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HISTORICAL KNOWLEDGE FOR BEGINNING TEACHING

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HISTORICAL KNOWLEDGE FOR BEGINNING TEACHING
By
Cynthia D. Hartzler-Miller

A DISSERTATION
Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
Department of Teacher Education

2000

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ABSTRACT
HISTORICAL KNOWLEDGE FOR BEGINNING TEACHING
By
Cynthia D. Hartzler-Miller

Recent efforts to delineate a knowledge base for beginning teaching have
emphasized several critical issues, including the need for novices to have
sufficient content knowledge. However, there has been relatively little
investigation into the nature of content knowledge for teaching. What does it
mean to understand one's discipline for the purposes of teaching it to young
learners of various ages and backgrounds? What knowledge and skills assist
teachers - particularly beginning teachers - in adapting and developing subject
matter knowledge?

This study describes and explains the nature and contribution of historical
knowledge in the practice of two novice history teachers. Through interviews
and observations over the course of one school year - designed to uncover
autobiographical influences, content knowledge, views of students and learning,
pedagogical reasoning, and reflections on action - a conception of subject matter
knowledge for beginning teaching emerged.

The findings of this study suggest that the more familiar beginning teachers
are with a topic they must teach, the more likely they are to critique content as
portrayed in the textbook, select topic-specific narratives to frame their units,
illustrate those narratives with concrete images and descriptive detail, be aware
of alternative interpretations of events, anticipate student difficulties and
generate multiple representations for communicating subject matter.
Furthermore, knowledge of historical forces, narratives, and imagination, along

with historical-mindedness is particularly useful in novice practice. Beginning

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teachers' subject matter beliefs, reaching back to childhood experiences, influence
their selection of content and what they are likely to learn about content from
practice.

Novices' efforts to transform content for their students are complicated by
various factors. Beginning teachers necessarily rely on their own memories of
learning content, which can be both a resource and a hindrance in their teaching.
They may not know what they know until they try to articulate subject matter to
learners. Thus, the first time they teach a topic they are primarily teaching
themselves. The task of learning how to manage pedagogical authority may
lead novices to view students’ prior knowledge as a problem to overcome rather
than a teaching resource.

These findings hold implications for professional education, suggesting that
one focus for prospective and beginning history teachers involves developing a
repertoire of historical narratives and cultivating the use of historical forces,
imagination and historical-mindedness as pedagogical tools. A second focus
should be on close, mentored interaction with students' work, transcripts and

curricular materials in the company of other professionals.

Copyright by
CYNTHIA D. HARTZLER-MILLER
2000

To Roy and Lois - my first teachers -
and to Greg,

who followed his bliss and encouraged me to pursue mine.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This dissertation would not exist if not for two outstanding individuals: Julia
Richards and David Parker. Their real names do not appear anywhere in this
document, but that in no way diminishes the esteem in which I hold them both.
They not only accepted me into their classrooms with my clumsy tape recording
equipment, they openly shared ‘with me the thoughts, worries and struggles of
their first - the most difficult - years of teaching. In a word, they moved me with
their desire to become better history teachers and their faith that time spent with
me would be beneficial to them. I never took their participation in this study
lightly.

I have known since the beginning of our relationship that I will never be able
to repay Dr. Suzanne Wilson for being my dissertation advisor. One simply
cannot put a price on her commitment to meet with me weekly over a period of
twenty months to keep me focused and writing, her skill in helping me turn my
muddled thoughts into coherent sentences, her persistence in pushing me to do
intellectual work I had never before attempted, and her willingness to help me
prepare for job interviews even though the dissertation was still quite
incomplete. Suzanne is among a very very small group of teachers I’ve had in
my life who possess the courage to demand much from me and the wisdom to
help me get there.

I chose my other three committee members - Peter Vinten-Johansen, Sharon
Feiman—Nemser and Lynn Paine - because I admire their work and value the
perspectives they bring to a study about teachers and subject matter. I am
deeply grateful for their thoughtful questions and feedback which pushed me to
frame the study around a compelling research problem, analyze my data more

closely, and write with my readers in mind. About halfway through my

 

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dissertation defense, I realized the extraordinary skill and commitment my
committee members brought to a meeting which I experienced as far more
"educative" than "defensive."

I also wish to thank my fellow doctoral students at Michigan State who read
many, many versions of this dissertation: Shari Levine-Rose, Brian Yusko, Joan
Hughes and Gaston Dembele. Special appreciation goes to Shari and Joan who
helped me organize my scattered, nervous thoughts in preparation for the
defense. Trudy Sykes, a member of the faculty, gave me excellent feedback on
an early attempt to understand some of the differences between David and Julia.
In addition, Michael McCann helped me pilot some of the interviews and both
Alex Mann and Bob Bain provided experienced history teacher perspectives on
my data.

Finally, I extend huge thanks to my colleagues in the Secondary Education
department at Towson University. They not only took the risk of hiring me ”all-
but-dissertation,” they went much further than I ever expected in protecting my
time so I could complete my degree. I returned to my balloon-filled office and

celebration cake with renewed energy to write and teach.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

LIST OF TABLES AND FIGURES. .

CHAPTER 1
INTRODUCTION . .
Teacher Knowledge
Content Knowledge, Transformation, and.
Instructional Representations .
Summary of Research Findings on
Content Knowledge for Teaching.
Competent History Teaching.
Beginning Teaching. .
Central Questions Guiding This Study

CHAPTER 2
EXPLORING HISTORICAL KNOWLEDGE FOR
BEGINNING TEACHING. A RESEARCH METHODOLOGY .
Overview of Methods and Study Design. . . .
Finding David and Julia . .
Cultivating the Relationships .
Collecting the Data .
Obtaining Consent .
Observing in Classrooms .
Analyzing the Data .
Reading Teaching

CHAPTER 3
JULIA AND DAVID. SUBJECT MATTER BELIEFS, SCHOOL CONTEXT S
STUDENTS, AND CURRICULUM . . .
Julia Richards: Teaching Social History
in an Under-Resourced High School
Julia and her Beliefs about History .
Julia and her School Setting .
Julia and her Students. .
Julia and her Curriculum. .
David Parker: Teaching Intellectual History
in a State-of-the-Art High School
David and his Beliefs about History.
David and his School Setting .
David and his Students
David and his Curriculum
Summary

26
26
27
29
31

38
39
41

48

49
57
62
68

72
78
81
87
94

CHAPTER 4
REPRESENTING CONTENT TO STUDENTS:
JULIA'S AND DAVID'S KNOWLEDGE IN USE
Introduction .
Julia: Transforming the Progressive Era
and the Civil Rights Movement . . .
General and Topic-Specific Knowledge .
Predicting Students' Misconceptions .
Representing Content to Students .
Learning about Content and Students 1n Practice
Conclusions about Julia
David: Transforming the Communist Revolution
and the American Revolution. . .
General and Topic-Specific Knowledge .
Pedagogical Understanding of History .
Representing Content to Students
Learning about Content and Students 1n Practice
Conclusions about David . . .
Toward Understanding Historical Knowledge
in Beginning Teaching. . . .

CHAPTER 5

HISTORICAL KNOWLEDGE FOR BEGINNING TEACHING.

Historical Knowledge for Teaching
Historical Forces
Historical Narrative.
Historical Imagination .
Summ
Historical Knowledge 1n Beginning Practice.
Generalizing from Personal Memories
Surfacing Content Knowledge
Managing Pedagogical Authority.
Summary .

CHAPTER 6

LEARNING TO TEACH HISTORY
Introduction . .
Preparing History Teachers: Curriculum and Pedagogy
in a Social Studies Methods Course . . .
Mentoring Beginning Teachers
Further Questions . .

98
103

108
111
118
127

131
131
136
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170
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APPENDICES
Appendix A: Autobiographical Interview
Appendix B. Content Knowledge Interviews
Appendix C. Fact Lists. . . .
Appendix D: Reflection on Action Interviews .
Appendix E: Post-observation Interviews . .
Appendix F. Vignettes of Secondary History Teaching
Appendix G: Consent Forms and Letters

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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Table 1:
Table 2:
Table 3:
Table 4:
Table 5:
Table 6:
Table 7:
Table 8:
Table 9:
Table 10: David’s Intended Unit Outline for the Communist Revolution.

LIST OF TABLES AND FIGURES

Tables
Profiles of Julia and David .
Overview of Data Collected
Julia’s Students

Julia’s Intended Unit Outline for the Civil Rights Movement
Julia’s Intended Unit Outline for the Progressive Era

Julia’s Actual Unit Outline for the Civil Rights Movement .
Julia’s Actual Unit Outline for the Progressive Era

David’s Students .

David’s Intended Unit Outline for the Age of Revolutions .

Table 11: David’s Actual Unit Outline for the Age of Revolutions .

Table 12: David’s Actual Unit Outline for the Communist Revolution

Table 13: Overview of Teaching Episodes

Figures

Figure 1: Conceptual Model of Knowledge for Transformation .

Figure 2: Julia's Progressive Era Time Line Activity.

Figure 3: David’s Representation for the Communist Revolution Unit .

29
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INTRODUCTION

I really did not enjoy this class. I do not feel prepared to start my internship
next year. . . [Learning about] the subject matter was a waste - that’s what

my classes are for in my major and minor.
(Prospective social studies teacher, May, 1998)

I still recall how it felt to read this statement among the final course
evaluations of my social studies methods class. My student’ 5 words both stung
and perplexed me - and she wasn’t the only one to give such feedback. I had
long been concerned about the subject matter knowledge of social studies
teachers. As a high school social studies teacher myself, I knew that my efforts
to teach World Geography had suffered from insufficient content knowledge. I
had worked with a colleague who confessed that his lack of historical knowledge
left him no recourse but to read to his students from the textbook, day after
dreary day. Furthermore, my personal interest in teachers’ content knowledge
overlapped with national policy statements aimed at reforming teacher
preparation and induction (e.g., Interstate New Teacher Assessment and Support
Consortium, 1992; National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future,

1 996). Thus, I believed I had defensible professional reasons for wanting
prospective teachers to leave my course with more knowledge of at least a few

tOpics they might one day teach. Yet for some of my students there was a huge

disconnect between my assumptions and theirs.
This disconnect surprises no one who has studied the learning-to-teach

1i terature.1 Preservice programs tend to reinforce the traditional partition

between liberal arts coursework and professional training (Lanier & Little, 1986)
Tea Cher candidates enter programs with strongly-held beliefs about teaching

deri Ved from the many hours they spend in educational institutions (Britzman,
Feiman-Nemser, 1983; Lortie, 1975). It is common for prospective

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teachers to hold presuppositions about how much and what kind of content
knowledge they need to have. It is also typical for them to believe that real
learning to teach happens in the field, not in their university courses (National
Center for Research on Teacher Education, 1991).

My professional dilemma grew into a research problem. In order to
understand what beginning social studies teachers need to know about their
content as they leave their preparation programs, we must first describe and
explain the nature of content knowledge for teaching. How is disciplinary
knowledge different from content knowledge for teaching? It is one thing for
nationally-funded projects such as the National Commission on Teaching and
America’s Future (NCT AF) to call for ”stronger disciplinary preparation that
incorporates an understanding of a discipline’s core concepts, structure and tools
of inquiry” (NCT AF, 1996, p. 76). But what does it mean to understand one’s
discipline for the purposes of teaching it to young learners of various ages and
backgrounds? What knowledge and skills assist teachers in adapting and
modifying subject matter?

A second question related to the task of conceptualizing what novices need
to know about their content concerns the nature of beginning knowledge and
practice. My reviews of the relevant literature revealed that investigations into
beginning teachers’ content knowledge are quite recent. Veteran teachers
frequently comment that they learned their content as they taught it (Ball &
McDiarmid, 1990). Although we may not expect beginning teachers to hold the
kind of knowledge their more experienced counterparts have, there may be a
minimum set of knowledge and skills that enables them to work with content in
pedagogically sound ways and develop the appropriate knowledge as they
teach. Yet further research is needed to help us understand the nature of
beginning teachers’ content knowledge and its role in emergent practice.

In this study, I attempt to describe and explain the role of content
knowledge in the practice of two beginning history teachers. This introductory

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chapter outlines the assumptions and constructs which frame the study. In the
following pages, I explore three relevant issues: notions of teacher knowledge;
conceptions of competence in history and social studies teaching; and
perspectives on the nature of novice practice.
Teacher Knowledge
Until recently, teacher education did not typically concern itself with the

problem of subject matter knowledge since the prevailing assumption was that
prospective teachers learn content in relevant disciplinary departments.2

Colleges of education were responsible only for teaching about pedagogical
theories and methods. This is, of course, a false dichotomy: preservice teachers
learn about pedagogy when they sit through a history or math professor’s
lecture and they learn about content when their education professor
demonstrates a teaching strategy. Still, educational researchers tended to treat
teaching as generic, rather than subject-specific. The ”process-product” research
in the 1970s, for example, tried to correlate technical and context-free aspects of
”effective” teaching behavior with student achievement (Shulman, 1986a).

Spurred on by developments in psychology,3 researchers in the mid-19805

shifted their attention to teachers’ cognition, including knowledge, beliefs and
pedagogical reasoning (Clark & Peterson, 1986). Teacher thinking research
assumes that teachers are active meaning-makers whose expectations, theories,
beliefs, and knowledge shape their judgments and actions in the classroom.
Investigators use research methods such as intellectual biographies, simulated

task interviews and extensive observations to explore practical and

 

2 Apparently, this hasn’t always been the case. Shulman (1986b) points out
that in 1875, it wasn’t unusual for ninety to ninety-five percent of the questions
on state licensing exams to evaluate teachers’ content knowledge.

3 Shulman (1986a) traces the evolution of interest in information-processing
and cognitive psychology back to the 1950’s when Jean Piazglet’s work - already
thirty years old - gained popularity among American psy ologists.

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multi—dimensional features of teachers’ professional knowledge (Clark &
Lampert, 1986).

Not all scholarship under this umbrella is equally concerned with the role of
content knowledge in teachers’ thinking. However, several researchers identify
content knowledge as one of many variables which influence teachers’
pedagogical reasoning. As Wineburg and Wilson (1991) are careful to point out,
the idea is not to elevate subject matter to a special status in research on teaching,
but to use it as tool for understanding the role of teacher knowledge:

We use content as a window through which to examine teaching more
generally, for we believe that the close examination of teachers’ subject-
matter knowledge yields keen insights about many aspects of the
professional knowledge of teachers. (p. 309)

There are three prominent examples of research programs dedicated to
viewing the interaction of teachers’ knowledge and beliefs through the window
of content: the Knowledge Growth in a Profession project at Stanford
University, the Learning Research and Development Center at the University of
Pittsburgh and Michigan State University’s Knowledge Use and Learning to
Teach research program. Generally speaking, researchers in these projects used
methods consistent with teacher thinking research. They wanted to know how
novice and expert teachers made sense of their practice; they studied teachers’
biographies, perspectives and orientations; they stayed close to classroom
events. Their methods - along with the theoretical constructs they used -
produced multi-dimensional portraits of professional knowledge in the context
of practice. Because my dissertation study on the historical knowledge of
beginning teaching attempts to contribute to this effort, I describe three relevant
concepts emerging from that research - content knowledge, transformation, and
instructional representations - and summarize key findings.

Typically, content knowledge researchers have taken as a given that ”the

goal of education is to connect children to the communities of the disciplines”

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(McDiarmid, Ball, & Anderson, 1989, p. 194). In other words, they define content
knowledge in terms of its relationship to disciplinary knowledge. For example,
Wilson and Wineburg (1988) use Schwab’s (1978) distinctions between the
substantive and syntactic structures of a discipline to conceptualize teachers’
historical knowledge. They consider teachers' knowledge of facts and concepts,
various analytical frames (such as Marxian or Freudian), and knowledge of
historiography (the awareness that historians work with incomplete evidence,
for example, and that they employ particular notions of causation, chronology
and continuity).

Given that school subjects have long been organized around academic
domains - humanities, sciences and social sciences - it seems logical to assume
that disciplinary knowledge plays some role in teaching. But, as Dewey (1902)
pointed out, the purposes of a teacher are quite different from the purposes of
an academic scholar:

For the scientist, the subject-matter represents simply a given body of truth
to be employed in locating new problems, instituting new researches, and
carrying them through to a verified outcome. To him the subject-matter of
the science is self-contained. . . . The problem of the teacher is a different one.
. . . What concerns him, as a teacher, is the ways in which that sub'ect may
become a part of experience; what there is in the child’s present at is
usable with reference to it; how such elements are to be used; how his own
knowledge of the subject-matter may assist in interpreting the child’s needs
and doin s, and determine the medium in which the child should be placed
in order at his growth may be properly directed. He is concerned, not
with the subject-matter as such, but with the subject-matter as a related
factor in a total and growing experience. (pp. 200-201)

The idea, then, is that teachers do not directly teach what they know about
their content. They think about subject matter in terms of their particular
students and the kinds of experiences they want to create for them. In the
process of selecting and organizing content, teachers draw upon much more
than their knowledge of subject matter: knowledge and beliefs about learners,
pedagogy, curriculum and context factor in as well. Cruse (1994) is a high school

history teacher who reflected on some of the considerations she brings to her

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work. While her experience in master’s and doctoral-level history courses
provided her with a personally rich ”intellectual exercise,” teaching requires her
to mold history content to fit her audience:

[Teaching] American history requires us to make histo relevant to our
students. Students want to know why history matters, ow it relates to
their lives, if at all, and how the study of history might affect them
personally. The manner and method we use to confront these questions can
convey enthusiasm and ignite a love of history in those whom we encounter
. . . . Or we can perpetuate a distaste for the study of history by failing to
draw connections and to infuse our work with energy, effective
methodologies and multiple perspectives. For the high school student,
learning history becomes a way to fulfill a graduation requirement. (pp.
1066-1067)

As Cruse depicts, teachers’ content knowledge has a practical dimension
which is delineated by the professional responsibility to communicate subject
matter to a captive audience of young people in a way that facilitates
demonstrable learning. In an oft-quoted speech given at the 1985 annual
meeting of the American Educational Research Association, Shulman (1986b)
referred to this pedagogical process as ”transformation,” identifying several
unasked questions:

No one asked how subject matter knowledge was transformed from the
knowledge of the teacher into the content of instruction. Nor did they ask
how particular formulations of that content related to what students came to
know or misconstrue. (p. 6)

In a later article, Shulman (1987) defined the notion of ”transformation” as the
act of ”think[ing] one’s way from the subject matter as understood by the
teacher into the minds and motivations of learners” (p. 16).

The notion of transformation is central to professional knowledge research
because it signals ”knowledge-in-action,” the practical application of teacher
knowledge. A basic definition of transformation, drawn from the relevant
literature, is that it is an act of practical reasoning, in which teachers take what
they know about the subject matter and modify it to enable student
understanding (Grossman, Wilson & Shulman, 1989; Shulman, 1987; Wilson,

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Shulman & Richert, 1987; Wineburg & Wilson, 1991). These modifications of
disciplinary knowledge are called ”instructional representations.”
Representations represent teachers’ conceptions of subject matter modified by
their sense of what the students under their charge need to learn and how they
will learn it. Representations include what are traditionally known as
”strategies” (lecture, recitation, small group work, debates and student
presentations) as well as the tOpic-specific analogies, illustrations, examples and
explanations provided by the teacher.

McDiarmid, Ball and Anderson (1989) propose several reasons for
subsuming both general strategies and topic-specific examples under the same
label. Both strategies and examples convey subject matter, a point which
challenges the conventional dichotomy between content and pedagogy.
Instructional methods that appear content-neutral may intentionally or
unintentionally communicate messages about the discipline. Classroom debates
over issues raised at the Constitutional Convention in 1787 may portray history

as contingent on human choice and context; textbook-generated worksheets, on
the other hand, frequently leave an impression of inevitability. 4 Furthermore,

since it is possible for representations to be misleading or inaccurate in the
messages they convey about the content, it is crucial for teachers to become
aware of the representations they are using and evaluate their appropriateness.
Teachers’ pedagogical approaches, materials, analogies, illustrations, examples
and demonstrations can all be evaluated in terms of a common set of warrants:

Using the notion of representation also connects the inventive work of
teaching - makin worksheets, tests and designin activities - with the more
routine tasks, su as using textbooks. . . . Given '3 way of thinking, all
representations, whether invented, selected or adapted, are subject to similar
standards for their pedagogical usefulness and appropriateness.
(McDiarmid, Ball & Anderson, 1989, p. 197).

 

4 Similarly, as I mentioned before, an education professor conveys messages
about content (whether about its substance, epistemology or both) even when
presenting a so-called ”generic” teaching strategy.

7

The term ”representation” comes from the cognitive psychology literature
which sometimes refers to learners’ subject matter understandings as ”mental
representations.” A constructivist theory of learning posits that through
experience, individuals construct understandings of the world (Piaget, 1952;
Vygotsky, 1978). When learners encounter new phenomena, they interpret
them in light of prior knowledge so they make sense. Thus, young learners are
not limited to acquiring only the information that adults teach them. They
constantly interact with their social environment, and in the process, develop
mental representations to explain what is going on around them. Appropriate
and pedagogically useful instructional representations, therefore, are those
which connect to and extend further than students’ mental representations
(Wilson, Shulman & Richert, 1987). McDiarmid, Ball, and Anderson (1989)
suggest that it is important for teachers to develop a ”repertoire of subject
matter representations from outside sources and from their own ingenuity” in
order to broaden the range of options they have for influencing the subject
matter understandings students create in their own minds (p. 196).

Dewey’s (1916) theory about the nature of subject matter knowledge and
the role of the teacher helps to illuminate this point about appropriate
representations. He begins with the assertion that all knowledge is the outcome
of thought reflecting on experience. The process of learning subject matter
begins early in life, as young children first learn to walk, play, and work and
soon develop the capacity to reflect on their actions. In the act of reflecting on
experiences and communicating these reflections to others, individuals begin to
build subject matter knowledge. For Dewey, subject matter is not, as one might
assume, something one encounters only in school. In fact, he argues that a
child’s experience, ”already contains within itself elements - facts and truths - of
just the same sort as those entering into formulated study” (1902, p. 189). When
Dewey (1902) refers to teachers as concerned ”not with the subject-matter as

such, but with the subject-matter as a related factor in a total and growing

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experience” (p. 201), he is building a case for a pedagogical approach which treats
students’ life experience as the starting point of instruction and formulated,
organized, disciplinary knowledge as the end point:

It is a cardinal precept . . . that the be inning of instruction shall be made
with the experience learners already ave; that this experience and the
capacities that have been developed during its course provide the startin
point for all further learning. . . . But finding the material for learning wit 'n
experience is only the first step. The next step is the progressive
development of what is already experienced into a fuller and richer and also
more organized form, a form that gradually approximates that in which
subject-matter is presented to the skilled, mature person. (1938, pp. 73-74).

 

Dewey’s theory of the continuity of experience provides a basis for studying
teachers’ content knowledge-in-action. In their acts of transformation -
modifying disciplinary knowledge to enable student understanding - teachers
may or may not treat students’ life experience as the starting point and
formulated subject matter as the end point of instruction. Because instructional
representations embody what teachers know about their content as well as
beliefs about students’ preconceptions, teachers’ representations can serve as
windows for viewing aspects of professional knowledge used (and learned) in
the process of transformation. Examining teachers’ instructional representations
helps researchers view what is being conveyed about both the substance and
epistemology of content. Representations may illuminate teachers’ beliefs about
learners and learning (McDiarmid, Ball, 8: Anderson, 1989; Wilson, Shulman, 8:
Richert, 1987). Because transformation involves ”think[ing] one’s way from the
subject matter as understood by the teacher into the minds and motivations of
learners” (Shulman, 1987, p. 16), the analysis of representations may reveal the
extent to which content is transformed in ways that connect it to students’
experience.

Using these theoretical constructs, researchers have studied mathematical,

scientific, language arts, and historical knowledge for teaching. Some have

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focused on experienced teachers, others have compared novices with experts.
Not surprisingly, these studies have found that - as one article title put it -
”subject knowledge matters” (Leinhardt, Putnam, Stein & Baxter, 1991). It is
not uncommon for teachers, especially beginners, to have thin knowledge for
some of the subjects they are called upon to teach, despite an earned degree in
those subjects (Ball & Feiman-Nemser, 1988; Ball 6: McDiarmid, 1990;
McDiarmid, 1992). Sources of content knowledge such as the typical
undergraduate sequence of courses in the arts and sciences are not sufficient;
beginning teachers must learn content as they teach it (Ball 8: McDiarmid, 1990;
McDiarmid, 1989). Furthermore, thin content knowledge has significant
consequences. Teachers who do not know their subject matter well are more
likely to misrepresent both the nature and the substance of the content to
students. (Grossman, Wilson & Shulman, 1989; Wilson, 1988; Wilson, Shulman
& Richert, 1987; Wilson & Wineburg, 1993). They are less likely to teach in
pedagogically sound ways. (Hollon, Roth 8: Anderson, 1991 ; Wilson, Shulman 6:
Richert, 1987). Inadequate content knowledge may inhibit teachers' ability to
make the content relevant for students and convey it using multiple and
intellectually engaging representations. (Grossman, 1990; Leinhardt, Putnam,
Stein & Baxter, 1991; Shulman, 1987; Wilson, Shulman & Richert, 1987).
Teachers' knowledge of conceptual relationships, modes of inquiry, and
disciplinary perspectives bear on their selection of curricular materials, the way
they use textbooks, whether and how certain topics get taught, and their ability
to keep learning about their content (Grossman, 1990; Holt-Reynolds, 1999;
Leinhardt & Smith, 1985; Wilson & Wineburg, 1988; Yeager &: Davis, 1995).
Studying instructional representations provides insights into the relationship
between teachers’ knowledge of students and content. For example, Leinhardt,
Pumam, Stein, and Baxter (1991) studied expert elementary mathematics
teaChers’ use of representations. They determined that a critical feature of

rcpresentations is their ”dual. nature;” they often have both a ”real-world

10

meaning” and a ”symbolic meaning” (p. 109). The real-world meaning is quite
intricate and multi-layered, full of detail that makes the representation
interesting to students (because it connects to the familiar) but which may
distract from the symbolic meaning - the concepts and ideas to which the teacher
wants students to attend. For example, a teacher who wants to teach her
students about the Cartesian coordinate system might select as a representation
a city map with streets running north-south and east-west. Although the map
provides a real-world example, it also contains information such as street names,
parks and buildings which may distract students from the task of locating
positive and negative coordinates. Leinhardt, Putnam, Stein, and Baxter found
that teachers’ ability to perceive the difficulties students might have with certain
instructional representations depended on their familiarity with the specific
content.

Wineburg and Wilson (1991) also encountered the issue of representational
complexity in their study of two experienced history teachers. These teachers
tended to select representations which served multiple purposes. For example,
when teaching about the American Revolution, one teacher had students read
two pre-war newspaper articles - one pro-rebel and the other pro-British. The
articles conveyed conceptual knowledge about the points of debate at that time
as well as epistemological understandings about why we have multiple,
sometimes contradictory accounts of the past. As the teacher worked to
transform his complex knowledge of history into forms his students would
understand, he had to skillfully avoid the dual pitfalls of misrepresenting the
content by oversimplifying it and confusing students by revealing too much of
its complexity at once. Thus, his knowledge of students - developed over years
Of practice - included finely-tuned understandings about learners’ developmental
readiness in relation to particular topics.

Knowledge of learners entered into Wilson’s (1988) study along with

teachers’ content knowledge and pedagogical expertise. Experienced teachers

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with a great deal of pedagogical experience but thin historical knowledge were
able to easily create generic activities (holding a debate, assigning a reading) but
they could not evaluate the historical content contained in those representations
in relation to students. This finding further underscores the point that some
teachers hold subject-specific knowledge of their students: understandings about
what their students already know and are likely to find difficult about particular
topics.

Naturally, we would expect beginning teachers to have less of whatever
knowledge teachers gain from accumulated classroom experience. Wilson (1988)
discovered that beginning teachers who had a solid grasp of historical content
and inquiry but who had a limited repertoire of instructional representations
tended to prefer didactic instruction. These teachers’ representations portrayed
history as a static body of knowledge and did little to take into account students’
interests or prior conceptions. On the other hand, novices whose historical
knowledge and repertoire of representations were relatively strong were better
able to link concerns about the content with concerns about learners.

Wilson, Shulman, and Richert (1987) claim that the process of selecting and
creating instructional representations helps beginners develop skills of
pedagogical reasoning. Facilitated by the interaction between a teachers’ content
knowledge and their need to communicate with learners, this process
encourages teachers to explicate their tacit knowledge. They try out a
representation on their students and sometimes experience failure. These
unsuccessful attempts to communicate previously tacit knowledge spur them to
further examine their knowledge and develop new representations. They not
only learn to reason pedagogically, they also build a repertoire of
representations, conscious awareness of their content knowledge, and insights
about their students’ prior knowledge and interests.

One implication of Dewey’s theory that all knowledge results from

reflection on experience is that teachers - like their students - began developing

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subject matter knowledge as children. Teachers’ content knowledge is
influenced by the particular experiences upon which they have had opportunities
to reflect. Some scholars suggest that teachers’ particular experiences with
subject matter lead them to form ”subject matter orientations” (Grossman, 1990;
Gudmundsdottir, 1991) or ”disciplinary perspectives” (Wilson 8: Wineburg,
1988). Disciplinary perspectives can be powerful influences on teachers’
decisions. For example, Grossman (1990) compared the instructional
representations used by two beginning English teachers, one of whom had a
”text-orientation” and the other a ”reader-orientation.” Both taught their senior
English classes using Shakespeare’s play Hamlet. However, the one with the
text-orientation used the play to teach students skills involved in literary analysis
while the other used it to help students explore aspects of personal experience.
Similarly, Wilson and Wineburg (1988) found that history teachers’
representations were influenced by whether they had developed historical,
political science, or geographic ”disciplinary lenses” in their academic training.
The geography major explained the role of post-war Japan in terms of climate
and location; the political science major focused on economic and political
patterns in revolutions, rather than highlighting historical contexts which set one
revolution apart from another. Wilson and Wineburg conclude that ”when one
is unfamiliar with the ways of knowing in disciplines other than one’s own . . .
new information becomes a slave to the old and fundamental beliefs go
unaltered” (p. 538).

In addition, teachers’ conceptions of school subjects may be distinct from
their personal understandings of the discipline. VanSledright (1996) offers a
dEtailed portrait of a high school teacher with a PhD. in history. Because of her
experience at the doctoral level, this teacher indicated that she was ”probably
more sensitive to the fact that history is so interpretive and I guess I probably
emphasize that more now than other teachers might” (p. 264). VanSledright,

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however, perceived that an ”objectivist” view of history prevailed in her
teaching, which he defined as an ”emphasis on the accumulation of indisputable
evidence for the purpose of drawing verified conclusions and making timeless
generalizations” (p. 263). He concluded that mitigating factors prevented this
teacher from offering students content that was more consistent with her
interpretive view of history. These factors included her beliefs about what it
means to teach history as a school subject: the textbook is the unbiased source of
factual information; historical facts speak for themselves; tests and quizzes
assess students’ recall of definitions associated with people, events, laws and
documents. McDiarmid and Vinten-Johansen (1993) made a similar discovery
about the power of teachers’ beliefs about teaching history to young learners.
When studying prospective (not yet practicing) history teachers, these
researchers found that, although students’ participation in a historiography
seminar helped them develop deeper understandings of historical inquiry, the
experience had no apparent effect on their prior, conventional beliefs about how
they would teach history.

Taken together, these studies underscore the notion that instructional
representations are ”the product of two processes - the comprehension of
content and the understanding of the needs, motivations and abilities of
learners” (Wineburg & Wilson, 1991, p. 333). Developing appropriate
representations hinges on teachers’ familiarity with content, topic-specific
knowledge of students, disciplinary perspectives, and beliefs about what it
means to teach and learn a school subject. One cannot examine the nature of
content knowledge for teaching in isolation from teachers’ knowledge and
beliefs about subject matter and students.

These findings also cast light on the difficulties novices may have as they

attempt to modify content in pedagogically sound ways. New teachers’ content
knowledge is likely to be uneven and novices are unlikely to hold finely-tuned

understandings of learners’ potential difficulties with particular topics and

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representations. To complicate matters further, learning to transform content
seems to depend on interaction between novices and students. There appears to
be truth in prospective teachers’ comments that real learning to teach happens in
the field, not in university courses. It makes sense, then, to focus future research
efforts on the kinds of knowledge and beliefs that enable novices to create
pedagogically useful representations and develop appropriate knowledge in the
context of practice. It is possible that some features of professional knowledge
are more pivotal than others in the beginning phase of teaching.

Any effort to contribute to this growing body of work must be clear about
its central construct: knowledge. Fenstermacher (1994), for example, reminds us
that in conventional philosophy a statement cannot be elevated to the level of
knowledge unless it is deemed ”justified” and ”true.” Yet in the content
knowledge literature, beliefs about learners, disciplinary orientations and tacit
understandings are often labeled ”knowledge” - a term that enjoys higher status
than ”beliefs” or ”orientations.” As Fenstermacher points out, it is important
for researchers to pay attention to their use of the term. Researchers’ claims
may be treated by practitioners and policymakers as having ”epistemic status”
when in fact the word is being used merely to classify a potpourri of personal
beliefs (p. 34).

Conceptual clarity is unnecessarily compromised when, for example, no
distinction is made between naive, unexamined beliefs and knowledge based on
careful reflection. For example, Grossman (1990) writes about a novice English
teacher who justified his decision to teach literary analysis of classic literature to
ninth-graders on the basis of his own fond memories in college English courses.
This was a naive belief in the sense that its premise was faulty: ninth graders and
their teachers usually do not share the same interests. The English teacher’s
belief does not carry the epistemic warrant that does knowledge about the
Special characteristics of young learners and their difficulties grasping new

content that is not tailored to their needs and interests. In her description of this

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teacher, Grossman referred to the basis for his pedagogical decisions as ”ideas”
and ”views” - not ”knowledge” (pp. 25-27).

The conceptual problem here involves setting a standard for teacher
knowledge which acknowledges that teachers’ actions are often based on ”what
has worked in the past, situations, particular instances, trial and error and
’muddling through’” (Orton, 1996, p. 140). Such grounds are not considered to
be ”justified, true belief” in the Conventional sense, but neither are they
necessarily unexamined and naive. One approach is suggested by the notion of
”practical argument” (Fenstermacher 8t Richardson, 1993; Morine-Dershimer,
1988; Orton, 1996). Fenstermacher (1994) describes this concept:

It is possible to take a liberal stance on the matter of justification, such that
there are a number of ways of warranting a knowledge claim. . . . Another
way to justify that we know something is to offer good reasons for doing or
believing it. Indeed, this form of justification might be called the ”good
reasons” approach. . . . Reasoning of the sort I am referring to here is what
Aristotle called phronesis: deliberative reflection of the relationship between
means and ends . . . . The provision of reasons, when done well, makes
action sensible to the actor and the observer. That is a minimal form of
warrant for practical action. Such reasoning may also show that an action is,
for example, the reasonable thing to do, the obvious thing to do, or the only
thing one could do under the circumstances. Each of these is, I believe, a
contribution to the epistemic merit of a practical knowledge claim. (pp. 44-

45)
The ”good reasons” approach gives researchers flexibility in their use of the term
”knowledge.” Some teacher statements - although not proven to be true
according to traditional standards - carry more epistemic weight than ”beliefs”
because they are based on good reasons and evidence to support claims.
Following this argument, in this study I use the term ”knowledge” whenever I
can show a novice’s good reasons and empirical evidence for holding certain
beliefs. For example, I call it knowledge when one of the teachers in this study -
Julia - believes that her students know more about Martin Luther King, Jr. than
BObby Seale. Her own experience, as well as later events, provided reasonable
support for her initial hunch. But whenever the teachers’ premises seem

unexamined, naive, or partial, I use the term ”belief” in order to highlight what is

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undeveloped or more disputable in beginning teachers’ understandings.
Competent History Teaching

It is perhaps an understatement to say that there is a lack of consensus
among educators about what constitutes good history or social studies teaching.
The field has been plagued or enlivened - depending on one’s perspective - by
differences of opinion regarding such issues as the social studies’ relationship to
the social science disciplines, whether subjects should be taught as separate
disciplines or interdisciplinary perspectives, whether teachers should emphasize
”cultural literacy” (Hirsch, 1987), ”critical literacy” (Giroux, 1988), decision-
making (Engle & Ochoa, 1988), or social transformation (Banks, 1991). Even
when history is considered as a distinct course, views of competent teaching
differ. Should history teachers emphasize chronology, big ideas, heroes,
ordinary folk, political history, intellectual history, historical ways of thinking,
common culture, multiculturalism, or the detrimental effects of European
domination (Combleth & Waugh, 1999; Nash, Crabtree & Dunn, 1998; Seixas,
1993; Thornton, 1994)?

To some extent, ideological differences between these various camps may
be irreconcilable. Yet some research suggests that history teachers’ actual
practice cannot be neatly categorized into one camp or another. Romanowski
(1996) conducted interviews and observations of nine experienced history
teachers. He found that although teachers are guided by their ”personal
curriculum” (values and beliefs about history which reflect broader debates),
they also tailor their teaching in light of the views and expectations of parents
and students. Although Evans (1989) found variation in teachers’ conceptions of
history, a significant percentage of the 160 teachers he surveyed (22%) appeared
to have no ”coherent philosophy,” but rather took ”a very pragmatic approach
to teaching . . . borrowing ideas and rationales from various traditions” (p. 236).
Leinhardt (1994) calls teachers’ conceptions of history ”a negotiated process, not
simply their own personal construction” (p. 213). Still, these and other studies

17

help to build the case that teachers are - consciously or not - ”curricular-
instructional gatekeepers;” their beliefs about appropriate subject matter and
instructional strategies play a major role in shaping the history students have
opportunities to learn. The culture of history teaching in the schools sustains this
degree of autonomy by isolating teachers from each other and from pressures to
conform to broad curriculum mandates (Thornton, 1991 ; 1993).

Researchers, like the history teachers they study, are influenced by their
conceptions of competent history teaching. Embedded in their work is a ”world
view or value system related to the purpose of knowledge, a conception of a
preferred social order, and a view of the good person” (Stanley, 1991, p. 253). In
the content knowledge literature on history teaching, for example, there is a
clear preference for practice which connects students to features of history as a
discipline. Thus, Leinhardt (1994) defines ”mindful” history teaching as that
which coaches students in the skills of ”historical dialogue,” modeled after
historians’ approaches to interpreting evidence and constructing narratives.
Wineburg and Wilson (1991) describe two experienced history teachers who
appeared to vary greatly in their use of direct instruction. However, both were
portrayed as competent teachers because they treated history as a human
construction, creating representations which modeled historical ways of thinking
and they continually updated their disciplinary knowledge.

Wineburg and Wilson’s (1991) portrayal of these two teachers suggests that
there is more than one way to teach history competently, within disciplinary
boundaries. In terms of their selection of content, one teacher might approach
the American Revolution by considering the influence of individual choice;
another by applying theories of revolution. In terms of teaching historical ways
of thinking, one teacher emphasizes the close reading of both primary and
secondary sources while another combines this with analysis of current events.
Some educators separate learning content from acquiring process skills, as Seixas

(1993) notes in the contrast between the ”chronological narrative” emphasis in

18

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the National Council for the Social Studies’ curriculum guide (1989) and the more
recently released N ationaLStandardsforHistory (1995), which proposes that K-
12 students have opportunities to engage in "historical thinking,” to ”examine
the historical record for themselves . . . create historical narratives and
arguments of their own . . . and examine the interpretive nature of history”
(National Center for History in the Schools, p. 59). But content knowledge
researchers have challenged this dichotomy by arguing that:

Students can learn both the content - the Boston Tea Party and the
Intolerable Acts, Sam Adams and the Committees of Correspondence,
Lexington and Concord - and historical analysis - examining different
interpretations of the same set of characters and events, weighing the
evidence presented by historians and source materials, discussing the
strengths and weaknesses of various accounts. (Wilson, 1991, p. 100).

Furthermore, some researchers have pointed out that interrogating historical
evidence, applying historical imagination, and constructing explanations about
historical events are cognitive activities which help students develop more
mature subject matter understandings (Downey & Levstik, 1991 ; Torney-Purta,
1994).

We have several examples in this literature which feature expert melding of
historical content and inquiry. Besides the two teachers in Wineburg and
Wilson’s (1991) work, the teacher in Leinhardt’s (1993) study helped students
construct a narrative about the Constitutional Convention by comparing the
writings of three historians. In his college history courses, Holt (1990) has his
students read post-Civil War letters to outline the conflict between aspirations of
former slaves, white plantation owners and the federal government. Kobrin
(1996) provides high school students with basic rules and a grading structure
which guide them in reading documents to identify major themes related to US.

19

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involvement in various wars. 5

Research on the content knowledge of beginning history teachers, however,
suggests that when teachers are not familiar with the processes of historical
inquiry themselves, they are more likely to misrepresent this aspect of the
discipline, treat history as a fixed body of knowledge and transmit content
didactically (Wilson, 1988; Wilson & Wineburg, 1988; Yeager 8r Davis, 1995).
There is evidence to suggest that even when novices hold these epistemological
understandings, they do not necessarily believe historical inquiry is appropriate
for their students (McDiarmid & Vinten-Johansen, 1993). Although it appears
that a ”natural affinity exists between history and a cognitive understanding of
learning” (Bain, 1995, p. 1) when content is taught alongside historical inquiry,
we do not know enough about the combinations of knowledge and beliefs held
by beginning teachers which may provide opportunities or obstacles in
constructing this kind of practice.

Beginning Teaching

The task of teacher education is to launch candidates on their journey
toward skillful, accomplished teaching. One important aspect of this preparation
involves providing new teachers with the subject matter knowledge that enables
them to transform content to promote student understanding. State and
national governments and professional organizations call for teachers to hold
knowledge of disciplinary-based understandings and ways of reasoning. But we
know that prospective teachers have not typically encountered this knowledge
in their elementary or secondary schooling experiences. Even after earning a
degree in a content area, beginners’ knowledge appears thin (Ball &: Feiman-

‘

5None of these reports, however, provide indicators about what students
actually learned from these strategies. As Wilson (in press) has pointed out,
difficulties in defining good history teaching stem from the absence of research
which attempts to correlate subject-specific instructional approaches with student
learning. Although this dissertation addresses gaps in the literature related to
beginning history teaching, it does not answer the need Wilson identifies.

20

Nemser, 1988; Ball & McDiarmid, 1990; McDiarmid, 1992). The challenge is
especially daunting for history and social studies educators who prepare novices
to teach everything from US. and world history to geography, economics,
government, psychology, sociology and anthropology. Each of these subjects is
drawn from distinct, albeit related, disciplines with various lenses for viewing
content and inquiry. New teachers trained in one or two of these disciplines are
nonetheless expected to teach any social studies course.

This then, is the practical concern about teacher preparation and induction
which motivates this study. One impulse is to say that the task is impossible,
especially when we consider that content knowledge for teaching is not a direct
translation of disciplinary knowledge, but includes knowledge and beliefs which
enable teachers to transform what they know, to represent content to young
learners. Maybe it is too much to ask teacher education to provide both
disciplinary-based understandings which novices are unlikely to encounter in
their liberal arts courses as well as knowledge of students that is typically
developed after novices enter the classroom. Indeed, as a member of one of the
INTASC sub-committees charged with the task of writing standards for
beginning teachers, I have often felt overwhelmed by the expansive and
demanding lists of expectations we have for novices.

An alternative response is to look for the theoretical problem that lies
behind this practical dilemma. Beginning teacher knowledge is poorly

conceptualized.6 This is not because researchers have neglected to study

beginning teaching, but because until recently, the focus has been on
investigating novices’ psychological concerns rather than their knowledge and

practices. For example, two literature reviews on beginning teaching portray the

 

6The Interstate New Teacher Assessment and Support Consortium
(INT ASC) uses the term ”beginning teacher” to refer to practitioners in their
first, second or third years of teaching, a period they call ”provisional practice.”
In this dissertation, I use the same definition of beginning teacher.

21

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first years of teaching as a kind of ”culture shock;” initial idealism and humanistic
commitments give way to ”disappointment and despondency” or ”anger” as
novices encounter school cultures which do not support their approaches to
teaching. Classroom discipline concerns consume novices’ time and energy

(W ideen, Mayer-Smith, 8: Moon, 1998). In an extensive review of studies which
asked new teachers to rank their problems and concerns, Veenman (1984) found
that beginning teachers’ top five concerns included classroom discipline,
motivating students, dealing with student differences, assessing students’ work
and relating to parents.

Representing subject matter was not on this list. Neither did subject matter
figure prominently in the expert-novice studies which sought to identify the
kinds of knowledge new teachers develop as they gain experience. In controlled
interview settings, these studies found that experts’ knowledge of their students
is clustered into categories, connected to classroom events, conditional and
detailed. In contrast, novices had difficulty interpreting classroom events,
weighing the relative significance of student information and developing
hypotheses or making predictions based on that information (Berliner, 1988;
Carter, Sabers, Cushing, Pinnegar 8: Berliner, 1987). In a review of expert-novice
literature, Reynolds (1992) concluded that beginning teachers have difficulty
making ”contingency plans,” seeing the connections between topics in the
curriculum, taking into consideration their students’ prior knowledge,
determining what to do when they notice student differences in performance or
motivation, linking related concepts within a lesson and identifying the sources
of student misbehavior.

These expert-novices studies are valuable in that they reveal the complex
nature of the knowledge and skills beginning teachers must develop. Good
teaching really is a kind of ”professional artistry;” much of what goes into the
work cannot be grasped except through the experience of actually teaching
(Schon, 1987). But the lack of attention to beginning teachers’ content

22

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knowledge is unfortunate, given that this is one resource they must have in
order to transform subject matter.

When researchers have explicitly investigated the role of subject matter
knowledge and its consequences for what students have opportunities to learn,
they have found that, in contrast to earlier findings, novices are concerned about
subject matter understanding. Their content knowledge interacts closely with
their concerns about engaging Students and both concerns affect the kinds of
historical texts they select (Noordhoff , 1993; Yeager 8: Davis, 1995). Novice
teachers must learn content as they teach; their content knowledge - along with
other kinds of professional knowledge and skill - develops in the act of planning,
teaching and reflecting (Wilson, Shulman 8t Richert, 1987). There is significant
variation in beginning teachers’ subject matter knowledge. Those with weak
knowledge tend to misrepresent both the nature and substance of history
(Wilson, 1988). Others may hold interpretivist understandings that lead them to
select content and representations which more accurately convey recent
developments in historical scholarship (Wilson 8: Wineburg, 1993).

But studying beginning teachers’ content knowledge is a recent
development in research on beginning teaching. Without further research, it is
difficult to speak about a minimal set of knowledge, beliefs and skills that enable
new teachers to work with content in pedagogically sound ways and develop
appropriate knowledge as they teach. Without more fine-grained
understandings of the combinations of knowledge and beliefs that teacher
education can provide, and upon which novices can build expert practice over
time, we don’t know whether some kinds of professional knowledge are more
pivotal than others in the beginning stages of teaching.

Moreover, further research might tell us more about the possible variations
in beginning teachers’ content knowledge. Insights into the meanings teachers
construct about their content and students may help teacher educators and

mentors more readily identify the diverse knowledge, beliefs and commitments

23

 

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novices bring to their practice.
Central Questions Guiding this Study

The points I have raised in this chapter reveal the complexity of the problem
of beginning teachers’ subject matter knowledge. In the current reform climate
calling for ”stronger disciplinary preparation” of teachers, we still do not know
enough about what is best taught in teacher preparation and what is best learned
in the first years of teaching. Research on historical knowledge for beginning
teaching is quite young, although findings to date suggest the following: novices
vary in terms of the substance and organization of their content knowledge;
their exposure to history in school and college may be insufficient, even when
they have an undergraduate degree in the subject; their historical knowledge
interacts with beliefs about history and learners with consequences for what
their students have opportunities to learn. In general, the content knowledge
literature provides useful constructs for further investigations: the notion of
”transformation,” which highlights teachers’ reasoning related to connecting
students and content; the concept of ”representation,” which provides a window
for viewing aspects of professional knowledge used and learned in the process of
transformation; and the construct of ”practical argument,” which provides some
latitude in the use of the term ”knowledge.” Dewey’s (1938) theory about the
continuity of experience provides a warrant for judging the extent to which
beginning teachers transform content in ways that connect to and extend
students’ understanding.

Throughout this introductory chapter, I have raised questions for further
study. What is a minimum set of knowledge and skills that enables beginning
teachers to work with content in pedagogically sound ways and develop the
appropriate knowledge as they teach? Are some features of professional
knowledge more pivotal than others? What combinations of knowledge and
beliefs provide opportunities or obstacles in constructing a practice which melds

historical'content and inquiry?

24

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To address these issues, I designed a study which attempts to describe and
explain the role of content knowledge in the practice of two beginning history
teachers. The study is guided by the following research questions:

What is the nature of content knowledge for beginning teaching?

a. What do novices know and believe about content and students?

b. How do categories of knowledge and belief relate to one another
in novice practice?

c. What knowledge and skills assist (or hinder) novice teachers’
attempts to transform content?

d. What do novice teachers learn about content and students as they
teach?

In the pages which follow, I build a conception of novice teachers’
knowledge and beliefs relevant to the process of transformation, the task of
modifying disciplinary understandings for the purposes of teaching. In Chapter
2, I discuss my research methods, study design and methodological issues the
emerged in the process of data collection and analysis. In Chapter 3, I introduce
the reader to the study participants - David and Julia - by describing their subject
matter beliefs, school settings, students and curricula. Chapter 4 is an analysis of
four episodes of Julia’s and David’s teaching using a conceptual model which
breaks ”transformation” into three interactive categories: knowledge and beliefs
about content, students and instructional representations. In Chapter 5, I put the
pieces back together again in an effort to explain what the portraits of teaching
can tell us about historical knowledge in beginning practice. Finally, Chapter 6
includes a discussion about implications for teacher education and beginning

teacher support as well as a set of research questions for future investigations.

25

 

Chapter 2
EXPLORING HISTORICAL KNOWLEDGE
FOR BEGINNING TEACHING:
A RESEARCH METHODOLOGY
Overview of Methods and Study Design

In order to study professional knowledge and beliefs in the practice of
beginning history teachers, I designed a comparative case field study in which I
interviewed and observed two promising beginning history teachers. I chose
two teachers who had graduated from the same highly-regarded teacher
education institution and had received strong recommendations from their
instructors and field supervisors in terms of their content knowledge and success
in student teaching. My hypothesis was that observing promising novices could
help me speak to assumptions about the knowledge base of beginning teachers.
In addition, I assumed that careful research on ”best case scenarios” might
inform our developing sense of possible and appropriate beginning historical
knowledge. I chose to study two such teachers in order to compare cases (Yin,
1994). By using the same methods to study two different people, I hoped to
learn more about potential variations than I would with just one case.

Because I wanted to understand beginning teachers’ thinking as they
transformed knowledge for teaching, I followed naturalistic research principles
which promote understanding from an ”insider’s” viewpoint, gathered multiple
kinds of data and allowed grounded theories to emerge. Specifically, 1 adapted
methods and interview protocols borrowed from the Knowledge Growth in a
Professional Project at Stanford University and the National Center for Research
on Teacher Learning at Michigan State University. I also borrowed an approach
Connelly and Clandinin (1985) describe as effective in eliciting teachers’ tacit
”knowledge in action” (see appendices for interview protocols).

I spent considerable time with each teacher, collecting data around two

distinct units: one the teacher designated as ”familiar” (based on his or her

26

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content knowledge) and one designated as ”unfamiliar.”1 I then observed each

teacher teach those topics to two different class periods for the duration of the
unit. I structured interviews around particular tasks that elicited the teachers’
autobiographies, historical knowledge and beliefs, and pedagogical reasoning in
the act of planning and teaching. Finally, I collected documents that the teachers
produced as part of their units (such as lesson plans, handouts, student work,
tests, quizzes, and seating charts) as well as information from district and state
offices concerning socio-economic, cultural and political features of the school,
school practices, and the student body.
15' l' D .1 ”1.2

To locate study participants, I searched for two history teachers who had
been teaching less than three years, since that corresponded to the Interstate
New Teacher Assessment and Support Consortium’s [INTASC] (1989) definition
of a ”beginning teacher.” My primary concern was to find two teachers who
had performed well in their teacher preparation program, based upon the
measures commonly used to designate promising teacher candidates, however
crude those measures might be. I generated a list by talking to social studies
field instructors who had worked in a secondary teacher preparation program
which requires a subject matter major and a full year internship. I asked each to
identify students who stood out in their minds as individuals with ”strong
subject matter knowledge” and ”skills in developing a classroom learning

community.” These two gialities were explicitly included as part of the

1These terms should not be interpreted as fixed and oppositional categories.
As the analysis of the data will show, the features of David’s knowledge of both
familiar and unfamiliar topics differ from Julia’s. Thus, the terms should be
understood as relatiire and subjective; David regarded his content knowledge of
the American and French Revolutions to be stronger than his knowledge of the
Russian Revolution. Julia felt that she knew much more about the Civil Rights
Movement than about the Progressive Era.

2David and Julia are pseudonyms, as are the names of their schools,
students, principals, colleagues and college professors.

27

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program’s standards for successful completion of the program. This meant that
each field instructor had evaluated their students on precisely these qualities and
I could use the final written evaluations to substantiate their more recent
recollections.

Once I had generated a list of twelve potential participants, I called each to
describe my study and get a sense of their interest. I said I was interested in
learning about the experiences of beginning teachers as they interacted with
students around the subject of history. Only four out of the twelve were
teaching history, even though many of them had majored in that subject.
Several told me that they had not been able to find history teaching positions
and were teaching in their minor area, such as English or a foreign language. I
eventually opted to work with Julia and David.

1 arranged to meet informally with each of them in order to set up a
schedule for interviews and observations. I also asked them to bring copies of
transcripts, collaborating teacher evaluations, and course papers, to help
substantiate my impression of them as promising teacher candidates. From the
start, I learned something of their differences. David, who later told me he still
has papers and notes saved from elementary school, brought me copies of
everything I requested. Julia, who later expressed feelings of alienation from
some aspects of academia, brought only her collaborating teacher evaluation and
said that she wasn’t sure where to find her course-related work (she had recently
married, moved, and hadn’t unpacked all of her boxes). As time went on, I
neglected to collect these other documents from Julia, so my claims about her
performance in college history courses are based solely on self-report.

Of course, there are limitations to relying so heavily on field instructors and
collaborating teachers’ impressions to identify potential participants for a study
designed to look at ”promising” beginning teachers. I return to this issue in the
last chapter of the dissertation as it relates to my findings. For now, based on the

information I had going intothe study, I felt satisfied that David and Julia fit the

28

profile of a promising beginner.
The table below provides basic information about each of the two

participants in the study.

 

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Table 1: Profiles of Julia and David

CultivatingtheRelationships

In my initial contact with Julia and David, both expressed a high level of
interest, commenting that the experience would help them improve their
practice. I took this as a good sign. Although I had not identified this as a
criterion in my initial search for participants, interest in improving one’s practice
is frequently cited as an important aspect of good teaching. Also, if they felt they
were getting something out of the experience for themselves, I might be able to
learn more from them. I knew that I would be posing tough questions, not to
mention inhabiting their professional space in their first years of teaching. I was

asking a great deal of them and I did not take this lightly.

29

I was determined to give Julia and David the respect they deserved as
willing and novice participants. At one point, this meant risking the possibility
that Julia would drop out of the study before it even began. When I called her
two weeks into the school year to set up the first interview, she told me she was
feeling ”overwhelmed” with the life of a first-year teacher and didn’t know if she
would have time for the research project. She wondered how long the
interviews would take. I tried to be straightforward, acknowledging that her
participation would place extra demands on her time and assuring her that I
would understand if she changed her mind. I tried not to betray my own panic
and was tremendously relieved when she decided: ”I’ll do it, I’ll do it.”

Throughout the study, I felt a deep gratitude toward David’s and Julia’s
willingness to stick with me until the end, even though it meant coming in early
or staying late, providing a desk for me to sit in, and an extra copy of each
worksheet. I had told them upfront that there was no monetary compensation,
but I tried to repay them in small ways. During each visit, I adjusted my
schedule so that our meetings took place at times and locations convenient to
them. Once, Julia and I met at a coffee shop close to her house. I brought
brownies to an after-school interview with David and coffee to an early morning
meeting with Julia. On more than one occasion, I offered to run copies for them
between class periods when they were busy with other tasks. In the spring, after
data collection ended, I gave each of them a 50 dollar gift certificate to purchase
teaching materials from a major publishing company.

It turned out that I was far more anxious about protecting David and Julia’s
confidentiality than they were. Since I knew other teachers in both buildings, I
anticipated having to provide an explanation about my presence. I told both
Julia and David that I would not reveal their identities, that I would simply tell
anyone who asked that I was doing a research project in the school. I used this
line on a few occasions, but both teachers introduced me to their colleagues as

someone who was ”studying” their teaching. David explained that he would be

30

referred to by a pseudonym in the final report: ”I’m going to be one of those
Joe Johns you read about in the research.”
CollectingjheData

As I conceptualized this study, I realized I would need to gather multiple
kinds of data. Previous studies indicated that life history, content knowledge,
and disciplinary orientations impact teachers’ transformation of subject matter.
In addition, since I wanted to theorize about knowledge in action, I had to find
some way to tap into teachers’ reasoning close to particular classroom events.
And because this was a study of beginning teachers, I needed data that told me

something about what might be changing or developing in their practice.
Table 2 displays each type of data I collected.3 In the Autobiographical

Interview, I asked David and Julia questions about their pre-college memories
related to learning about history, both in and out of school. They described
some significant college history courses and identified influential aspects of the
teacher preparation program. I asked them what they thought it meant to
”know” history and why high school students should learn history. These
questions also triggered quite a bit of detail about the teachers’ life histories -
what their parents did for a living, the kinds of schools they attended,

 

3T he citation abbreviations for data collected in this study are as follows:
Interviews are cited by title, date and Roman numeral to indicate whether the
interview took place during the first or second round of data collection.
”Autobio” refers to Autobiographical Interview; ”CK” refers to Content
Knowledge Interview; ”ROA” refers to Reflection on Action Interview; and
”Post-Ob” refers to Post-Observation Interview. Portions of classroom dialogue
are cited by class period and date. Thus, ”2nd; 11 / 24/ 98” refers to a second
period class session held on November 24, 1998.

31

 

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32

experiences which shaped their values and worldviews.4

I designed the Content Knowledge Interview to help me understand David

and Julia’s content knowledge directly related to the four units I observed. I
waited to do these interviews until the teachers told me that they had reviewed
the topic in preparation for teaching it. I wanted to assess their topic-specific
knowledge while fresh in their minds, reasoning that this would give me the
closest approximation of the content they were drawing upon prior to actually
implementing the unit. The plan was to have each teacher draw a conceptual
map about the topic, followed by a ”mind dumpz” ”T ell me everything you
know about this topic, even if you’re not planning to teach everything you know
to your students.” The second part of the interview involved having the
teachers look over a ”fact list” about the topic which I had gleaned from a
current high school history textbook. I asked each to comment on any items
they hadn’t included in the mind dump. I closed the interview with questions
about where and when they had learned about this topic and whether they were
aware of alternative or conflicting historical interpretations.

By using both open-ended questions and the fact list, I hoped to get insight
into what several researchers (e.g., Grossman, Wilson 8t Shulman, 1989,
borrowing from Joseph Schwab, 1978) refer to as ”substantive” and ”syntactic”
content knowledge. The first of these categories includes knowledge of the facts
of historical events and interrelated concepts. This is typically the kind of
knowledge college students are tested on in their history courses: What

significant events led to the French Revolution? How did Progressive reform

 

4Prior to the first interview, I piloted both the Autobiographical and the
Content Knowledge interview questions with a history major who was currently
doing his student teaching. I made a few adjustments based on his responses: to
the Autobiographical interview, I added a question about describing the schools
they had attended and a phrase about learning history outside of school; I
incorporated a concept mapping task into the Content Knowledge interview.

33

 

 

('1'?

a.)

ideas shape political and social institutions?

Syntactic knowledge refers to understandings about the process of historical
inquiry - how historians use evidence to construct interpretations of events. It is
less common for history courses to emphasize this kind of knowledge, but since
some of the current reforms in history education call for teachers to teach about
the processes of historical inquiry, I wanted to find out whether or to what
extent Julia and David held these understandings. I made some discoveries
about the format of this particular interview which reveal some of the
complexity of trying to study teachers’ content knowledge. I discuss these at the
end of this chapter.

I arranged to observe each teacher for two class periods every day for the
duration of their units. This enabled me to see each lesson plan twice, with two
different groups of students. This method helped me to notice aspects of the
teachers’ curricular goals and representations that were dynamic and evolving,
since no lesson plan was ever taught the same way twice. In addition, I asked
the teachers to identify topics with which they felt familiar in terms of the
content and topics with which they felt less comfortable or familiar. I made a
point to observe one of each, which gave me an opportunity to notice variations
in their teaching based on differences in content knowledge (see Table 1 for these
topics).

Midway through each unit, I held the Reflection-on-Action Interview. The
general rationale for this interview comes from Schon (1983). Teaching, like
other complex, uncertain, and ambiguous professional work, relies on
knowledge which is very often tacit and intuitive. Schon posits that:

both ordinary people and professional practitioners often think about what
they are doing, sometimes even while doing it. Stimulated by surprise, they
turn thought back on action and on the knowing which is implicit in action.
They may ask themselves, for example, ”What features do I notice when I
recognize this thing? What are the criteria by which I make this judgment? .
. . How am I framing the problem that I am trying to solve? (p. 50)

I was interested in eliciting David’s and Julia’s reflections on their actions because,
as Fenstermacher (1994) suggests, in this way teachers’ tacit understandings may
be brought to a level of ”practical reasoning:”

The provision of reasons, when done well, makes action sensible to the actor
and the observer. That is a minimal form of warrant for practical action.
Such reasoning may also show that an action is, for example, the reasonable
thing to do, the obvious thing to do, or the only thing one could do under
the circumstances. Each of these is, I believe, a contribution to the epistemic
merit of a practical knowledge claim. (p. 45)

I designed the Reflection-on-Action interview around a set of tasks which I
hoped would stimulate this kind of ”turning thought back on action,” especially
around moments of surprise. For example, during the first round of data
collection, I asked the teachers to comment on a list of representations I had seen
them use up to that point. I asked them to tell me which representations they
had planned to use in advance, which were generated in the moment and the
content they hoped to convey to students with each representation. I also
replayed a tape of their teaching or read a transcript and had them do a ”think
aloud” - stopping at any point where something unanticipated had happened
and report on what they had been thinking at the time. These tasks elicited rich
detail about the teachers’ curricular goals and evolving content knowledge for
very specific pieces of the unit.

However, in the second round I created tasks specifically intended to test
hypotheses I had generated from my preliminary analysis of the first round.
The second Reflection-on-Action interview asked the teachers to recreate what
was going through their minds as they planned their units and then comment on
any mid-stream adjustments they had made.

The format for the Post-Observation Interview also changed from first to
second round. In the fall semester, I asked the teachers to imagine that they
were preparing to teach the entire unit again. First, I asked them to evaluate
their major representations, identify the ones they would and would not use in

the future and why. Then they described the central theme of their unit and

35

explained whether they would teach it differently next time. Their responses to
these questions gave me information about their selection of curricular goals and
representations across the entire unit, as well as which lessons stood out in their
memory as having been particularly instructive for them as beginning teachers.
Finally, in an effort to discover whether the teachers had acquired new content
knowledge as they taught, I asked them to recall what they had said in the
content knowledge interview (with the aid of the fact list and concept map) in
order to find out whether they felt they had learned new content while they
were teaching.

At the end of the second semester units, I again changed the interview
protocol in order to test my hypotheses. This time, in addition to asking the
teachers how they would teach the unit in the future, I had them analyze
samples of students’ work, react to four vignettes of history teaching, and
comment on aspects of their teaching they would like to develop over the next
few years.
thainingConsent

In my application for university permission to conduct research using human
subjects, I had indicated that I would obtain consent from principals and
students’ parents, as well as the teachers. Prior to the Autobiographical
Interviews, I contacted the principal of each school to get approval for the study.
Fortunately in those districts, principals held the authority to give approval; I did
not have to wait for the decision to get processed at the district level as is often
the case in larger school systems. David’s principal signed the consent form and
made it clear that he didn’t want to be further involved. He left it up to David
and me to determine procedures for collecting parents’ signatures. The only
caution he expressed to me was, ”Some of these parents are lawyers so make
sure they’re satisfied.”

Julia’s principal wanted to be more involved. He provided me with a

computer print-out with the home address of each of Julia’s students in her
second and third period classes (the sections I would be observing). He wanted
me to mail the consent form and cover letter to each parent, with a statement
about contacting him about concerns or questions. I did exactly what he
requested. The letter indicated that students were to return the consent from to
Julia, but for some reason about fifteen students apparently never received their
letters. With the principal’s permission, I gave these students their consent forms
directly.

The return rate was one hundred percent with David’s students and about
eighty-six percent with Julia’s. Several factors account for this difference. Both
teachers said they preferred to explain my presence and the consent form
process to their students rather than have me do it. That was fine with me, after
all, they had relationships with parents and students to maintain. Julia
introduced me the first day I observed and explained that they would be
receiving consent forms in the mail, if they hadn’t already. I was surprised that
David chose not to introduce me to his students until I had already been
observing for over a week. Students were accustomed to observers in their
classrooms, so my presence didn’t seem unusual until it became apparent that I
intended to keep coming back! When one of his fourth hour students finally
said, ”Mr. Parker, you never introduced us to the visitor,” David explained my
presence, distributed the consent forms and offered five extra credit points to
anyone who returned them (making it clear that they did not have to give
consent to get the points, only return the form to indicate their preference).
Several students wanted to know if their real names would be used in my report.
At that point, I spoke up and said that I would make up names for them, but if
they had a particular preference, they should write it on the form. This appealed
to a few of them who immediately called out their preferred pseudonyms.

It hadn’t occurred to me until that point that technically I should have
obtained all parents’ signatures before I started the observations. Logistically,

37

 

this was difficult to do - in part because I was negotiating with David and Julia
about which class periods I would observe and respecting their professional
judgments about when to distribute the forms. I justified the delay in my own
mind by reasoning that I had the teachers’ and principals’ permission to
audiotape class sessions, which is something I would do even if no parents
consented to my use of students’ comments or written work. And, I refrained
from making copies of student work until I had obtained parents’ consent. In
the end, there were only nine students whose words and work I could not use.
Qbsenzingijlassmoms

Initially, I had planned to videotape several class sessions, as a way to
supplement field notes and audiotape and help me to identify student voices as
well as a possible tool to use in the Reflection-on-Action Interviews. I tried this
on two occasions in David’s classroom, with limited success. I found that without
an extended microphone, the video camera was no better than a tape recorder
(and perhaps worse) in picking up students’ voices. Furthermore, although I
was not a total novice when it came to operating a video camera, I found myself
distracted by the task of operating it. It also impeded my ability to get a holistic
view of what was happening in the classroom at the moment. Naturally, a
camera lens puts a frame around interactions so that what is happening outside
that frame is not recorded. Since I didn’t have the funds to pay someone to run
the camera for me, I ceased videotaping.

Eventually, I developed a technique for recording my observations that
seemed generative. I placed my tape recorder in a central location and used a
sound-grabber microphone which enabled me to pick up all but a few voices.
Since I was spending so much time in the classrooms, I quickly learned to
recognize students’ voices when I listened to the tape. During each class session,
I kept a running written commentary of the dialogue, writing as fast as I could,

recording virtually very word that was spoken. This required a high degree of

38

concentration, because my writing was always a few seconds behind the
conversation. (My years of sitting through college lectures helped me out here!).
Every time there was a substantial pause in the conversation, I was able to look
up and notice behavior, which I recorded in the margins. I made no effort to jot
down my own thoughts during this time; I was a recording machine.

However, I was able to arrange my schedule so that within 30 minutes of
leaving each school I could be somewhere (the library or a coffee shop) to plug
in my laptop computer and type up my field notes. As I did so, I kept a list at the
bottom of each document containing more analytical comments or questions or
ideas of things I needed to ask David and Julia about. During the second round
of observations, I also began to integrate my notes from each pair of class
periods for the same lesson. I highlighted one class period in bold-face to keep
them separate, but this way, I could easily compare what each teacher did or did
not change from period to period. I then used my field notes to help me be
more selective about which class sessions to transcribe.

During the actual weeks I was observing, this was about all I had mental
energy to do. I was committed to typing up my notes on a daily basis, when the
classroom events were still fresh in my mind. I left the transcribing to the
periods of time between observations, except for the portions I chose to use in
the Reflection-on-Action interviews. These needed to be typed up so the
teachers could read them as they were listening to the tape.

By the time I had collected all my data and transcribed field notes, interviews
and selected teaching episodes, I had gathered a total of 28 hours of observations
for Julia, 42 hours of David, 18 hours of interviews and 523 pages of transcript.
Anal¥zingihfiflata

My methodological orientation in this study was naturalistic. I wanted to
immerse myself in the culture of David and Julia’s teaching environments,

understand as much as possible what reality looked like from the ”insiders’”

39

perspective and allow theories to emerge from the data. In the final section of
this chapter I will say more about the complexities of doing this kind of research.

In a sense, I was analyzing data as I collected it, but my analysis was more
concentrated and productive during the breaks in interviews and observations.
In the process, I came to see my mind as an instrument of analysis. I prepared
myself for the analytical process by reading research journals periodically and by
interviewing three ”expert witnesses:” Alex Mann, a high school history teacher
who recently earned a Ph.D. in Asian history; Bob Bain, a teacher educator with
26 years of history teaching experience and a Ph.D. in social policy and history;
and Trudy Sykes, a teacher educator who coordinates field experiences and
regularly interacts with prospective and practicing secondary social studies
teachers. I met with each of them for an hour to share with them some of my
data and get their reactions. Their perspectives helped me to see things - in
terms of historical content and pedagogy, as well as aspects of Julia and David’s
personal orientations - that I might otherwise have overlooked. I also received a
great deal of help from my weekly involvement in two study groups composed
of doctoral students - who were also collecting and analyzing dissertation data -
and one faculty advisor. We read each others’ transcripts and analytic memos,
co-constructed concept maps, and discussed strategies for displaying data.

I read and reread my field notes and interview transcripts many times over. I
looked for themes and patterns pertaining to David and Julia’s knowledge and
beliefs about content, students, pedagogy, curriculum and context. I bought a
large tablet of poster paper and filled it with circles, charts and arrows - all in an
effort to display the data in fresh ways. After the first round of data collection, I
wrote two analytic memos - one about each teacher - describing their personal
backgrounds, views of history, instructional representations and points of
surprise. Based on these memos, I created a set of hypotheses about the
interaction of their knowledge and beliefs, as well as the aspects of teaching that
seemed difficult for them. I turned my hypotheses into predictions about what I

40

would observe during their second teaching episodes. At the end of data
collection, I reread my predictions and found that the comparison to what really
happened helped me build explanations. I also used the hypotheses to develop
a new set of interview protocols for the Reflection-on-Action and Post-
Observation Interviews that helped me to test my hunches.

After the second round of data collection, I was able to identify emergent
analytic categories. I then cut and pasted segments from the interview
transcripts onto index cards, each with a label such as ”conceptions of history” or
”beliefs about students.” These cards helped me construct my next four memos:
one each on David’s and Julia’s familiar and unfamiliar units. Later, as I was
writing various drafts of the dissertation, I referred back to the notecards I
hadn’t used in order to look for confirming and disconfirming evidence.

In these memos, I tried to describe what I saw and heard in vivid detail.
Whenever I had an analytical comment to make, I stuck it into a footnote.
Eventually some of these footnotes came together to form the outline of my
theoretical argument. Toward the end of second semester, after all interviews
and observations were complete, I gave Julia and David early drafts of my
memos about them. My analysis was still fairly preliminary at that point, so I
didn’t get the kind of feedback from them I might have if I had waited until my
argument was more developed. Still, their comments were useful. Both pointed
out a few factual errors I had made and affirmed my decisions about which
aspectsof their teaching to focus on.

Washing

To paraphrase a popular line, research is a journey, not merely a destination.
Likely, most readers will be more interested in the final chapter of this
dissertation than in this methodological report, but this project taught me as
much about doing research as it did about beginning teachers’ knowledge. In

this last section, I summarize a few insights I gained about research.

41

I had anticipated that a major hurdle in the effort to understand what
teachers know and believe is the fact that so much is tacit. As an observer, I
couldn’t depend solely on my interpretations of their actions to infer knowledge
and beliefs. After all, teacher actions are highly contextualized. Even though I
was more than an occasional visitor, how could I know whether a teacher was
withholding information for a pedagogical reason or because of lack of
knowledge? When teachers simplify content, they may or may not hold more
complex understandings. Teachers select certain representations for reasons that
may not make sense to an outside observer.

Consequently, I felt quite dependent on David’s and Julia’s self-awareness.
At the same time, I assumed that it would be natural for them to want to explain
their actions as if they were part of a deliberate, coherent philosophy, when in
fact, beginning teachers may still be sorting through competing purposes and
values. So I experimented with various ways to tap into their thinking. I think
that some of these strategies were useful but I also believe that, to the extent
these teachers made their knowledge and beliefs available to me, it was in large
measure due to their own desire to reflect on and learn from their practice.

Although I had not anticipated it, observing two class periods turned out to
be fruitful. My presence seemed to sensitize Julia and David to any changes they
made across groups of students. It wasn’t long before each of them started
approaching me to offer spontaneous explanations: ”Did you notice I erased the
board before second hour but left the diagram on the board for fourth hour?
That’ s because fourth period [students] need more structure.” ”I decided to give
the worksheet to this group today instead of waiting until tomorrow because I
think they will need more time to finish it.” They also initiated these kinds of
comments when they modified a lesson slightly from the original plans they had
described in the interviews.

A similar thing happened during the Reflection-on-Action interviews in
which each teacher ”relived”.a lesson they had taught in order to identify where

42

something unexpected had happened. It seemed natural for them to want to
explain what was going on in their heads at the time. I had been a little
concerned that David and Julia would hesitate in admitting that they had been
caught off-guard in the middle of a lesson. However, perhaps because they
were beginning teachers, they seemed to presume that surprises were inevitable
- a daily occurrence - and they were quite willing to reflect on those surprises.

I also developed a set of phrases that I would use whenever they had time to
talk between class periods. Referring to something that had just happened in
class, I would ask ”When did you learn to do that?” or ”I noticed that you
seemed excited by what that student said,” or ”What’s going on with [name of
student] today?” This approach seemed less aggressive than asking them ”Why
did you do that?” and their responses seemed more extensive and involved than
I might have gotten had I waited.

Naively, I had assumed it was possible to separate what these teachers
knew about their content from their ”knowing in action.” I believed that the
Content Knowledge interview would give me access to the former and
observations would give me access to the latter. What happened instead was
that David and Julia repeatedly mentioned historical facts or interpretations in
their teaching that did not come up in the interviews. Julia actually froze up
when I asked her to talk about the items on the Progressive Era fact list, even
though I learned later that she was quite familiar with some of them (the
NAACP and the Nineteenth Amendment). Both of them surprised me by
making knowledge statements while teaching that revealed more understanding
than I thought they had. It turned out, for example, that David knew much
more about 18th century European social history than he ever revealed during
his Age of Revolutions unit. Julia described a scene at a history department
meeting in which she had been the sole member who knew that Yugoslavia had
been created in the aftermath of World War I (as opposed to World War II).

43

Experiences like these made me cautious in assuming that I was discovering
anything more about David and Julia’s historical knowledge than what
happened to be triggered in a given moment. This was still useful data; when I
put it all together I was able to make claims about the interaction of certain facts
and interpretations with particular beliefs or orientations. But I learned I had to
be careful about characterizing their historical knowledge as if I had just taken a
snapshot of it and could study it under bright lights.

A final insight - perhaps the most important of all - concerns my role as the
researcher. I anticipated that my presence in Julia’s and David’s classrooms
would affect the data. My goal was to minimize my influence and I think I
succeeded most of the time. I arrived in the classrooms early to set up my
equipment. I did not participate in class discussions unless a comment or
question was directed at me (which only happened once or twice). When it came
to my interactions with the teachers, I tried as best I could to set aside the role I
had grown accustomed to playing in schools - the role of field instructor
responsible for helping new teachers develop their practice. At the beginning,
this was especially hard, because I would reflexively think of comments I could
make or questions I could ask to bring something to their attention

On the other hand, there was no question that as an adult in the school, I felt
a moral imperative to be a positive presence. This meant that when a student
sitting near me asked me to repeat David’s directions or a phrase Julia had just
erased from the board, I did so. Once on my way into David’s building, I moved
closer to two boys who were yelling at each other in order to deter a fight.

Similarly, I didn’t feel that I could be completely detached in my interactions
with Julia and David. After all, they were beginning teachers in need of
resources and I was a resource. This reality was apparent from the beginning.
Both asked for my advice on more than one occasion. I think they were
primarily interested in my point of view as a former social studies teacher,

although I’m sure my connections to the university had some bearing as well.

44

Julia asked me what I would do about students who fall asleep in class or hand in
poor quality work. David wondered how to respond to a student who seemed
openly annoyed with him. Once, Julia asked me to comment on a handout she
had prepared: ”How can I improve it?” she wondered.

In each case I was careful with my response to show respect for their
autonomy, to make it clear that I didn’t have prescriptions for their practice. I
said things like ”Yeah, I’ve had that same dilemma” and ”What have you done in
the past?” or ”How is she doing in her other classes?” In the case of Julia’s
handout, I offered her a summary of the related content she had taught students
and asked her how that tied into the worksheet she had created. She had several
ideas. I had a particular preference for one of her ideas and told her so.
Afterwards, I worried that I had over-stepped my bounds but as it turned out,
Julia did not use the worksheet in the way I had encouraged her to. This was a
relief because it seemed to suggest that, although she cared about my opinion,
she didn’t feel obligated to agree with me.

There was another way in which self as researcher entered into this study. I
had to keep reminding myself to watch out for the presumption of familiarity
based on my own past experience as a beginning, ninth-grade social studies
teacher. There were times when I could use my past experience as a resource; I
knew enough about experiences common to teachers to be able to make some
educated guesses about what might be going through David’s and Julia’s minds.
However, I also found myself judging their teaching against the standard of my
own practice. I was initially quite drawn to David’s scholarly approach, his
interest in intellectual history. I found myself dismayed by Julia’s very different
sense of what it meant to teach history. My colleagues at the university told me
my preference for David was conspicuous in my analytic memos. ”You’re
neglecting Julia” one of them scolded. After this, I make a special effort to read
Julia’s transcripts more empathetically and David’s with a more critical eye. An

additional problem was that, with only two teachers in my study, I was inclined
45

to polarize contrasts. It was only by carefully monitoring myself that I was able
to moderate this tendency.

Given the complexity of ”reading teaching,” this study has all the limitations
of this kind of research. A large part of the data relies on self-report: David and
Julia’s accounts of their knowledge and reasoning which were probably
influenced by the natural impulse to look good or the fact that self-
understanding is rarely complete. Among the transcripts and field notes stored
in two boxes in my office, there is likely some piece of data which seemed
inconsequential a few months ago but may later strike me as significant. I
continue to reflect on the ambiguity surrounding my role as researcher, a role I
negotiated with myself as well as with Julia and David.

All in all, the time I spent with these two teachers was much more personally
intense - physically, mentally and emotionally - than I had imagined. Clearly it
was for them as well. David asked whether he could have his transcripts because
he’s thinking he would like to write a book. ”There are no interesting books
about social studies teaching out there,” he explained. Julia commented that the
experience was "cathartic" for her. Whereas she felt her colleagues treated her
like a blank slate, I at least acknowledged that she ”knows some stuff.” Indeed,
the experience of reading a transcript of her teaching as part of the Reflection on
Action interview helped convince Julia herself that she knew some stuff:

This is so interesting. I’m getting a lot more pedagogically out of the kid’s

responses, I’m getting a better picture of what kids are thinking. In the class,

I’m constantly trying to monitor my own thinking, what my goals are, what

kids might be erceiving. But now I can hear voices I didn’t necessarily hear.
(RCA 1, 12 / 22 98)

In a sense, my task as researcher was similar to Julia’s as teacher. I wanted
to hear the voices of beginning teachers, the meanings they construct about
content, students, curriculum and school culture. In order to do so, I couldn’t
depend solely on my interpretations of their actions. I needed Julia and David to

articulate their tacit and intuitive knowledge and beliefs to me as best they could.

46

And I needed to position myself so I could hear what might not have otherwise

occurred to me.

47

Chapter 3
JULIA AND DAVID: SUBJECT MATTER BELIEFS,
SCHOOL CONTEXT S, STUDENTS, AND CURRICULUM

The purpose of this chapter is to describe the beliefs about history Julia and
David brought to their practice as well as the contexts in which they taught. The
chapter introduces the reader to each beginning teacher’ 5 disciplinary
perspectives, conceptions of history as a school subject, work setting,
involvements in the life of the school, relationships with colleagues, interactions
with and general attitudes toward their students, their typical teaching style, and
the curriculum units I observed. My goal is to provide the reader with a global
impression of each teacher in which then to situate later chapters.

Descriptions of novices’ orientations toward their subject matter are
particularly relevant to studies about the nature of transformation. Previous
researchers found that teachers’ personal theories about what is worthwhile and
significant to know, as well as their epistemological beliefs about the nature of
knowledge and ways of knowing, influence the process of transformation
(Wilson 8: Wineburg, 1988). In addition, teachers’ ideas about the purposes of
teaching subject matter are powerful influences on their pedagogical reasoning
(Grossman, 1990). In order to understand such beliefs, we need to explore early
influences on David’s and Julia’s process of constructing meaning about what
history is and how one comes to know it.

Like their pupils who are trying to make sense of subject matter, Julia and
David have been and are students of history, bringing their existing knowledge
to bear on any new historical information they encounter. What each of them
”knows” about their content is a product of ongoing efforts to adapt to the
world as they perceive it: ”knowledge consists of those beliefs that ’survive’ in
the sense that surviving beliefs help the human who holds them” (Orton, 1996).
This is similar to Becker’ 5 (1968) observation that ”every normal person - Mr.

Everyman - knows some history” because drawing meaning from the past is

48

what the mind does before acting in the present:

History in this sense cannot be reduced to a verifiable set of statistics or
formulated in terms of universally valid mathematical formulas. It is rather
an imaginative creation, a ersonal possession which each one of us, Mr.
Everyman, fashions out of his individual experience, adapts to his practical
or emotional needs, and adorns as well as may be to suit his aesthetic tastes.

(p. 13)

Thus, we would expect to find that teachers, like their students, hold
personalized historical knowledge. Polanyi (1958) used the phrase ”self as a tool
of understanding” as shorthand for his central thesis that ”into every act of
knowing enters a passionate contribution of the person knowing what is being
known” (p. 3). Other theorists have emphasized that knowledge is socially-
constructed, since people make sense of phenomena within particular social and
historical contexts (Dewey, 1916; Vygotsky, 1978). In the following sections, I
attend to the social settings in which Julia and David ”adapted and adorned”
their beliefs about history and what it means to know it.

Julia Richards: Teaching Social History
in an Under-Resourced High School

Julia andhecBeIiefsahoutHistory

Julia Richards, 27 years old, does not remember very much about her social
studies classes in elementary and secondary school, although she has one
striking memory from fifth grade. The previous year, her parents had divorced
and Julia had been allowed to choose the parent with whom she would live. She
chose her father, which meant a move from Michigan to Colorado:

I remember in Colorado, the teacher had a map and he said ”What states are
on here?” I said Michigan, but he didn't want Michigan. It was a teacher
question. I felt stupid. (Autobio, 10/ 27/ 98)

For young Julia, history was a school subject in which one was expected to
memorize ”fact-oriented names and dates” and Julia was ”not a memorizer.”1

She did not - and still does not - consider herself to be a strong student. She

 

1All quotes are Julia's own words.

49

 

 

thought of her teachers as ”robots the government gave” her. And yet, as an
adult, Julia decided to become a social studies teacher and now, in her first year
of teaching, says that she feels she has finally found her "niche."

Julia explained how her early dislike of history evolved into her decision to
become a US. History teacher. Julia’s father is black and her mother is white.
Julia refers to them as ”social studies people” because they were constantly
discussing social history and politics. She learned early on that, from her parents’
perspective, ”It was taboo to vote Republican.” When she was older, she heard
the stories about when her father was a social worker in Kentucky and fought to
get indoor plumbing for the elderly, about how her parents were escorted by
police out of town because there were laws against black people being in town
after dark, about how her parents got shot at while eating in a restaurant and
were approached by members of the Ku Klux Klan.

Julia’s parents were less concerned about social mobility and competition
than they were about encouraging their daughter to identify and express her

authentic self. They did not put pressure on her to excel in school:

[They said] you are who you are, we’re not placing any racial or financial
constraints on you. You don’t have to go to college. . . They didn’t even say

”you’re biracial,” the said ”you’re Julia.” They were very acceptin of me

as a person, and not solely] because I was their child. (Autobio, 10 27/ 98)

Because of her parents, Julia was drawn at an early age to historical and
contemporary individuals and movements directed toward social change. Her
interests rarely found support in school. Only two school events stand out in her
memory as occasions in which she felt connected to the curriculum. In seventh
grade and then again in high school, she moved back to Michigan to live with
her mother and attended a predominantly white school in a semi-rural
community. She remembers learning about Mahatma Gandhi and Martin
Luther King, Jr.:

In seventh grade, we watched the movie Gandhi. I loved it, it made me feel
connected to people doing things with other people. I'm very emotional, I
cry and connect to the way people were feeling. What was amazing was

50

that I didn't talk at all or pass notes during that movie. . . . I remember
learning about Martin Luther King Jr. and becoming enamored with his
voice and because he was speaking to everyone [about] how compassion
works better to change things. (Autobio, 10/ 27 / 98)

In the all-white Michigan high school, Julia became conscious of her skin
color in a painful way, feeling like she ”stuck out like a sore thumb.” Yet,
teachers and students seemed to pretend that wasn’t the case, as if racial histories
had no relationship to Julia’s present experience. She dreaded any mention of
slavery in her history classes because there was no recognition of her connection
to that experience. In the predominantly black Colorado schools, ”black girls
hated me because of my [light] skin color . . . one called me a ’half-breed bitch.”
Looking back, Julia feels that her parents’ well-intended ”experiment in not
making race an issue,” made her ”naive.” ”I wasn’t warned about what was out
there . . . [as I was growing up], society didn’t make sense to me.”

Julia’s parents tried to protect her from the realities of racial conflict, but her
school experiences left her feeling frustrated by the intolerance directed toward
her as well as the messages about race conveyed by the hidden curriculum. She
noticed that this wasn’t just her experience, but a reflection of something going
on in society at large. ”Society didn’t make sense” to her. When things don’t
make sense, the human mind ”fights to create explanations” (Delval, 1994, p. 97).
Ironically, history provided a lens for constructing explanations. From an
historical perspective, it seemed less surprising to Julia that "the lower class is still
having a hard time" and "people are still prejudicedz”

I never understood the cliche ”ignorance is bliss” until I started trying to
understand society and looking at all those things that are going on. It’ s so
hard not to feel heavy and frustrated and scared about the future. . . . A
friend of mine is real ignorant about social issues and sometimes I think how
great, she has no idea. So when I am looking at the negative, it helps me to
understand [that] it has only been thirty-three years since segregation laws
in the South ended. So if you think about it that way, we have made a lot of
strides and how can you expect someone who was racist thirty-three years
ago to wake up one day and say ”Oh, the law says I’m not supposed to do
that so I’m not going to anymore.” So that’ 5 why I like to connect past
[realities] to the present. (CK I, 12 / 10 / 98)

51

It is only partially accurate to call this an ”historical perspective.” Yes, it
relies on some historical knowledge, but it is history in the service of social
analysis. What Julia constructed was an explanation of persistent prejudice based
on the socialization of attitudes over decades of US. race relations. She drew on
political and social history to make sense of her experience as a biracial woman.

Perhaps that is why she initially entered college planning a future career in
civil rights law. She reasoned that as a civil rights lawyer, she could ”speak a
message to a lot of people and help them to understand both sides or all sides of
racism. I wanted to be a civil rights attorney, help people understand their
rights.” So she chose to major in political science and at first, minor in English.
But ”there was something missing” and when she realized that she had actually
earned more credits in history than in English, she declared a history minor
instead. It wasn’t until she was almost finished with her bachelor’ 5 degree that
she decided to become a social studies teacher instead of a lawyer, and applied
for the teacher preparation program as a post-baccalaureate:

I was sitting at the dining room table with my mom, where most e iphanies
happen, and I said, ”I think I want to be a teacher.” Before then, I ad
always felt void of [knowing] what my talent was. Because of my
experience in school, I thought I would do very well. . . . We didn’t talk
about prejudice [in school]. (Autobio, 10/ 27/ 98)

When Julia entered the teacher preparation program, she imagined that she
would be a government teacher: ”I love the law, I love the Constitution.” But in
both her internship and now in her first teaching job, she found herself teaching
US. history. She bemoans the fact that she didn’t major in history, because ”You
need to major in it to feel confident walking into the classroom. I had eight
classes of history and I felt weak walking in. What are the chances you're going
to have come across all the facts that your students could ask you about?” Such
comments provide clues as to Julia’s disciplinary perspectives. As a youth, she
viewed history as ”fact-oriented names and dates.” Now, as a teacher, she is

concerned that her history courses did not teach her sufficient facts. And, as a

52

political science major who ”loves the law,” she may tend to perceive historical
content through a civil rights lens.

Indeed, of the eight history courses Julia took in college, those that stand out
in her memory were the History of the Constitution, two African-American
history courses and one women’s history course. Even in these courses, she
found memorizing facts difficult. She didn't ”read stuff unless I had to” and sold
most of the assigned books at the end of each semester. She admits that she
probably wouldn’t do well on a test that measured her memory of details. But
what she does remember from those courses are the facts, themes, and concepts
which connected with or challenged her evolving conception of US. History:

I had never heard of the Harlem Renaissance or the cult of true womanhood
or that the Supreme Court molds our lives so much, more than any other
branch of government. I also learned that some stuff I had learned in high
school was distorted, like [the perception] that Martin Luther King had led
the whole civil rights movement or that [the movement] was primarily in
the South. (Autobio, 10 / 27/ 98)

These history courses provided Julia with knowledge about the experiences
of women and minorities in our nation’s history, particularly from a civil rights
standpoint. They also taught her something about historical research:

Dr. Stevens gave us primary source documents that were hard to interpret.
She had us do historian stuff and make conclusions and evaluate evidence
and go find resources of where this person was from and [reach] logical
conclusions. (Autobio, 10 / 27/ 98)

She says that from this course, she developed a sense that history is"ambiguous
and conceptual," in contrast to a subject like math:

It’s not one plus one equals two. It’ s more like sometimes it’ 5 two, but if
you do this and this is mi ht be three. In the past couple of years history

as changed. That tg‘uy w o worked at the Swiss bank found these
documents saying ey laundered money for Hitler. He changed history
because we were always going on the idea the didn’t [launder mone ].
And they have proof now that Jefferson had c 'ldren by his slaves, w ereas
before they just thought no. (Post-Ob I, 12/ 22/ 98)

So Julia has some conception that histories are based on interpretations of

evidence which may change over time, but she doesn’t emphasize this aspect of

53

the discipline. What she remembers most from the historiography course is not
so much the epistemological issues involved but the realization that there is a
”historical way of writing” that she was not good at, based on the feedback she
got from her professors.

Julia’s historical knowledge and disciplinary perspectives developed long
before she entered college. She is interested in historical knowledge which
supports social change. She seems to view the discipline as primarily fact-based,
although she is aware that historical accounts are created and evolve. This is not
surprising, given that the history she encountered in school seemed to consist of
trivial facts which were disconnected from personal experience and made her
feel ”stupid.” In contrast, the historical understandings she developed in the
context of family and minority group identity-building held explanatory power.
History the way Julia constructed it could shed light on why progress toward
social and racial equality has been so slow and inspire her with images of
nonviolent, collective efforts to ”change things” and visions of what might have
been:

Can you imagine if Malcolm [X] and Martin [Luther King, Jr.] had united [as
Malcolm had proposed just before his assassination]? . . . We've never had

two leaders rise up to that magnitude and I would love to see it happen
again. Ahh, I'd love it, it would be beautiful. (CK II, 5/ 18 / 99)

This is a formulation of history in which the starting point is not so much the
discipline of history as it is social analysis. History is but one tool among many
for understanding and changing contemporary society; history serves a broader
purpose.

Julia’s commitment to use her knowledge to change society is clear: first her
interest in becoming a civil rights attorney; later her decision to enter teaching
where she could do what her own teachers failed to do: ”talk about prejudice.”
When Julia talks about teaching history, she emphasizes the impact of the past
on the present. She wants her students to ”remember stuff, although the stuff
isn’t lists of vocabulary, but understand society and why things happen today,

54

why there are certain laws that there are." She wants them to be able to explain,
for example, ”not just what happened in 1492, but why Native Americans would
say Columbus Day is a disgusting holiday. Why it’s significant today.” She is
not as present-minded as her colleagues who ”want to hurry up and get through
all the early history so they can get to contemporary history." She feels that is:

doing a disservice to students . . . . You can't get to contemporary history
without knowing why you got there. You can't get to the ’805 without
understanding where it came from. To understand the Cold War, you have
to understand WWII. (CK I, 12 / 10 / 98)

Julia is especially committed to providing her students with historical
information which helps them to become more tolerant of others and active in
the struggle for social equality and justice:

[Knowing] history gives you an understanding of society, to understand
stereotypes, why people are prejudiced . . . and why people are still angry.
You can learn to be tolerant through understanding why we are the way we
are. Like if you 0 from Reconstruction to the Great Depression, you can
see how aid was anded out. Minorities didn't get it. Then you can
understand why people are still havin a hard time and have more tolerance
and understand your role as citizens. Autobio, 10 / 27/ 99)

For this reason, Julia gravitates toward historical narratives which teach ”lessons
about society.” History is not something to be learned for its own sake; she
finds no intrinsic pleasure, for example, in teaching ”descriptions of characters,”
unless she can use their stories to teach a ”lesson about societyz”

Like Celia the slave who was raped by her owner . . . so she killed him. . .
Some abolitionist la ers helped her, kept her throughout the trial, and she
was found guilty on e grounds that [the owner] could rape her because
she was his [property]. If someone else had raped her, that would be

tres a/ssing. . . A story like this reinforces lessons about society. (Post-Ob
H,6 2 99)

Julia’s beliefs about history correspond closely to Evans’ (1994)
characterization of the ”reformer” who ”emphasizes relation of the past to
present problems and suggests that history is background for understanding
current issues” (p. 189). One can also recognize parallels with the ”New History”
which emerged in the early 19705. In the wake of post-modern attacks against

55

historical objectivity, some historians began producing African-American,
working class, and women’s histories to promote political and social change.
Seixas (1993) notes these developments in the discipline of history coincided with
a movement in history education to teach historical antecedents of current
controversies and social problems.

While it is likely that Julia’s historical understanding has been shaped in part
by broader social forces, to simply place her in a particular category of history
teacher diminishes the sense of interplay between Julia’s encounters with
disciplinary content and the rest of her life experience. For example, growing up
as the daughter of a black father and a white mother, Julia had been raised to
consider Martin Luther King, Jr. as a hero for suggesting that black and white
people can learn to live in harmony. She had been taught to reject the anger and
militancy associated with Malcolm X, the Nation of Islam, and the Black Panthers.

”How could somebody like me hate white people?” she recalled, ”It made me
feel torn because of being born to my parents.”2

But when Julia entered college, she encountered new information about
Malcolm X. Yes, he held more militant views than Dr. King, but these views
could be interpreted as appropriate responses to his social environment. Julia
became more sympathetic toward Malcolm because the social environment
explanation fit her own life experience. As a teenager and young adult, Julia had
struggled to understand why, despite civil rights legislation, she and other
people of color still experienced intolerance. She realized that intolerance, at its

foundation, is a problem of attitude and understanding, not a legal issue. And

2 Epstein (1998) discovered that ”African-American students’ historical
perspectives . . . were shaped b their own and their family members’ race-
related experiences, many of w 'ch were marked by racial discrimination and
oppression” (p. 418). The students’ perspectives were oriented around the
historical struggle for equality, concerns about the gap between the ideal and
real in discussions about individual rights, and skepticism toward academic
accounts of history. Epstein’s findings are similar to those described by
Rosenzweig and Thelen (1998) who interviewed 24 African-American adults

about their views of history. _

56

foundation, is a problem of attitude and understanding, not a legal issue. And
where do people get their attitudes and understandings? From their
socialization, their experiences within particular social and cultural contexts. Julia
refers to this view as her ”eerie understanding of society and of people" that
most people don't have, that ”developed from my experiences.”

Thus, Julia’s beliefs about history are the product of an interplay between
new information she encounters and prior understandings which have helped
her make sense of experience. Sometimes the result is a fresh interpretation
which replaces a more naive conception. Sometimes the new information
provides further support for her previous understanding. It is not clear that her
college courses did much to change her views of the nature of history.

Although she listened to her college professors and read scholarly texts when
she ”had to,” she seems to view both the discipline and the school subject much
as she did in her formative years, as facts to disseminate. Julia intends to
improve on the history teaching she observed as a child in regard to the
particular facts she selects: facts and generalizations which support the
connection between past and present, particularly around contemporary social
issues.

Julianndherfichoolfietting

Julia Richards, 27 years old, teaches ninth and tenth grade US. History at
Fairmont High School, a school of about 1000 students on the outskirts of a mid-
sized Midwestern city. She is a first-year teacher, hired a few weeks after she
completed her year-long internship at a school in a neighboring district. About
80 percent of the Fairmont student body is Caucasian; the remaining twenty
percent is predominantly African-American, with some Latino and Asian
students as well. The community surrounding Fairmont is racially, economically
and religiously diverse.

Fairmont has some characteristics of an urban school: it is located in a school

57

community where 17 percent of students receive a free or reduced lunch and less
than 50 percent of eleventh graders score at the proficiency level in science and
writing on state assessments. However, nearly 85% of Fairmont's students
successfully graduate and a substantial number of students from other districts
request admission under the state's choice program. The school district spends

$7,467 per pupil per year compared to the national average of $6,146.3

In terms of its physical structure, Fairmont High School faces some of the
same problems that plague many school buildings throughout the United States
- a consequence of inadequate funding and the public's disregard for the
environmental conditions conducive to learning. The high school building is a
one-story, gray cement block building, with linoleum floors, dingy lockers,
dysfunctional drinking fountains, and movable walls separating classrooms that
allow the noise from neighboring classrooms to seep through. Julia has to use
her own money to purchase desk cleaner, a fan and extension cord. During
some of my visits, there was a problem with hallway littering. However, in spite
of these less than desirable physical conditions, the social environment at
Fairmont has some positive features. There is a positive rapport between
students and staff evidenced by the high level of faculty involvement in student
events and activities and the freedom that students have to move about the
building during the day.

In Julia’s classroom, the students’ desks are arranged in traditional rows with
her desk at the back of the room. Typically, Julia sits or stands at a small table
located front and center, piled with books, papers, pens, and overhead markers
and a travel mug containing water or coffee. A new television and VCR hang
from the ceiling. They were installed last summer, although the equipment isn’t
networked into a school-wide system the way it is in wealthier school districts.

An old set of history textbooks collects dust on a small bookshelf; Julia told me

 

3Data from 1996-97.
58

that a soon-to-retire colleague passed them on to her, thinking she could use
them. She suspects he was trying to ”unload them” onto her. Above all, one’s
eye is drawn to the posters Julia has selected to decorate her walls. One
proclaims "Diversity is our Strength" and another "There is only one race: the
human race. Do your part to stop hate." There is a map of Europe during World
War II which shows the locations of concentration camps. Squarely in the front
of the room, below the chalkboard, hangs another poster with a quote by
Holocaust survivor and Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie Wiesel: "Only the guilty
are guilty, the children are not."

As a first year teacher, Julia feels protective of her time. She prefers to spend
her time learning about her curriculum, becoming familiar with a new group of
students, and developing relationships with her principal and colleagues. She is
hesitant to take on extracurricular responsibilities, and when the athletic director
approached her about being a cheerleading sponsor, she refused. But, as she
described the interaction to me later, he ”practically got down on his knees and
begged” and Julia was worried that if she persisted in saying no, she would be
perceived by her colleagues as unwilling to do her part. So she agreed, but with
the stipulation that the athletic director find a second faculty member who would
share the responsibility with her. I checked in with Julia a few months later and
she said that she was glad she had taken the extracurricular position, but she had
told the athletic director that she would not be doing it next year. Julia’s
sentiment is that extracurricular involvements make it difficult for her to spend
the time she needs on developing her professional skills and knowledge.

When Julia talks about her relationships with colleagues, she seems torn
between wanting to fit in with her departrnent’s culture and needing to assert
her own opinions (which she sees as quite different from those held by some of
her colleagues). She negotiates this tension by conforming at some times and
doing her own thing at other times. For example, at the first social studies

department meeting of the year, a veteran history teacher suggested that they

59

 

rent the newly-released sequel to Gonewithiheflind and show it in the school
auditorium over a three-day period to all US. history students as an introduction
to the Reconstruction period. Julia told me later that she was ”shocked” that this
teacher viewed this as a serious suggestion. She felt she could not agree to this
on the grounds of historical accuracy: she believed the film did not provide the
information about constitutional debates over equal protection and the
complexities of race relations which she intended to teach her students. So she
gathered up her courage and told her colleagues that she didn’t want to show
the film.

However, the week before Thanksgiving, this same history teacher
proposed showing another film to all sections of US. History: EarandAmay, a
story featuring two Irish immigrants played by famous celebrities Tom Cruise
and Nicole Kidman. This time, Julia agreed to allow her students to view the
film, because of the ”pressure” she felt to teach common curriculum within the
department.

For the most part, the social studies department at Fairmont gives teachers
considerable autonomy over decisions about what and how to teach. Some of
Julia’s colleagues, particularly those who have been teaching for less than five
years or so, occasionally stop by her room and ask her ”What chapter are you
on?” or give her a copy of a handout or worksheet they are using in their
classrooms. I observed some of these interactions myself, and in each case, Julia
was gracious and friendly. But after the teacher left, Julia expressed her
misgivings. Was there an implied criticism in the question about ”What chapter
are you on?”? She feels badly if she perceives that she isn’t ”keeping up” with
the pace set by her colleagues. At the end of the year, she mentioned to me that
at least one fellow history teacher had not managed to get beyond World War II,
a fact which I could tell had boosted her own self-assessment, because she had

gotten as far as the Vietnam War. Apparently, one of her worries all along had

60

been a fear that her colleagues would criticize her for not covering the
curriculum.

Julia also confided in me her mixed feelings about accepting help from
colleagues in the form of worksheets and tests. She rarely, if ever, uses anything
they give her because their emphasis seems to be on asking students to
memorize lists of information. This is not how Julia wants to teach her class - she
recalls how much she hated rote memorization when she was in school. And she
feels slightly irritated that no one in her department ever comes to her and asks
her for help in working with material she feels she knows a lot about: the
Reconstruction period, for example, or the Civil Rights Movement. It is as if her
colleagues assume that as a first year teacher, she knows little and all she is
trying to do is ”survive:”

I don't think they think I feel as comfortable as I do. There's a lot of stuff I
like that I did this year-it's not all about treading water and staying alive. I
feel successful. They don't give me credit, they don't realize that I found my
niche and my talents. It used to be a big deal, to say I'm a loser, I don't have
a talent. And [now] I think I've got it - which doesn't mean I can't improve -
but I feel like this is where I'm supposed to be and it feels good . . . . When
we were doing wars, I went to [my colleagues] for help, but that's expected
because I’m a first year teacher. (ROA H 5/ 20/ 99)

Julia sees herself as a teacher and even though she knows she is still learning
her craft, she feels she brings strong foundational skills and knowledge to her
first year of teaching; she is not just ”treading water.” She wishes that her
colleagues would acknowledge this, perhaps even ask her for her help
occasionally. She is hesitant to offer unsolicited advice or suggestions because no
one seems to expect that from her. There is, however, one person with whom
she shares a more mutual relationship: an English teacher. One day when I
happened to be in the room, this teacher stopped by and asked Julia whether she
had anything written by Maya Angelou. Julia smiled, pulled out an anthology of
Angelou poems and handed it to her grateful colleague.

61

JuliaandherStudents

On a typical day in Room 118 at Fairmont High School, Julia stands at her
podium which is close to the door as her ninth and tenth graders enter--black,
white, Asian, wearing baseball caps and baggy sweatshirts, name-brand
backpacks slung over their shoulders. They greet her with adolescent energy -
"Hey Mrs. Richards" - and she jokes back - "Got your homework done Jeremy?
I'm calling on you first today." The room gets noisier as students fill their seats.
Cassandra calls out from across the room: "Mrs. Richards, we need to have a
discussion about how you walk around this school and people are like 'Oh, I hate
you’ and that's their way of saying ’Hello.”’ Julia doesn't hear her because she‘s
talking to another student. Several students sit and read magazines or novels
while they wait for class to start; a pair of boys enters the room arguing about
which fast food burgers are the "nastiest;" another looks to see if Julia is watching
and when he sees that her back is turned, he throws his pencil toward the ceiling
to see if it will stick in the porous tile. The morning announcements come over
the intercom, but no one seems to notice. The equipment is old and the voices
are blurry and metallic, making them unpleasant to listen to, even if it were
possible to make out what they are saying.

As soon as the announcements are over, Julia calls for attention and within
seconds the room is quiet. "Get out your Learning Logs4 and start writing," she
says. There is the sound of backpack zippers opening and more chatter, then
quiet again as Julia reads the Learning Log question from the chalkboard where
it is written in large letters: "Why do you think the US. has a War on Drugs?"
Her students spend the next four or five minutes in silence, except for the sound

of pens scratching paper and pencils being sharpened. Everyone is writing

 

4Julia required her students to keep a spiral notebook in which they were to
write their reactions to an open-ended question which the class later discussed as
a group. She did this on almost a daily basis first semester and much less often
during second semester.

62

 

something, although one student looks bored and appears to have written no
more than a few sentences. Julia is taking attendance and organizing
transparencies in preparation for her lecture.

Julia and her students appear to get along pretty well. She does many of the
things that help to build rapport: she says please and thank you when making
requests; she is quick to compliment a student for demonstrating knowledge or
ability. Once she led the class in singing "Happy Birthday" to someone who
otherwise was a relatively uninvolved student. Frequently during transitions in
her lessons - as students are passing their homework to the front of the room or

getting ready to take notes - Julia and her students engage in pleasant bantering:

Student: (to Julia) Are you coming to our concert?

Julia: Are you singing?

Student: Yes and Pamela is playing [violin].

Pamela: It's going to be non-stop music, first the symphonic band,

then the ensemble starts as soon as the band plays their
last song. The theme is Music of the Twentieth Century.

Julia: I have too many things to go to - track, the fashion show -
and I have to write your test!
Student: That's OK, you don't have to.
Julia: I guess it would be easiest if I made a one-question test.
Student: Yeah - like ”What is your name?’ (laughter) (2nd;
5/ 20/ 99)

Julia’s typical teaching style vacillates between lecture and relatively open
class discussions around divergent questions Julia poses. During the lectures, she
stands at the front of the room, sometimes at her overhead projector, and asks
students to take notes. ”Taking notes” means writing down basic information,
either copied from Julia’s transparency or filling in blanks on a worksheet which
follows the content of Julia’s lecture. She speaks distinctly and with little

inflection; she monologues for two or three minutes before directing a question

63

 

to either a particular student or the class in general. The questions are often
close-ended, but occasionally, Julia poses a question which requires students to
express opinions. Her students rarely initiate their own questions or assert their
own ideas unless prompted.

The nature of the discourse is very different during class discussions, which
take place whenever Julia has her students complete a ”Learning Log”
assigrunent or they may erupt spontaneously when a student interjects a
comment or question that stimulates wider participation. Sometimes these class
discussions last only a few minutes; other times, they last the entire hour. In
these instances, Julia’s voice becomes less dominant, the discourse livelier. She
shifts slightly from her lecturer stance presenting information in a uni-directional
fashion, as students actually respond directly to one another. Still, I never
observed Julia take the role of ”guide on the side”; student-to-student
interaction never lasted more than a few minutes before Julia interjected
comments intended to emphasize points she wanted students to remember.

Julia uses sarcasm sometimes when a student repeatedly loses his
homework or asks "Are we going to need to know this?”, but overall the tone of
the classroom is positive and supportive. She describes her classroom as "a nice
place to be because you can talk about anything you want to and get respected
almost unconditionally." In fact, she suspects that one reason one of her students
is not doing any assigned work is because he discovered that he can repeat the
course with Julia next year.

At the beginning of the year, Julia described her classroom management
style as "laid back but in control," but later, she decided to make some changes in
future years:

Because I’m laid back, sometimes they don’t understand the boundaries
there. So next year I just want to make those boundaries more clear. When
I say work silently, that means work silently. (ROA II, 5/ 20/ 99)

I noticed for myself what Julia was referring to. Occasionally, during her

64

lectures, she would lose the students’ attention and there would be an
undercurrent of conversation going on. But this was actually a relatively
infrequent occurrence, and when Julia raised her voice and told students to
”quiet down” they did so, at least for a little while. During the time I observed, I
only witnessed one instance of more serious misbehavior. Julia caught a student
writing on his desk after she had told him not to; she said to him in an even
voice, although loud enough for everyone to hear: "Andy, you are now cleaning
all of the desks, come in at lunch." Andy made a half-hearted protest, but Julia's
attention had turned back to the rest of the class and their assessment of
Woodrow Wilson as a president.

The way Julia handled this incident was unusual for a first year teacher, in
that she was able to attend to what her students were doing while she was
implementing a lesson. Indeed, I made note of several more occasions in which
Julia, during the course of a lesson, noticed and responded without disrupting
the flow of the lesson, when students were not paying attention, doing other
work, putting their heads down, or feeling upset.

Although the rapport between Julia and her students is strong and positive
in both second and third periods, there are differences among the students.
Second hour is an "Honors" US. history class and almost entirely composed of
white, female students. Third hour is a "regular" history class, with slightly more
ethnic and gender diversity (see Table 3). The honors students rarely initiated a
question or comment; they seemed intent on taking notes and following
directions. In contrast, the ”regular” history class included about a dozen
students who routinely interject comments and questions in Julia’s lectures and
Julia appeared to enjoy and encourage that mode of interaction. In fact, she told
me that third hour is her favorite class because ”they’re interested and yet don’t

misbehave.

65

 

 

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; 1 [American ' Asian 1 Asian i a 1 :Students
1 _- 1 .1___.___L_.-_ “CM”- :....____a'_-.-___a ____-_a
1 t E ; : 1 t
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1 ' l | ‘ 4 '
3rd 1 14 s, 13 g 6 I 1 1 o 3 4 17 L 27

 

 

 

Table 3: Julia’s Students

Julia notices differences among her students. Some of them, particularly in
her honors class, are ”into being a good student”

They are going to learn, they will be just fine. It has nothing to do with me
as a teacher, as long as I do the minimal amount. If they had done the
section questions, chapter reviews, worksheets, quizzes and tests, they
would have learned because they have the ability to memorize and the "A
student" ability to listen. (Post-Ob II, 6/ 2/ 99)

Julia doesn’t think that her actions as a teacher have much to do with her honors
students’ success and she has found that their focus on memorizing and listening
sometimes actually inhibits their ability to think creatively. For example, she
noticed that some honors students tried to answer an essay-type test question by
stringing together all the facts they knew, at the expense of writing a coherent
argument. ”If something is in their notes,” she said, ”they think they have to
make it fit the essay, even if it doesn't."

Julia tends to speak more positively about students who are not doing as
well. Mark, for example, is a flamboyant African-American twelfth grader who
is required to take her ninth-grade US. history class in order to graduate. Not
surprisingly, Mark’s interests and personality tend to dominate class discussions;
. even though Julia tries to persuade him to allow others to speak, it is Mark’s
comments which garner the most reaction. Julia says that she gets irritated at
Mark at times. He walks into the room with an air of authority, he sits at a

different desk every day, usually choosing one near an empty chair so he can

66

elevate his feet. But Julia has decided to say nothing to him about these antics.
She perceives that Mark is ”invested in protecting his freedom to do things” and
if she fought him over his freedom, she, not he ”would lose.” She says she
would rather invest her energy in drawing out Mark’s intelligence and interest in
history.

Julia also has a few special education students. She says that she makes few
modifications in her lessons to accommodate them, because most are earning
passing grades. She has noticed, however, that a few of them seem to prefer
taking their tests in the learning center, where the special education teacher reads
the test questions out loud. Julia has concluded from this that some students
”communicate better orally than in writing.” She also observed that one
student, who had been absent for awhile, seemed to concentrate better and get
his work done when she gave him end-of-chapter questions to answer on his
own in the library. She then gave him the textbook publisher’s test for that
chapter and he did very well, in contrast to his usual performance in class.
"When we talk about the abstract ideas, he gets frustrated and can't stand taking
notes." The lesson she took from this was that "that's what he needs. . . he is
learning, he will remember this stuff.” It bothered her a little bit that he wasn’t
doing ”what the rest of us are doing because that’ 5 important, but he’s learning
the other stuff." So Julia is willing to expose her students to different content if
they seem more successful at it.

Overall, Julia seems to pay attention to characteristics of her students that go
beyond their academic and study skills. Toward the end of the year, she told me
that it felt ”weir ” when she realized the kinds of things she had inadvertently
learned about some students over the year. For example, she developed the
impression that Sandra was ”kind-hearted, a Christian who is concerned about

loving and helping others. . . she watches IouchedbiLanAngel (a television

drama with a Christian orientation)." She told me about another student who

67

has close to expert knowledge about car mechanics, according to Julia’s husband
(who is also quite knowledgeable in this area). ”He knows my husband is a
machinist and he’s into that so he talks to me. I’ll say something about
carburetors and he thinks I know what I’m talking about. So he’s connecting to
me.”

Julia also demonstrated several times that she takes into account her white
male students as she teaches lessons that emphasize historical and present-day
social inequality and injustice. As much as she wants to "counter the white male

perspective" in her teaching, she is aware that:

There are white men in my class who are going through teenage stuff, who
don’t want to feel guilty or defensive or resentful. I wouldn't want to close
them off. So I say "We don't usually hear this part of history" but I don't say
"It's because white men wrote [history]." (Post-Ob II, 6 / 2/ 99)

Inliaandherfiurriculum

The US. History curriculum at Fairmont covers events from Reconstruction
to the present, in chronological order, over two semesters. In this first year of
teaching the course, Julia followed this order of events, which coincided with the
succession of textbook chapters. However, one of the central notions that runs
through Julia’s comments about her preferred curriculum is the idea that
students should primarily be learning about the world they live in through direct
experience. History, like any subject taught in the sterile environment of the
high school, is only one of many disciplines that can help students to examine
social and political issues. In future years, Julia has a plan for modifying the
curriculum according to her ideas about what high school students should be
learning:

What I’d like to do in future years is the whole first semester we talk about
whose responsibility is it to change society - the government’ 5 or ours - and
that history is made u of ople who took it upon themselves to change
society. . . . So spend the w ole first semester talking about that, then after
Christmas - where we talk about giving but then afterwards the giving stops
- then . . . have a project where they figure out how to change society in our
own little corner. (Post-Ob Interview, 12/ 22/ 98)

68

I observed Julia teach two units, one in the fall and one in the spring. The fall
unit was one she felt she knew very little about - the Progressive Era. It lasted
five days and fell between a previous unit ”Industrialization, Urbanization, and
Immigration” and a subsequent unit on World War I. In the spring, she taught
one of her most familiar topics, the Civil Rights Movement, just after the Cold
War and prior to a unit on the Vietnam War. That unit lasted eight days.
Although these two units were similar in length, this had more to do with Julia’s
interest in following the department’s folk wisdom that, in order to ”get through
the textbook,” teachers should teach one unit a week. As an observer, I saw
differences. Julia was stretching what she knew about the Progressive Era to
make a one-week unit, whereas in the case of the Civil Rights Movement unit,
she seemed to be forcing herself not to teach everything she knew in order to
keep it to a roughly one-week unit.

Julia was not inclined to plan daily lessons prior to beginning the unit, due to
lack of time and a sense that activities and representations would evolve as she
learned about her content from teaching it. She was apologetic about this. She
has the impression that she ought to have ”specific objectives” in her head
because that is what she was taught to do in her education courses. She feels
torn about this because having specific objectives before she teaches a unit flies in
the face of what she has directly experienced. As a beginning teacher, she finds
that ”it’s impossible to predict what students will say,” so she has to come up
with examples and analogies on the spot. She tried to create a final test at the
beginning of a unit once and couldn’t do it: she didn’t know what the unit was
about until she taught it.

Although Julia predicts that her planning skills will ”get better with
experience,” she also believes that being a teacher has more to do with ”who I
am” than ”what I do:”

I think that’ s the only way you can be a teacher. I can’t make a plan and say
this is what I’m going to teach and that’s it, we have to get through it

69

because I have to hit this benchmark by this day. . . . N 0, when I’m

planning, I don’t think about what questions they’re going to ask, because

even if you try, you’d have no idea where they’re coming from . . . . I don’t

plan, I think I should plan, but I feel I can’t. It’s all up there [point to her
ead] and it will come out. (ROA I, 12 / 22 / 98)

A comparison between the Civil Rights Movement (her familiar topic) and

the Progressive Era (her unfamiliar topic) shows some differences.

 

 

 

Day 1. Time Day 2. Little Days 3-4. lDay 5. Video on jDay 6. Unit test
Line of Southern Rock video I Changes in 1 Malcolm X ’

CRM Events j 1 voting pattems; i

i
j lecture on

1 Malcolm X,

’1 Black Panther 3
1 Party and Black i
j Power E '
l 2 !

 

rv mag

 

Table 4: Julia’s Intended Unit Outline for the Civil Rights Movement

 

 

I: LeamingLog 7.2: Learning Log :3: Learning Dog ?4: Learning Log 3: Unit Exam

Discussion on } (related to |(related to 1(related to 1
War on Dmgs; Iqualities of good Equalities of good iqualities of good
What is 1 resident); I resident); j resident); l
Progressivism? EReforms under jReforms under jReforms under 1
lRoosevelt; time ,Taft Wilson; Chart of i
i line assignment 1 lProgressive Goals?

1 1 1

‘ 1

 

 

Table 5: Julia’s Intended Unit Outline for the Progressive Era

Julia had much more prior knowledge about the Civil Rights Movement

than the Progressive Era and it showed. For one thing, she had some topic-

specific representations in mind for teaching civil rights: a video from the Eyes

onlheErize series, another about Malcolm X, and a chart depicting the changes

in voting registration patterns as a result of the Voting Rights legislation in 1966.

In contrast, the Progressive Era unit included more generic representations: a

70

 

m1} 1;

time line and a series of Learning Log questions.
In neither unit did Julia deviate very much from her original plan. However,
as the tables below show, in the Civil Rights Movement a rather major

unexpected event took place.

 

1: Review of 12: Little Rock Y 3: Changes in -4: Lecture on 5: White Power
Reconstruction video; Writing l voting patterns 4 Malcolm X, 1 vs. Black Power;
and time line 1 Activity and j 1 Black Panthers 1 Heated

' and Black PowerE discussion in 4th

i Discussion .j
2 * penod

 

6: Racism vs. f7: Civil Rights 18: Finish video; 1
Oppression; l video 1 exam review 1
Black Panther 1 jworksheet

party speech, E ‘
Fairmont's Black;
Student Union, ;
Name your
favorite sitcom

 

 

f
F
t
s

 

Table 6: Julia’s Actual Unit Outline for the Civil Rights Movement

 

 

Day 1: Learning Day 2: Learning Day 3: Learning 4: Learning Log 5: Unit Exam:
Log discussion Log discussion Log discussion discussion and Explain the four
and lecture and lecture; and chart on chart on goals of the
Time line progressive Progressive Progressives,
assignment goals goals how they
reached them
and what
difference it
makes

 

 

Table 7: Julia’s Actual Unit Outline for the Progressive Era

The big surprise came when Julia started teaching about the Black Power

movement. In one class period on Day Five, several white students disagreed

71

vocally with Julia’s comment that there was a difference between ”Black Power"
and ”White Power.” This reaction caught her off guard and she spent that
evening trying to come up with a lesson that would communicate the idea she
was trying to convey in a form she thought her white students would find
acceptable and believable. The incident led her to several unanticipated
representations which she used in class the following day: a primary document
consisting of a speech given by'a member of the Black Panther Party, reference
to the Black Student Union at Fairmont, and a discussion of racial and sex role
stereotypes in television sitcoms. The experience of facilitating discussion
around such delicate issues left Julia feeling exhausted and worried that she had
”spent too much time” on the events taking place in northern cities. So she
substituted the Malcolm X video for one which provided a chronological
overview of events in the south.
David Parker: Teaching Intellectual History
in a State-of-the-Art High School

Davidandhisfieliefsaboutfiistory

As a child, David was drawn to history because of its story-like quality, ”the
whole grandness of seeing history happen and people getting caught up in it . . .
Even now when I look at history, I see it as a story with characters.” In third
grade, David read Walter Lord’s ANightttLRememher for a school project and
became ”obsessed” with the story of the Titanic. He says that ”it was the single
thing that sparked my whole interest in history.” He also remembers enjoying
historical fiction, like AccossEiveAprils about the Civil War because ”it’s not just
a story, but it catches you up in a real time and place.” This interest in
connecting fictional characters with historical places and events continues to this
day. When David saw the recent film version of the Cinderella fairy tale, Ever
After, he was excited to recognize the chateau palace and authentic dress he had

studied about in France the previous summer. For his current pleasure reading,

72

 

 

he is enjoying Harry Turtledove’s fictional ”alternative histories” which portray
what the world might look like if certain major events had ended differently.

David’s elementary and middle school experiences were in predominantly
white public schools, while he spent his high school years in a private, all-male,
mostly white Catholic school. He enjoyed learning history no matter how it was
taught, as long as he was encountering new material. He remembers the
”Puritan Christmas feast" in sixth grade which involved costumes and "weeks of
preparation.” He credits his middle school history teacher for giving him his
”love for the Civil War.” He loved the ”difficult" teachers whom his peers
”hated:”

Mr. Malik was a really hard man, a difficult teacher, but he inspired me. . . . I
got a lot out of it, but most students hated him. He was a bit of a jerk I
guess. (CK I, 11 / 3 / 98)

By the time he got to twelfth grade, he realized he knew as much about US.
History as his Advanced Placement teacher. David was also an exceptional
student in college who received 4.05 in all of his history courses.

Well before David entered college, he knew he would become a history
teacher. In fact, he saved notes and assignments from elementary and
secondary school, thinking that he might need them some day. For example, his
notes from Mr. Malik’s class are as "thick as a book." In college, he "got into the
history side and the education side right away," by pursuing a history major and
seeking out a dean's assistantship which enabled him to work with two
nationally-known education professors on a K-5 social studies curriculum
project. In the history department, he served as the undergraduate history
association president and accompanied a history professor on a summer tour of
England. He enjoyed ”feeling like part of a community, being accepted into a
profession, becoming involved in the teaching life of the university.”

As one listens to David describe his educational experiences from elementary

school through college, several factors seem central to his construction of

73

 

his

6111

historical understanding. For one, his early encounters with history came via
historical fiction. Brooks and Brooks (1993) argue that when facts are
encountered in the form of stories, the human mind builds more connections
between those facts. Indeed, David is extraordinary in his ability to recall
historical facts and dates, evidence of the intricate web of knowledge he has built
over the years. Secondly, long before David got his first teaching job, he was
already thinking about history pedagogically. He identified with his teachers
and college professors, sought out extensive contacts with them and learned the
discourse of both history and education.

Because David immersed himself not only in learning the products of
historical research but also in the culture of academia, he developed a disciplinary
orientation around the work of historians. In his high school and most of his
college history courses, "[history] was really just absorption; this is history, this
is the answer." But one of his undergraduate courses and a recent master's level
education course taught him that "being like an historian, that's history." For
David, knowing history means understanding it from an historian's vantage
point. When he hasn't read what historians have written about a topic, he feels
that he lacks important knowledge. One of his favorite pastimes is to visit used
bookstores in search of historical narratives. Recently, David decided to limit
these visits because he has accumulated eleven bookcases full and "it got to be
too much." He goes to that book collection, which includes works by historians
on diverse topics in US. and world history, to sharpen his knowledge of topics
he's interested in, regardless of whether he’s preparing to teach them or not. He
seeks out information about context and chronology, as well as scholarly
interpretations:

History is unique in that you aren't going to get this anywhere else. It
provides a way of looking at the world, seeing yourself, looking at the other
subject matter, the sum of human knowledge. Without it, you're lacking in
being a human being, not able to see that it's not just you in the world.
Knowing the history - the background knowledge to world events - puts
events in a context. (Autobio, 10/ 21/ 98)

74

In his references to the discipline of history, David frequently refers to what
historians do. What happened in the past is known (or not known, as the case
may be) by virtue of the fact that historians construct interpretations. They
”take bits and pieces and try to see how they make sense,” they ”create an
order” out of otherwise meaningless details and ”tear causes apart and group
them into categories to see how they’re connected.” History has meaning
because human beings give it meaning:

People sometimes refer to [one kind of historical inquiry] as ”revisionism.”
It’s all revisionism. If we see the same set of events, we’ re going to have
radically different interpretations. To say that we stick to the facts is dumb.
Even the facts we choose to present are slanted by the way we try to make
sense of them. The order we create is history, but it’ s also us. You can never
take the bias out of it. People think that because they got it from a certain
book it must be true. Even the most primary sources are biased by the
individuals who wrote them, their choices about what to leave in and leave

out. Even with a camera, there are things you choose to ignore. (CK I
11/ 3/ 98)

In middle and high school, David was ”weaned on military history.” But in
college he realized the appeal of intellectual history. One of the most important
classes he took in college was a two-semester European civilization course from
a professor with a ”humanities perspectivez”

Dr. Clark was the greatest professor I've ever had in the way that he
combined music, art, literature, science, everything. A humanities approach
to history, it summed up everythin that I had been learning, everything
cor/nes/to ether, everything about the history of mankind. (Autobio,

10 21 98

History was still drama, but for David it became a drama in which ideas like
humanism, Darwinism, and Marxism took center stage more often than
individuals or events. When he talks about Alexander Hamilton and Thomas
Jefferson, for example, David doesn't describe them as individuals, but in terms
of ideas they represent, namely, the fundamental debate about the distribution
of power in a democracy. He also frequently comments on the

interconnectedness of events:

75

Most historians view the American Revolution as an outgrowth of the
Enlightenment. . . . There’s so much evidence to support the connection
between the American and the French revolutions: Franklin and Jefferson in
Pa7is, Lafayette [who] sent the key of the Bastille to Washington. (Post-Ob I,
12 18 98)

For David, what is interesting about the American Revolution is its connection to
the French Revolution; what makes these revolutions interesting is their
connection to Enlightenment ideas about human nature, progress, and liberty.

Thus, David’s content orientation seems much more closely aligned with the
discipline of history than Julia’s. He perceives history through the eyes of
intellectual historians and reads scholarly interpretations in order to develop his
disciplinary knowledge. There is also a great deal of continuity between David’s
disciplinary perspective and his conception of history as a school subject. David
not only finds intellectual history personally fascinating, he feels it is important
for students to learn:

. My ideas about what is worthy [to learn] come out of my humanities
background. Ideas are the thing that I emphasize the most. [My students]
are going to forget who Pizarro is, I don't care. But if they remember what
humanism is, that means a lot to me. . . because those ideas are mind-
expanding, applicable and useful in life in general. I do believe in cultural
literacy: there are things that if you read something, you're going to have to
know it. But there's a lot of things which aren't so important. Ideas like
humanism, Social Darwinism, Marxism, the dialectic of changing warfare -
these big grand ideas, these larger concepts are much more important.
(Autobio, 10/ 21 / 98)

But David is clearly not interested in carrying these big ideas too far. What
moderates the temptation to try to subsume the entire World History
curriculum under a few sweeping ideas was David’s socialization into the
discipline of history. Because he saw his curriculum in part through the eyes of
the discipline, he worried that too much emphasis on themes across the year
would weaken the sense of sequence and chronology that is a mainstay of the
historians’ craft. He worried that presenting history in this way would
misrepresent the discipline to students.

I like to have a theme within a given unit, but . . . if you teach all history

76

from a thematic base . . . you give up this sense of time, the chronology,
understanding history as a series of periods. . . [A whole-year theme] has
some appeal, but my fear would be of over-simplifying things. Just like I
would beware of single causation. [That’s] a horrible mistake in history, to
look at anything through a single lens or theme. (PostOb II, 5/ 4 / 99)

David appreciates the importance of chronology and context, what gives an
event ”a sense of time.” He is tuned to the danger of ”presentism,” when
people mistakenly treat the past as if it was simply an extension of the present.
He wants his students to learn about facts and ideas particular to an historical
event. David fell in love with history in third grade and he has nurtured that
love over his lifetime. Now he wants to recreate that experience for students:
”If I could create a Titanic experience for every student, I would feel successful.”
He is also interested in teaching students ”skills to help them in their adult life . . .
skills like determining the validity of evidence, bias, the validity of witnesses,
developing generalizations, facts versus theory.” However, he has a belief about
the developmental nature of learning various aspects of history:

When you first start out learning anything new in history . . . you start out
with the basics, the details, so when you’re reading a histo book, you’re
basically gaining factual knowledge. The interpretation ofrtlliat and contrary
interpretations - it’s almost like Bloom’s taxonomy - those things come later
(ROA, 4/16/99)

David’s beliefs about teaching history do not fall neatly into Evans’ (1994)
categories. There is a bit of ”cosmic philosopher” in him when he speaks
excitedly about patterns in history. His statements about the importance of
knowing what historians do, perceiving history as interpretation resemble the
”scientific historian.” But he is also like a ”storyteller,” fascinated by the people
and events, the basic facts of history, which, when woven together produce ”the
whole grandness of seeing history happen.” There are strong indications that he
is partial to the ”cultural literacy” view that students need a common factual
knowledge base before they can do more higher-level thinking, although he
scorns trivia as facts disconnected from a larger narrative. He seems largely

oriented toward the ”historical canon,” with its focus on Western nations (Seixas,

77

1993). He also has an affinity for intellectual history which explores the influence
of thought, values and subjective meanings on historic individuals and events
(N ovick, 1988).

Certainly David’s beliefs about history have been shaped by these broader
debates over the nature of history as a school subject. But his beliefs also bear
the imprint of much more direct experience, the influences of family and school
on his desire to find a community with scholars. It is not just that he knew how
to do well in school; David wanted to participate in the culture of academia, a
culture which values intellectualism, Western thought, and cultural literacy.
David’s orientation toward history was forged in his childhood when he
encountered stories from the past that were as compelling as fiction. It was
nurtured in high school by teachers who assigned Grapemfflrath and The
Jungle and humorously appointed students to represent opposing interest

groups from the New Deal era.
D .1 11' S] 15 .

David Parker, 24 years old, teaches World History, Economics and French at
Sycamore High School located in a well-to-do suburban community on the
outskirts of a mid-sized Midwestern city. He is in his third year of teaching,
although this is his fourth year at Sycamore, since he completed his one-year
practice teaching internship there. David works in a newly-built, $40 million high
school with carpeted hallways and classrooms, vaulted ceilings and skylights.
Every classroom has its own television, VCR, computer and telephone. The
school is equipped with its own educational access channel which produces and
broadcasts daily morning announcements to students in a TV news format. The
teacher’s lounge has a microwave and coffeemaker, a large refrigerator and soft,
comfortable furniture; for lunch, a special cart of food is wheeled in from the
cafeteria so teachers can buy and eat their lunch in the comfort of the lounge.

Each teacher also has a personal desk in the departmental office, where there is

78

 

easy

repu
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easy access to a copying machine and a computer with a scanner.

The building is an aesthetically-pleasing place to be, but it is Sycamore’s
reputation as a place of rich academic opportunity that draws parents from
outside the community to request that their children be enrolled there, under the
state’s choice program. The Sycamore school district is one of the most desirable
in the area, with 70 to 80 percent of eleventh graders scoring at the ”proficient”
level in math, reading and science in state assessments. In 1996, the district
admitted seventy-nine students from other school communities. Sycamore
parents tend to be well-to-do; only 6.6% of students in the entire district receive
free or reduced school lunches and the distiict spends $8,151 per pupil each year,
compared to the national average of $6,146. Ninety percent of Sycamore
graduates attend two-or four-year colleges; only 1.5 percent do not finish high
school.5 The high school offers an unusual array of electives, clubs and
activities, such as courses in Latin and Statistics, and a camping/ canoeing club
called Explorers. Out of the 1400 students who attend Sycamore High, 89
percent are white, 5 percent are Asian and the remainder are African-American,
Latino and Native American.

In David’s classroom, the students’ desks are arranged in a semi-circle facing
the dry eraseboards (there is no chalk dust at Sycamore High). The floor is
carpeted, windows along one wall let in natural light, a television set hangs from
the ceiling and serves as a digital clock except when the Sycamore Channel News
comes on at 9:00 every morning. David has covered nearly every square inch of
the walls with National Geographic posters, reprints of famous paintings,
student artwork, EarSide cartoons and jokes he downloaded from the web.
Some items around the room are labeled in French. A black-and-white photo of
a nuclear bomb explosion hangs over his desk, which is in the far corner of the

room; he rarely sits at it except to work at his computer. As evidenced by the

 

5Data are from the 1996-97 school year.

79

long row of trophies sitting on the window sills in his classroom, David coaches
the Sycamore Quiz Bowl team. He also sponsors French Club, Cinema Club,
and the Freshman class. There are a couple of houseplants and a small table-top
fountain at one end of his desk. Occasionally when he is alone in the room, often
late at night grading papers, he turns off the bright overhead lights and turns on
a small lamp which emits a soft, warm glow.

The teacher next door once commented that David’s room looks like he lives
there. Indeed, if he is not somewhere in the school building or involved in some
extracurricular activity on evenings and weekends, David is working at the
convenience store next door to the school to supplement his income. He
occasionally comments about how busy he is or how little sleep he gets, but not
in the form of complaint. Instead, one gets the impression that David is
energized by his teaching and extracurricular involvements. On one occasion,
for example, I heard him tell the women’s soccer coach that he would stop by the
field to watch the game as soon as he could take a break from supporting the
home baseball team.

David is equally enthusiastic about his role as a member of the social studies
department. His colleagues view him to some extent as a resource: one stopped
by to ask David for suggestions of historical fiction set during the American
Revolution (David offered several off the top of his head). Another colleague
and he exchange teaching ideas (and jokes) from the Internet. David is also
currently working with this colleague to push for more Asian, African and Latin
American content in the World History curriculum; they share the criticism that
it is too Euro-centric.

In the faculty dining room, David usually eats with the special education
teachers and frequently initiates conversations about students they have in
common: ”Did you get Jake’s paper?” ” I'm giving the next test the day before
Thanksgiving.” ” Do you know Aaron likes Laura?" He also reaches out

informally to the student teachers in the building. One mentioned that some

80

parents complained about the way she graded group work. David suggested
she try an alternative approach to peer evaluation, in which students choose
their own partners with the admonition to "make a wise choice," and their grade
can be reduced one grade level for low participation.

The fit between David and his professional environment is good. He’s
actively involved in a variety of activities at the school, with a strong preference
for clubs that attract the most academically-oriented students. His classroom
decor reflects his broad range of interests in the arts, humanities, and sciences.
He nurtures his collegial relationships around the professional work of providing
support to students, designing curriculum, and sharing knowledge about
teaching strategies. David clearly enjoys teaching at Sycamore and his rationale
reveals his sense of himself as a member of a profession: ”If my career keeps
going the way it has for the last three years, I would be the happiest teacher.
There is an atmosphere of team work and quality education, but we’re not
content - there’s always more to do.”

Davidandliisfitudents

On a typical day in David’s classroom, he moves about the room getting
things ready as students enter one or two at a time. Most of them wear T-shirts
advertising popular brand names and carry backpacks. One student, Karen,
jokes ”Mr. Parker, you don’t have anything written on the board today. That
just isn’t like you!” Aaron enters the room, pulls out a bag of goldfish crackers
and starts munching. When Laura comes in wearing a brightly colored striped
shirt over plaid pants, Aaron calls out ”Laura, you’re looking wild today.” Laura
smiles with false sincerity and gives him the finger.

David’s students seem relaxed and comfortable. A few take off their shoes
and sit in their stocking feet. They bring water and small snacks to class, since
many of them will not be able to eat lunch until 12:30. One student, Brian,

approached me a few days after I started observing and offered an unsolicited

81

opinion: ”World History is fun everyday.” It is clear that David helps to create
this kind of environment. During the passing periods between classes, he invites
early arrivals to collect or staple papers for him; he asks individuals to give
feedback on a new seating chart he has created. While he’s handing back
homework, he makes conversation: "I didn't know you were on the swim team,
is there a meet tonight?" "How was lunch?" "Is today your birthday, Ann? How
old are you? Have you started driver’s ed yet?"

David occasionally begins class with a story or joke. One day, he mentioned
that he had thrown up his meal at a restaurant the night before. The class
laughed and hooted, one called out ”Way to go, Mr. Parker.” Eva, who acts
more maturely than most students in her class, said in an adult voice, tinged with
sarcasm, ”T hank you for sharing that with us, Mr. Parker.” Later, David told me
that he told this story because he figured that it was ”typical ninth grade humor”
and this is one way he tries to ”bond” with his students.

David also displays a natural compassion for students in distress. One day
during lunch, he saw one of his students crying on a hallway bench. Even
though his next class was starting in 5 minutes, he stopped and sat down beside
her. She was upset that she hadn't gotten all A’s on her report card, ”I’ve always
been an A student,” she exclaimed. David reassured her that she doesn’t have to
be perfect, that she’s good at many things. ”Look at me, I’ll never be an athlete,
but I’m good at other things.” He told her that when she felt ready to go to her
next class, she should come by his room and he would write her a late pass.

David’s typical teaching style is what one might call ”interactive lecture.” He
positions himself at the front of the room and he is clearly in charge of the
conversation, the flow of information in the classroom. Without question, David
is a "sage on the stage." But he rarely carries on a strict monologue. On the
contrary, he involves students in his lectures, calling on them to represent
branches of government, for example, or to demonstrate Copernicus’ view of

the movement of the spheres. He regularly invites them to respond and react,

82

 

he uses their ideas to supplement his central message. He peppers his lectures
with questions to which students answer back, often in chorus. He asks leading
questions in order to guide his students to the understandings he holds. He uses
repetition because he knows the concepts he teaches are difficult and abstract.
The discourse is lively, David leans forward as he talks, moves from one side of
the room to another, uses large gestures, creates diagrams on the board, calls on
students to respond to his questions and repeats their answers. His face is
animated, he speaks at an even pace, but with lots of expression, and he
occasionally pounds his stool to emphasize a point. His eyes twinkle, his voice is
mellow and soothing.

During the year I collected data, I observed David teach two World History
units to two different groups of ninth graders: his second and fourth period
classes. There was some ethnic diversity among these students (see Table 8), but
socioeconomics and teenage culture have an homogenizing effect. Still, David
notices differences between his students. At Sycamore High School, ninth
graders are not tracked into different sections of World History. But David has
noticed that a kind of ”de facto tracking” occurs: students who take band and
orchestra tend to be the more successful or serious students and since these
courses are offered only in the afternoons, those students fill up the morning
social studies sections. At any rate, David finds that his second period students
are generally more studious and independent, whereas he finds his fourth period
class ”more challenging to teach.” He feels frustrated at times that, whereas his
second hour students tend to take school seriously, his fourth hour students
”regard school as a place to come to be entertained for awhile.”

Indeed, I noticed the contrast myself. In second hour, a majority of students
seem oriented toward doing what they are told, raising their hands politely to
speak, never answering a question unless they’re sure they are right. A
significant number fourth period students blurted out comments to whomever

might be listening, saying the first thing that came to their minds (no matter how

83

unrefined), and seemed to feel freer to make lateral connections with the topic at
hand. They were noisier and brought it more gadgets and toys to show their
friends. They shared their thoughts with their neighbors rather than waiting for
their turn to speak to the entire class, the girls combed and braided each others’
hair, the boys looked around to see how much attention they have managed to

draw to themselves.

 

 

 

 

[—Pefiod 1 Female E Male Tflrican- I Asian Caucasian TrotaT No.
E E . American 2 1 of
1 f . E Students
vamFfl.___..._ ,_-__L___..___,c __._12_, __ ~11 i 1 w
2114 ___; - -12_.__._M 112.. 17,111,221; -1. 4____ _1__._12__ wL31.“
[ ‘ 1 1 1 *
4th [ 13 15 ' 1 1 1 1 26 1 28

 

 

 

Table 8: David’s Students

David is careful not to make only negative comments about his fourth hour
students. He recognizes strengths that come out in other ways that aren’t
graded - such as their verbal responses in class or their willingness to take risks
with open-ended assignments. He called them his ”creative hour,” because
”they aren’t afraid to make mistakes.” Once, when he deliberately refrained
from giving students much direction in regard to an assignment which required
that they make a visual representation to depict the ideology of one of the
political parties in pre-Communist Russia, David noticed that more of his second
hour students wanted him to reassure them that they were doing the
assignment correctly; his fourth hour students were more inclined to draw
whatever came to mind, whether it was accurate or not:

Fourth hour is more comfortable being wrong and making mistakes than
any of my other classes. Second hour is sharper. They’ll pick up the
connections and make the leap and they’ve got it better . . . but they have
more trouble on their own. (ROA II, 4 / 16/ 99)

But typically, when David is reflecting on his students’ diversity, it is in

84

regard to their grades in the course. I happened to talk to him one day soon
after he had calculated quarter grades. Ten of his fourth hour students received
failing or nearly failing marks, compared to only two in his second hour class.
Most of these were his inclusion students, who receive additional support from
the special education faculty. He commented, ”T his is depressing,” and
speculated out loud about what might account for these low grades. For most of
them, he figured, ”it’s because they just didn’t do the work If they did their
homework, they would at least pass.” He said that since he started teaching, he
has learned that many students who are weak academically have particular
problems with history courses because ”they don’t have the cultural literacy and
they are concrete thinkers.”

David sees history as full of ”abstract ideas,” some of which are ”right over
some students’ heads.” In an effort to accommodate ”concrete thinkers,” he
says he tries to use a variety of teaching strategies: individual reading, group
activities, writing assignments, and oral presentations. Also, in the last year or
two, he modified his grading system so that students who do poorly on his tests
(the most abstract of his assessments, according to David), can still pass the
course as long as they make an adequate attempt on homework and projects
(which involve students in making posters or other visual presentations). David
considers the projects to afford students the opportunity to exert more ”control”
over the final product than they have on tests or homework and feels frustrated
that he has so many students - particularly in his fourth hour class - who don’t
take advantage of this opportunity.

David wonders why some students don’t do homework. He confesses that
”I don’t really understand them, because I wasn’t like that [as a student].” He
wonders whether the problem is that some students don’t comprehend the
abstract ideas presented in class and then feel it is useless to attempt the
homework. Or is it the other way around: a student doesn’t have the discipline

or interest in doing homework and, as a consequence, has difficulty

85

understanding the content of the course? And then there’s the possibility that
”some students just aren’t bright; they’re never going to get A’s and B’s. I hate
to say it, but it’s true.” Another possibility is that this is a developmental
problem: ninth graders may not have been assigned much homework in middle
school and some are not mature enough yet to take seriously the consequences
of their actions.

At any rate, David is disturbed by the fact that some other teachers,
including some of the special education faculty, are ”working harder than the
student is” to get a student to pass the course. David sees his role as one of
”helping the student up to a point.” But then he has ”no qualms” about failing
students who do not do passing work. He does not think it is so terrible to make
a student repeat a course. ”Perhaps they will do better with a different teacher’ ’
or because they are one year older.

One persistent theme in David’s interactions with his students has to do with
his concern that they develop more studious and academic attitudes. He wants
them to become independent readers, writers, and thinkers. To this end, he
occasionally presents a lesson on, for example, test-taking strategies or assigns
them the task of re-reading a project assignment just before turning it in to
double-check the requirements. He also scolds them from time to time, as he did
on the day after their disappointing performance on the Reformation and
Renaissance test:

It’ s time to put away childish things. Put away the Tubby babies and turn off
the TV and do some homework. Be an adult. There can be no
independence without responsibility. Turning homework in late, or doing it
on the bus is middle school stuff. When you get to college you're going to
have more independence and more responsibility. (2nd; 11/ 9 / 98)

David is not one of those teachers who waters down the curriculum so
students pass the course with little effort. He doesn't apologize for having the
reputation as someone who gives "hard tests." He considers various possibilities

as to why a student might be failing his course, including his own responsibility

86

to make abstract ideas more concrete and provide a grading structure which
allows students to pass even if they do poorly on tests. But, for the most part, it
seems to him at this stage in his learning to teach that much of the responsibility
lies within each student. Some of his students are able to grasp abstract ideas
and others are not; some are proficient at reading for understanding and writing
effectively and others are not; some are inclined to finish homework and study
for tests and others are not.

Daviiandhisfiurricuhim

The World History curriculum, as agreed upon by the teachers in
Sycamore’s history department, encompasses 4000 years of major events in
chronological order from ancient Greece and Rome to the present (or at least
post-Cold War). Previous to this year, the World History curriculum began
much later with the Industrial Revolution and ”The Age of European
Dominance,” as the textbook labels it. However, several faculty members were
concerned that this did not provide students with sufficient historical
background. While David expressed sympathy with his colleague’s rationale
(and voted in favor of the decision), he also disliked the idea of trying to fit more
content into a two-semester course. ”The breadth is killing me,” he groaned.

I observed David teach two curriculum units, one in the fall and one in the
spring. The fall unit lasted 20 days and focused on the ”Age of Revolutions.” It
fell between a previous unit on Renaissance and Reformation and a subsequent
unit called ”Changes in Ideas” with a focus on the impact of Darwin, Marx and
Freud on Western thought. The Age of Revolutions encompassed the period of
time immediately preceding the American Revolution through the French
Revolution, the Industrial Revolution in England and the beginnings of

unionization. David considered his knowledge of these topics to be quite strong,

87

although he had never taught this unit before.6 The spring unit was actually a

series of six lessons about the Communist Revolution of 1917, contained within a
larger unit about the years between World War I and World War 11. David
considered his knowledge of this topic to be weaker. In his words, he has not
”studied the topic in depth at all” and ”I don’t consider that very good. I don’t
feel like I’ve got it or that I know a lot about it.”

David’s choices about how to divide up the 4000-year span of World History
are sometimes quite independent of what his colleagues do. For example, most
of David’s colleagues teach about the French Revolution and the Industrial
Revolution in Europe as separate units. However, there is no requirement that
these topics be taught separately and David decided to combine them, along
with the American Revolution, into one unit, held together by the concept of
”revolution” which he had studied in college. Similarly, David used his own
judgment in creating the Communist Revolution unit. His colleagues typically
teach about the 1917 Revolution as a completely separate unit. But David felt
that this made the topic seem "more important" than other events during the
interwar years, such as the independence movement in India and the end of the
Chinese dynasty. In his perspective, the Communist Revolution did not need "its
own corner, its own unit by itself." So, he decided to give it a more minor place
in his curriculum and treated it on par with the other four topics he taught as a
package during the Interwar Years: the Treaty of Versailles; the Amritsar
Massacre in India; Chinese history from 1911-1931; and the Rise of Fascism.

Despite these deviations from the chapter-by-chapter approach taken by

some colleagues, for the most part David taught events in chronological order.

 

6However, he had taught parts of this unit before. He had taught about the
American Revolution in his US. history courses in two prior years. He had also
taught about the Industrial Revolution last year in his World History course,
before the department made changes in the curriculum. But, he had never
taught about the French Revolution and had never before combined all three
into one unit.

88

One exception was his one-week ”Plague Unit” which compared the Black Death
plague in fourteenth-century Europe with the current AIDS epidemic. However,
David felt strongly that the problem with teaching thematically was
”compromising the story, making sense of sequence:”

You lose sequence, you lose chronology, you sacrifice narrative for
meaning. I think you can do it either way, either [focusin on themes or
chronology] is valid, but you give up this sense of time [w en teaching
thematicall ]. . . understanding US. history as a series of periods. You can
link these things across [time] - that’s good - you should be able to see that
the Alien and Sedition Acts in 1796 have a lot to do with the Vietnam War
and other protest movements against the ovemment and about civil ri hts.
. . . But I think you should also know that e Alien and Sedifion Acts fit ere,
they have meaning here in this context, outside of being art of a story of
civil rights development in US. history. (Post-Ob II, 5/ 4 99)

For neither unit did David prepare daily lesson plans in advance or make
decisions about how he would assess student learning:

I don’t alwa 5 know quite where everything is going to go. I have my plans
and I know ow I’m going to frame a unit, what I want them to know, but
how other things come into play and how to test those? I always wait until
the end [to write the test]. I tried it once, making the test earlier, but I found
out that not everything on the text did I end up doing and important things
that came up . . . I had to deal with. If I’d alread written the test, that
wouldn’t be on there and I would want to test at. So sometimes my
objectives change. (ROA II, 5/ 20 / 99).

It seems understandable that, as a beginning teacher, David’s unit plans would
be rather sketchy; writing more detailed objectives, activities, and assessments
requires knowledge of how students of a particular age respond to specific
content - something that a teacher learns from experience. So David’s plans
consisted of broad outlines, in which he selected several major representations,
sequenced sub-topics and estimated how much time he would spend on each of
them. He did not consult district curriculum guidelines because none existed for
the course he was teaching. Neither did he refer to national history standards,
although he was familiar with both the National Council for the Social Studies
(1994) and National Center for History in the Schools documents (1996). He

considers these documents to be ”excellent” in that they emphasize ”conceptual

89

understanding,” but they are also ”terribly vague:” ”They assume that students
are getting some content, some history from [each] time period . . . but there’s
no cookbook approach to how to do it” (ROA II, 4/ 16 / 99).

Without a ”cookbook” or extensive prior experience teaching these topics to
ninth-graders, David draws upon the knowledge and beliefs he does have to
structure a sequence of learning opportunities for his students. Since I explore

these dynamics in later chapters, here I simply present the outlines of each unit.

90

 

1. What is j 2. Read ‘ 3. Locke and [4. Structure of 1 5. Createa

1

 

 

"revolution?" F Candide and I Rousseau ; government 3 government
1 identify the five ‘ : (students work .(groups present
1 Enlightenment { l in their groups) [ to the class)
' ideas . 1 '
1- - . _1WM_____,_1 -— ......“ ,_ .
6. American I 7. French ; 8. French j 9. French 1 10.1ndustnal
Revolution 1Revolution Play ' Revolution Revolution 1 Revolution:
‘ 5 Choose your
1 ' own adventure
1 : story

 

 

 

11. Effects of'EiZLHommeeajiszHewfireen. 1 I4._Howr.Green_i 15. Review,
Industrial 1 WasMyvaiiey ; was My Valley ; WasMyjlalley ! Jeopardy Game

Revolution ' ‘

._ __ _.E_A . “4+4 .-. _.__ _ -A M___ 4—__.1L__ .-..____ A11; , H.7._r_ __ ...n 2*—

#l—éflExam '.

 

 

 

Table 9: David’s Intended Unit Outline for the Age of Revolutions

 

Day 1: Student 1Day 2: Russian Days 3—4: [Days 5-6: 1A week later:
presentations on , social pyramid [Compare ' People's CenturyFExam over the
chapter terms ; [Russian social ; video about [Interwar Years
. {pyramid to 1 Lenin and Stalin 1

1Sycamore High 1 1

[School; ‘

EIntroduce

[political

 

 

 

Table 10: David’s Intended Unit Outline for the Communist Revolution

91

A comparison between Tables 9 and 10 shows that David had much more

content he wanted to teach about the Age of Revolutions (his familiar topic) than

about the Communist Revolution (his unfamiliar topic). This is not only an

indication of his familiarity with the former but also his judgment that the

American, French, and Industrial Revolutions were more significant events than

the one in Russia. He also had more diverse ways to represent the content of the

Age of Revolutions: Candide; the structure of government; a play about the

French Revolution, a choose-your-own adventure story about the Industrial
Revolution and the classic film HomGreenj/y as Mylalley. In contrast, his

representations for the Communist Revolution were the textbook, a social

pyramid, the political spectrum, and a documentary video.

 

 

1. What isaEZ. Candide E3. Candide 14. Candide E5. Candide
revolution? 1 1 1 ‘
6. Locke, E7. Locke, 1.8 Structure E9. US. [10. Causes
Rousseau, 1 Rousseau, E of Constitution Eof the
Montesquieu MontesquieuE government E [American
Hobbes EsHobbe E ‘ ‘ Revolution
11. What 13a 12. Effects of 13.14 French [15. Causes
revolution?; [ the Am. EGuillotine 1 Revolution [of Fr.
Causes of the! Revolution [video [Time line and' Revolution
Am. Rev. 1 ' [Play E

1 1 |
[16. Industrial; 17. Benefits T18. Review, 1 19. Exam E20. Exam
Revolution and 1 Jeopardy 1 Part One: [Part Two
story ENegatives to 1 Historian's E

[the Industrial ‘ Exercise

1

[

. éRevolution

 

 

 

 

 

Table 11: David’s Actual Unit Outline for the Age of Revolutions

92

 

1: Student 12: Russian ,3: Compare E4: Introduce {Day E People's
Presentations onE social pyramid; . Russian social E political 1 Century video;
chapter terms Eread about Bread pyramid to ' spectrum iHomework
ERiots in :Sycamore High 1 Eassignment: "10
. textbook ' School ' sentences on
3 1 E where your
Epolitical beliefs
1 1 t 1 fall along the
‘ ‘ E 1political
‘ - , -8 7, - , _ .. L-_.1s_oectru_m"_

 

Day 6: Finish A week later:
People's Century Exam over the ' ,

video; Read 1 Interwar Years

about the 3

"history 1 E

mystery" of 1 ‘ 1

Anastasia : E E E

 

 

 

Table 12: David’s Actual Unit Outline for the Communist Revolution

A comparison between Tables 11 and 12 reveals that, although David’s
actual Communist Revolution unit closely followed this original plan, his Age of
Revolutions unit deviated considerably. He ended up spending not one, but
four, days with Candide in order to provide students with the background
information they needed to make sense of it as a satirical piece of literature. The
same thing happened with the American Revolution, when he realized that his
students did not have the prior knowledge he had assumed. He also added
major new content after he started teaching the unit. Montesquieu and Hobbes
joined Locke and Rousseau in a discussion about how views of human nature
influence the structure of governments. Quite by accident, he happened to see a
documentary film about the guillotine which seemed to support his theme so
well he decided to show that and postponed the viewing of HowGreenl/llas My
Valley until the week following the exam. He also extended the unit exam by
one day to include an "Historian's Exercise" dealing directly with a theory of

revolution he had wanted to serve as a conceptual frame for the entire unit.

93

Summary

If the collection of studies on the psychological concerns of beginning
teachers can claim to represent the typical novice, then Julia and David are clearly
not typical. They are not ”angry” or ”despondent,” they are not preoccupied
with classroom discipline, they are not so focused on themselves that they fail to
attend to the learning needs of their students. On the contrary, these two
teachers behave like promising young professionals. They have established
classroom routines, they interact appropriately and positively with their
students, they are able to attend to simultaneous classroom events, they are
finding their place in the institutional culture of the school and they inquire into
their own practice. And yet, they still have things to learn. They find it difficult
to predict how their lessons will go, what students will find difficult or confusing,
and what kinds of assessments they will give. They are inclined to explain poor
academic performance in terms of poor study habits or disposition, rather than
considering cognitive factors such as information-processing difficulties.

We can also see in these portraits evidence of the work environment that
seems so prevalent in schools. Julia and David are expected to carry the full
workload of experienced teachers, including extracurricular responsibilities. In
Julia’s case, she must be very assertive in order to protect the time she feels it will
take her to develop her teaching skills. When she does so, she also worries
about how this will be perceived by her colleagues. Both teachers experience the
tension between wanting to conform to departmental expectations and needing
to live by their own convictions. Both teach in schools which offer them a great
deal of autonomy, although this comes with the price of further isolating them
from their colleagues. This is particularly apparent with Julia who disagrees with
most of her colleagues and feels dismayed that they don’t regard her as a
resource. It may be that David’s additional years of experience help him feel
more secure in his peer relationships and professional conversations.

In the next two chapters, I select several episodes from Julia’s and David’s

94

teaching in order to examine the knowledge and beliefs they draw upon in
transforming content for their students. However, this chapter has already
provided a glimpse into features of these novices’ knowledge and beliefs about
subject matter and students. Julia’s disciplinary perspective is less about history
than about civil rights issues and social analysis. History the way she perceives it
explains why progress toward social and racial equality has been so slow and
inspires with images of nonviolent, collective efforts toward social change. Julia’s
experiences learning history do not seem to have shifted her view that history is
primarily an accumulation of facts; although she knows that historians interpret
evidence, she is not particularly drawn to the process of historical inquiry. Beliefs
are apparent in her curricular decisions and in the posters in her room which
convey a strong social message. These beliefs seem powerful because they are
so embedded in her life experience.

Similarly, David’s beliefs about history begin to take shape early in life and
are embedded in particular configurations of experience, opportunity, and

personality.7 However, unlike Julia, David found it easy to memorize factual

content and his love for reading historical fiction gave him a sense of historical
narrative at an early age. His disciplinary perspective maps onto historians’
perspectives; he enjoys intellectual history and seeks scholarly interpretations to
further his historical knowledge. He wants students to develop this same love
for the abstract ideas that shape historical events and he is concerned that
students comprehend historical events chronologically and contextually. His
preference for intellectual history comes out in his selection of curricular content.
The Communist Revolution was about the clashing of political ideologies on first
a national, then global scale. The Age of Revolutions was about stages in

revolutionary change, what he referred to as the ”revolutionary dialectic” or

 

7Instead of the term ”beliefs,” other researchers have used the terms
”historical positionalities” (VanSledright, 1998) or ”temporal bearings” (Seixas,
1996).

95

”pendulum.” His humanities interests show in his eclectic room decor.

David and Julia also bring different orientations toward their students.
When David considers the differences between his students, he notices whether
they are independent thinkers, disciplined in completing homework and able to
fathom abstract ideas. Although he appreciates students who are ”willing to
make mistakes,” he grades them based on whether they ”got it right.” Julia is
more inclined to feel critical toward learners who are ”into being good students.”
She likes the challenge of helping students like Mark who might be dismissed by
other teachers because of his defiant behavior. She is not strongly committed to
making sure that all students are exposed to the same curriculum and she takes
an interest in learning about their non-academic pursuits.

It may be that these characteristics of their knowledge and beliefs interact
with their school settings. David teaches in a school with lots of intellectual
stimulation and a clear expectation that students will do well on standardized
tests and attend college. The physical environment of Julia’s school is less
conducive to serious learning. The relatively lower socio-economic status and
test scores of Fairmont compared to Sycamore students allude to the possibility
that Fairmont students lack the ”cultural capital” needed to do well
independently on academic tasks (Lareau, 1988).

Finally, both teachers have difficulty establishing specific lesson objectives,
writing detailed lesson plans and creating assessments in advance because they
do not yet know how their students will respond to the topics they teach - a
crucial piece of curricular knowledge. As they teach, they are still continually
surprised by the content that receives the most attention, by what students have
more or less difficulty with, by the unplanned representations that emerge.
Curriculum standards do not guide their thinking; they rely on their colleagues,
textbooks and (primarily) on their own knowledge to help them create unit
plans. Furthermore, their knowledge is uneven for the different topics they

must teach: with more familiar units, they tend to teach more content and use

96

topic-specific representations and are more likely to deviate from their plans.

97

Chapter 4
REPRESENTING CONTENT TO STUDENTS:
JULIA’S AND DAVID’S KNOWLEDGE-IN-USE
Introduction

This study aims to contribute to our understandings of novice teachers’
knowledge relevant to the process of transformation, the task of modifying
disciplinary knowledge for the purposes of teaching. In this chapter, I take apart
the theoretical construct of transformation in order to analyze the knowledge
and beliefs David and Julia used in their teaching. In the following chapter, I put
the pieces back together again in an effort to explain the nature and contribution
of historical knowledge in beginning teaching practice.

In this chapter, I use a conceptual model to examine three significant
categories of Julia’s and David’s knowledge and beliefs: knowledge and beliefs

about subject matter, learners and instructional representations. The model is

based on constructs developed in the content knowledge literature, in which
instructional representations are viewed as ”the product of two processes - the

comprehension of content and the understanding of the needs, motivations and
abilities of learners” (Wineburg & Wilson, 1991, p. 333).1 Dewey’s (1902) theory

of the continuity of experience suggests a way of conceptualizing the relationship
between these categories of knowledge, as illustrated in Figure 1. Students’ life
experiences are the starting point of instruction; formulated, organized,

disciplinary knowledge is the end point; and teachers’ acts of transformation (in

 

1 Researchers have identified other possible categories of knowledge
experienced teachers seem to draw upon as they transform content. Wilson,
Shulman and Richert (1987), for example, list the following categories of
professional knowledge for teaching: knowledge of subject matter; pedagogical
content knowledge; knowledge of other content; knowledge of curriculum;
knowledge of learners; knowledge of educational aims; general pedagogical
knowled e. I limit my analysis to subject matter, students and representations
because t ese three emerged as the most significant types of knowledge in
David’s and Julia’s practice.

98

the form of instructional representations) are the means.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Knowledge and Knowledge and
Beliefs about Beliefs about
Learners Subject Matter
(The Starting Point) \ j (The End. Point)

Knowledge and Beliefs

about Instructional

Representations

(The Means)

 

 

 

Figure 1: Conceptual Model of Knowledge for Transformation

In my decision to base this study on the notion of transformation, I take a
normative stance toward knowledge and teaching. Researchers - like the history
teachers they study - are influenced by their conceptions of competent history
teaching. Embedded in our work is a ”world view or value system related to the
purpose of knowledge, a conception of a preferred social order, and a view of
the good person” (Stanley, 1991, p. 253). I deliberately linked my study to what I
have termed ”the content knowledge literature” because I share some of the
perspectives often expressed in that literature. These perspectives include
preferences for knowledge, beliefs and practices of teaching which treat students
as active creators of meaning and aim to connect students to disciplinary
knowledge and ways of thinking. I believe that we do a disservice to young
learners when we treat their minds as blank slates or assume that they are only
capable of understanding ”ready-made” knowledge, the products of disciplinary
study but not the processes, questions or debates that occupy the minds of
expert thinkers. My views and convictions led me to this study in the first place;
they also shape the conclusions I draw in this chapter and the next.

In order to make claims about the nature of historical knowledge for

99

 

 

teaching, it is necessary to delve more deeply into these normative conceptions
of subject matter and students. Dewey (1916) describes the subject matter
knowledge needed by teachers as ”formulated, crystallized and systematizedz”

Scientific subject matter is organized with specific reference to the successful
conduct of the enterprise of discovery, to knowing as a s ecialized
undertaking . . . . The ideal of scientific organization is, erefore, that every
conception and statement shall be of such a kind as to follow from others
and to lead to others. Conceptions and ropositions mutually imply and
support one another. . . . The [Chemist’s description of H20 is superior from
the standpoint of place and use in inquiry. It states the nature of water in a
way which connects it with knowledge of other things, indicating to one
who understands it how the knowledge is arrived at and its bearings upon
other portions of knowledge of the structure of things. (pp. 182, 190)

Dewey uses the term ”scientific subject matter” to refer specifically to knowledge
created in the context of disciplined inquiry. To understand subject matter is to
grasp both content and inquiry, interconnected ”conceptions and
propositions”as well as notions of ”how the knowledge is arrived at.” Dewey’s
idea is that teachers need to hold such subject matter understandings because
”scientific subject matter” represents the end point of instruction. It is what
teachers should be helping their students to develop; it defines the direction of
their growth. In history courses, then:

Students can learn both the content - the Boston Tea Party and the
Intolerable Acts, Sam Adams and the Committees of Correspondence,
Lexington and Concord - and historical analysis - examining different
interpretations of the same set of characters and events, weighing the
evidence presented by historians and source materials, discussing the
strengths and weaknesses of various accounts. (Wilson, 1991, p. 100).

In this chapter then, I investigate David and Julia’s disciplinary
understandings - including their knowledge of facts, core concepts, interpretive
frameworks and modes of inquiry - as well as their conceptions of school
subjects. Because they are history teachers, I examine their knowledge and
beliefs related to the discipline of history and the historical topics they were
teaching: the historical narratives they constructed by interrelating particular

facts and themes; their awareness of multiple historical interpretations; and

100

personal beliefs about what students should learn about history. Since Julia and
David also drew upon other fields and disciplines (political science, sociology, and
physics for instance), I include their knowledge and beliefs about other academic
subjects within this category as well.

Teachers’ content understandings may actually ”get in the way,” according
to Dewey (1916), unless they know their content in terms of its ”interplay in the
pupils’ own experience:”

There are certain features of scholarship or mastered subject matter - taken
by itself - which get in the way of effective teaching unless the instructor’s
habitual attitude is one of concern with its interplay in the pupils’ own
experience. In the first place, his knowledge extends indefinitely beyond the
range of the pupil’s acquaintance. It involves principles which are beyond
the immature pu il’s understanding and interest. In and of itself, it may no
more represent e living world of the pupil’s experience than the
astronomer’s knowledge of Mars represents a baby’s acquaintance with the
room in which he stays. In the second place, the method of organization of
the material of achieved scholarship differs from that of the beginner. It is
not true that the experience of the young is unorganized - that it consists of
isolated scraps. But it is organized in connection with direct practical centers
of interest.” (Dewey, 1916, p. 183)

Even when teachers know relatively little about a particular topic in their
curricula, it is possible for them - by virtue of their adult experiences - to bring
knowledge that is ”beyond the immature pupil’s understanding and interest.”
Unless teachers realize this, they may be ineffective in introducing students to
the ”material of achieved scholarship.” And yet, herein lies another
complication. Students’ understandings of physical and social phenomena
represent rational efforts to make sense of the matters which directly concern
them. Thus, teachers may also be ineffective if they assume that their students
are empty vessels and have no prior conceptions of subject matter. The
implication of all of this is that for content transformation to be educative,
teachers must routinely enter into the ”living world ” of their students, gather
evidence about how young learners organize their experiences, decide where
there is ”interplay” between students’ experiences and content and only then

create representations - new experiences upon which students may reflect and

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develop subject matter understandings.

Teachers’ knowledge and beliefs about learners encompass ideas and
assumptions about what is difficult, confusing or easily misconstrued by students
when they encounter particular topics or concepts. Additionally, teachers may
hold knowledge about points of continuity between students’ lived experience
and the subject matter. They may hold beliefs about the extent to which
students’ ideas are a resource for teaching. There may be characteristics of
learners that teachers consider for purposes that are secondary to transforming
content. However, these are not the focus of my analysis. For example,
although David offered a rationale for recounting a story in which he lost his
dinner at a restaurant (his belief in the importance of ”bonding” with students), I
focus my attention on his knowledge and beliefs about learners in relation to the
content he teaches.

Because instructional representations embody what teachers know about
their content as well as beliefs about students’ preconceptions, Julia’s and David’s
representations serve as windows for viewing the other two categories.
Representations represent teachers’ conceptions of subject matter modified by
their sense of what students need to learn and how they will learn it.
Representations include what are traditionally known as ”strategies” (lecture,
recitation, small group work, debates and student presentations) as well as the
topic-specific analogies, illustrations, examples and explanations provided by the
teacher. An example of the former is Julia’s Learning Log activity (mentioned in
Chapter 3); an example of the latter is the Learning Log question she posed -
”Why do you think the US. has a War on Drugs?” - to create an analogy with
Prohibition in the 19205. Teachers have more or less knowledge of useful and
appropriate strategies, analogies, illustrations and explanations. They also have
beliefs or preferences for particular ways of representing content. In their acts

of transformation - modifying disciplinary knowledge to enable student

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understanding - teachers may or may not treat students’ life experience as the
starting point and formulated subject matter as the end point of instruction.

Overlaying this conceptual model of knowledge for transformation onto the
actual practice of two beginning history teachers helps us see - not only what
novices may know and believe about content and students - but also what
knowledge and beliefs assist or hinder novices teachers’ attempts to transform
content with learners’ ”needs and doings” in mind. In the sections which follow,
I identify what Julia and David knew and believed about content and students,
how categories of knowledge and belief related to one another in their practice,
the knowledge and beliefs which assisted or hindered them in transforming

content and what they learned as they taught.

 

’ UNFAMILIAR”; FAMILIAR
UNIT I UNIT

2...... W'L—l

L—- - ....

JULIA 1‘ Time‘LiflneHo‘fthe TBJlack Power and
Progressive Era E White Power in

 

j the Civil Rights
,___-- M ___,. ----“ fl_______._ __M0ve111§9t_L
DAVID . Social Inequality 1 Causes and
and the { Effects of the
l Communist i American
Revolution j Revolution

 

 

 

Table 13: Overview of Teaching Episodes

Julia: Transforming the Progressive Era
and the Civil Rights Movement

As a first-year teacher, Julia had never taught most of the topics in her
curriculum. As a student teacher, she had taught US. Government, a course
which corresponded well to her political science major and her interest in law: ”I
love the law, I love the Constitution.” But when she received the offer to teach
ninth and tenth grade US. History at Fairmont High School, she eagerly
accepted. She liked the fact that Fairmont, although predominantly white,

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offered more racial and economic diversity than many surrounding schools.
Julia confessed, however, that in terms of her historical knowledge, she felt
”weak walking in . . . . ”I look at [the history curriculum] as somebody who
minored in history . . . . I have a broad understanding of history.”

Thus, Julia makes an interesting case because her mentors considered her to
be a promising teacher candidate with ”strong subject matter knowledge” and
”skills in developing a classroom learning community,” yet she found herself
assigned to teach relatively unfamiliar content. This is not an unusual
predicament for social studies teachers. A comparison with David, who majored
in history and had taught World History the year prior to this study, helps to
illuminate features of Julia’s historical understanding that were weak or absent.
Additionally, Julia was able to identify topics in the US. History curriculum with
which she was more and less ”familiar.” When we compare her planning and
teaching of her unfamiliar topic - the Progressive Era - with her familiar topic -
the Civil Rights Movement - we gain insight into those aspects of knowledge and
beliefs which remain stable and those which change from one unit to the next.

Julia could not remember learning about the Progressive Era. She could not
recall a single lecture or reading about the topic from her college courses. "I
don't remember ever hearing that Wilson was a progressive,” she remarked.
Julia read the textbook to fill in gaps in her knowledge about the Progressive
Era, but as she did so, she sought to transform the factual information into a
coherent narrative. She was critical of the way in which the textbook organized
information about the topic:

The book has two chapters. The first was [about] Progressives, what
happened during progressivism, the muckrakers, Seth Low, the recall law,
the primary system. Then in Chapter Ten, they talked about the presidents,
what each individual president did, where they came from, what their beliefs
were in being president. I don't like using the book. I don't want to say first
we're going to talk about the progressives and muckrakers, and then we'll
talk about the presidents. I want them to see it all together. (CK I, 12/10/99)

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Julia’s criticism reflects understandings and beliefs she holds about history.

She perceived the textbook’s separation of progressives and presidents as a
content-specific pedagogical problem that she would have to remedy.2 In her

words, ”I started thinking about it in terms of how I think about history." Julia’s
historical understanding includes a notion that historical details need to form a
coherent, meaningful narrative so that learners can ”see it all together.” Her
historical understanding also includes a broad narrative about the struggle for
democratic equality and social justice, which she constructed from an array of
facts, stories and ideas she encountered throughout her life. She selected the
factual information from the textbook chapter that seemed to fit this narrative.
She created a storyline that cast the Progressive Era as the triumph of ordinary
citizens and activist presidents against undemocratic practices in business and
government:

Before this, government wasn't for the eople. . . . This is now how
presidents are thinking - re resent all e people fair and right, whereas

efore it was represent all e rich white males fair and right. And [Teddy]
Roosevelt said we can’t do that anymore because a huge chunk of our
population is not being represented. . . . Wilson appointed the first Secretary
of Labor and now workers are being taken seriously. . . . Sam Jones, Frances
Perkins and Seth Low did things - not because they had to, not because it
was their job - but because they wanted to do things for people. They knew
it was their responsibility. (CK I, 12/ 10 / 98)

Julia remedied the textbook's separation of presidents and progressives by
constructing a coherent narrative that she believed would help her students
"understand that progressives were this whole thing - some people did some
things, other people did other things - and it was a whole belief system in
reforming." By characterizing the Progressive Era as ”a whole belief system in
reforming,” Julia was drawing connections in her own mind to other historical

periods, other examples of popular efforts to expand democratic representation

 

2 Although Julia never mentioned her familiarity with the research, some
studies support the general premise that history textbooks hamper students
from assembling facts around big ideas (McKeown & Beck, 1994).

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and economic prosperity, such as Reconstruction and the Civil Rights
Movement. She saw how neatly this theme fit with the previous unit on
Industrialization, in which she had taught students that a common attitude of the
rich had been that ”people were great beasts, [they were] stupid, poor. [It was]
Social Darwinism - ’I'm rich because I deserve to be rich because I worked hard,’
- even though Carnegie got a loan from his mother to buy into the railroad
business.”

Thus, although Julia relied heavily on her textbook for content knowledge,
she adapted the content by casting presidents and progressives as joint players in
a larger drama encompassing several periods of US. history. She constructed
this storyline by drawing on her belief that historical topics are more than I
collections of facts and her broad narrative of US. history. These general
understandings - not prior knowledge of the Progressive Era as a distinct focus
of historical study - determined the historical facts and meanings her students
would have opportunities to learn.

Julia exhibited a similar tendency to think in terms of historical narrative
when planning to teach the Civil Rights Movement unit, but in the latter case, the
historical knowledge she brought to the task was far more complex. In contrast
to her background on the Progressive Era, Julia could easily identify people and
events associated with the Civil Rights Movement. She was obviously more
comfortable — and confident - talking about the Civil Rights Movement than she
was about her unfamiliar topic. She spoke, not in terms of how little she knew
(”I don’t remember even hearing that Wilson was a progressive”), but in terms
of how much she knew:

In my head there is this huge understanding. Malcolm X was needed in the
north, Martin Luther King in the south and that's how I want them to
understand the Civil Rights Movement. Not that it was completely in the
south and only in the south, because then it sounds like for decades, people
just let this [Jim Crow laws] happen to them, that no one spoke up before
then and Martin Luther King was the only person trying to do anything
about it. (ROA II, 5 / 20 / 99)

106

As with the Progressive Era, Julia thought about historical content
narratively. She wanted students to understand that the Civil Rights Movement
was actually part of a centuries-long, still ongoing effort to protect the rights of
all citizens, with regional differences between north and south, represented by
the figures of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. She also linked the regional
differences theme to a previous unit, just as she had done with her Progressive
Era narrative. In the Reconstruction unit, she had had students consider
differences in the economic base between north and south.

But a major difference between the two units was that Julia held prior
knowledge of the Civil Rights Movement which she had previously constructed
into a narrative. She did not consult the textbook in this case; on the contrary,
she found the textbook seriously flawed. She noticed that the textbook chapter
on the Civil Rights Movement focused almost entirely on events in the south,
that Malcolm X only got "half a section in the entire chapter" and that it made no
mention of his pilgrimage to Mecca which led him to denounce his support of
black separatism. "So according to this textbook,” Julia declared with
disgruntlement, ”Malcolm X is still alive and preaching black separatism."3 This
response was in stark contrast to Julia’s initial dependence on the textbook to
develop her understanding of the Progressive Era.

It is striking what a difference Julia’s topic-specific knowledge made in her
characterization of the Civil Rights Movement compared to her treatment of the

 

3T echnically, Julia was not correct. The textbook did contain the statement:
”In 1964, Malcolm X modified his views, embracing the possibility of interracial
harmony. But he did not live long enough to develop his new views. In 1965 he
was murdered in New York City” (DiBacco, Mason & Appy, 1997, p. 529).
However, Julia’s basic point is valid. The overall im ression left by the textbook
is that very little of importance happened in the no except ”an explosion of
black anger” in the form of urban riots. The textbook made only passing
reference to conditions in the north (”run-down neighborhoods” and ”high
jobless rate”) and no mention of the Black Panther Party’s social analysis or
neighborhood development activities.

107

Progressive Era. In the latter instance, Julia rarely moderated her interpretation
that progressivism resulted in a more just and democratic society. She presumed
a ”history as progress” narrative. Given her social justice orientation, one might
think that Julia would be generally skeptical of such a narrative, but this was not
the case. Instead, Julia’s ability to critique historical narratives seems dependent
upon her topic-specific knowledge. She did not appear to know details about the
Progressive Era with which to counter the portrayal of the time period as a
triumph for democratic values. She did not seem to know, for example, that
some progressives were proponents of eugenics, the notion that certain
categories of people are a detriment to society and should not be allowed to
reproduce. She seemed unaware that progressive presidents largely ignored
civil rights issues affecting blacks. The narrative she constructed was limited by
her reliance on a single, generic interpretation of US. History.

In contrast, with the Civil Rights Movement, Julia had both detailed
knowledge of specific events and two competing, topic-specific interpretations in
mind. Julia understood the regional differences narrative in relation to an
alternative, less desirable interpretation. She juxtaposed what she called the
”two Civil Rights Movements” emphasis against another interpretation which
she felt conveyed inaccurate messages about historical events, that ”the Civil
Rights Movement is all about Martin Luther King and the south.” Her historical
knowledge of the Civil Rights Movement focused on the outrage and frustration
experienced by blacks, the poverty in northern cities, and the media’s skewed
portrayal of the Black Panther Party’s agenda.
PredictingStudents’Msconceptions

In order to transform content, teachers need to consider their students’
relevant experience, knowledge, and beliefs. For both units, Julia predicted
students’ misconceptions, but there were differences linked to her content

knowledge. Her predictions for the Civil Rights Movement were specifically

108

related to the content in that unit. In contrast, her predictions for the Progressive
Era unit pertained to general aspects of using time lines to study history.

Julia’s topic-specific knowledge of the Civil Rights Movement translated into
specific predictions about students’ misconceptions. Knowing two competing
topic-specific interpretations of the Civil Rights Movement - one Julia deemed
true, the other false - informed beliefs about learners. She believed that her
students held some misunderstandings about Malcolm X and the Black Panther
Party that they didn’t have about the southern Civil Rights Movement. She saw
her unit as an opportunity to counter misperceptions by telling students about
Malcolm’s experience that led him to despise whites but later reject separatism,
and about the community development work done by the Black Panther Party
and its use of the phrase ”Black Power.”

Julia’s predictions about students’ misconceptions were based on her
knowledge of competing interpretations, which was, in turn, shaped by her own
memory of learning about regional differences. As the daughter of a black
father and a white mother, Julia had been raised to consider Martin Luther King,
Jr. as a hero for suggesting that black and white people can learn to live in
harmony. She had been taught to reject the anger and militancy associated with
Malcolm X, the Nation of Islam and the Black Panthers. "How could somebody
like me hate white people?" she recalled, "It made me feel torn because of being
born to my parents." But in college, she encountered new information about
Malcolm X which helped her to appreciate rather than reject his viewpoints. She
realized that Malcolm’s more militant approach was ”understandable,” given
”conditions in the north [where] racism was more subtle.” Julia’s own
preconceptions of the Civil Rights Movement had changed and now she wanted

her students to have a similar experience.
Julia felt her hunch about students’ misconceptions was confirmed when she

saw a colleague's worksheet that stated that "the ideas of World War 11 set the

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stage for the Civil Rights Movement." Although she later admitted that she
might have misinterpreted the worksheet, Julia’s initial reaction was anger:

I think she's thinking there that people saw what happened to the Jews, but
that's not exactly what happened. People weren't ready for the Civil Rights
Movement, it's not like [they said] 'Oh, now we can apply that [violence
against Jews] to [our situation]. She's talking about Hitler, but Hitler got his
idea for segregating Jews from the United States. Like I've been [telling my
students], did we go into the Civil War [to end] slavery? No. Did we go
into World War II because of the Holocaust? No. This is misleading. When
I saw that [the colleague's worksheet] it made me angry. We send students
the wrong message for decades. . . . [We say] the Civil Ri hts Movement is
all about Martin Luther King and the south and it has no 'ng to do with
Malcolm X or minority self-esteem. We just teach that and it's wrong. (ROA
II, 5 / 20/ 99)

Julia’s conviction about ”the wrong messages” her students have received
was pretty strong. The misconception she thought they had was not simply a
matter of having been ”bombarded” in elementary and middle school with
information about the southern Civil Rights Movement or reading textbooks
which omit significant facts about Malcolm X. The misconception had to do with
misreading history, casting the Civil War, World War II and the Civil Rights
Movement, for example, as victories over racism. Julia’s historical knowledge,
constructed from both personal experiences as a biracial woman and a few
African-American history courses, provided her with an alternative view. In her
interpretation, racism continued in spite of efforts to eliminate discriminatory
social institutions; people like Malcolm X understood that the effects of racism
are enduring poverty and low ”minority self-esteem.” Pervasive racism
nurtured harsh social criticism and militant tactics, particularly among northern
blacks. What made Julia angry was that students did not typically hear this
interpretation.

Julia made no specific predictions about students’ potential difficulties with
the content of the Progressive Era. She did, however, express a belief that
students were prone to assume historical inevitability. This point came up

because Julia planned to use a time line to teach about the Progressive Era:

110

[Wlhen most people give time lines, they say, "Here it is, fill in the blanks"
and nobody ever thinks of history as a decision-making thing, a split-second
thing going on. They just think that's the way it was and that's the only way
it could have been because nobody ever stops to think . . . . "What if this
hadn 't happened, would the results have been different?" George
Washington almost joined the British navy, but his mother didn't want him
to. Can you imagine? Just that little thing [could have changed history]. It's
weird. (ROA 1, 12/22/ 98)

Julia knew that historical events were not inevitable. She believed that a more
accurate view of history was to consider events as the consequences of people’s
actions and choices. Perhaps this too was an understanding Julia developed in
the process of reconsidering her own conceptions of the nature of history.

In both units, we see that Julia had some notions about possible student
misconceptions and that these notions were informed by her historical
knowledge, whether about history in general or one topic in particular. In a
sense then, Julia’s historical understandings - shaped by her own memories of
learning the content - substituted for the fact that she did not yet have direct
experiences teaching this content to young learners. Even without the benefit of
the ”wisdom of practice,” (Shulman, 1987) she was able to consider her students
in relation to subject matter. And both kinds of misconceptions identified by
Julia seem valid: one related to the substance of content (misunderstandings
about Malcolm X and the Black Panther Party) and the other concerned with an
epistemological issue (misperceptions of historical inevitability). But as we shall
see, variations in Julia’s subject matter knowledge impacted her ability to
transform content in ways that seemed likely to, in turn, shape students’
understandings of either substance or epistemology.
Representingfiontentiosmdents

Julia had only two major representations in mind for the Progressive Era
unit: a lecture and a time line activity. Her repertoire of representations for the
Civil Rights Movement unit was more extensive. She planned to show a video

from the EyesnnthePrize series, another about Malcolm X and a chart depicting

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changes in voting registration patterns as a result of the Voting Rights legislation
in 1966. If, as McDiarmid, Ball and Anderson (1989) suggest, a wider array of
representations is needed to influence the range of subject matter
understandings students may create in their own minds, then we would prefer
Julia’s repertoire for the Civil Rights Movement, another apparent benefit of her
topic-specific content knowledge.

In both units, Julia relied primarily on lecture to transmit historical
information to students, a feature of David’s practice as well. In Julia’s case, the
quality of historical content in each of the two units varied remarkably. In the
Progressive Era unit, her lectures were full of uncritical and vague assertions
about people and events. She taught that "Roosevelt said the president should
take care of people's business with their best interests in mind,” that Upton
Sinclair wrote about the ”rat-infested” meat industry, that the NAACP ”was like
a union for African-Americans.” She framed these references within her
narrative of democratic progress, and emphasized how particular pieces of
legislation changed things for the better:

The 17th amendment gives us the choice [about] who goes to Washington
for us. . . . When the Constitution was written, they called people "great
beasts." They didn't trust us with the ri ht to vote, they didn't give it to us
when it came to [Senators], [they thoug t] that we didn't deserve it. . . .
Progressives were free-thinking and forward-thinking . . . . they wanted to
change all these things to make a better United States, to make it more
democratic, more representative (2nd; 12/ 8/ 98)

In contrast, during the Civil Rights Movement unit, Julia provided details to
support the narrative. For example, she told her students that Black Panther
leaders like Huey Newton and Bobby Seale advocated ”self-defense" and
”empowerment” for blacks; that they were ”militant,” not violent. Then, to
support this point, she described the Party’s efforts to promote community
policing, breakfast for kids, Headstart, and after school day care. She
emphasized that the Party had strict guidelines against the use of drugs or
alcohol. Then she explained, in vivid detail, why the Black Panther Party was

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misunderstood by mainstream society:

Newton, Seale and Cleaver, over the years, they've been misinterpreted.
People who write textbooks want to forget about them. The only thing
you'd ever hear is that the incited a riot. They have a bad reputation for
that, but they didn’t start the riot. There was a trial, very discriminatory, like
Sacco and Vanzetti. Bobby Seale was bound and gagged during his trial.

I've seen the transcript - it was very unfair. Bobby ke t s eaking up, so the
judge bound him to a chair and gagged him. (2nd; 5 25 99)

Julia was able to describe the nature of individual and collective actions and
the context in which they occurred; refer to an actual historical document about
that particular event; and compare the trial of Seale and Newton to the (possibly
unfounded) accusations against Italian-born anarchists Nicola Sacco and
Bartolomeo Vanzetti in 1920. She commented that she knew more than what
she had time to teach her students: ”This could be a whole unit in itself.” And
she tied the historical detail back into her narrative, the comparison between the
nonviolent and and militant factions within the Civil Rights Movement:

[Huey Newton, Bobby Seale and Eldridge Cleaver] are names every person
should know but hardly anyone does. . . . These names should be taught
alongside Malcolm and Martin Luther King. The media chooses a golden
pfrson and an evil person. Martin was olden; the media didn’t report on

's cheating his wife. . . . The Black Pan ers were the ones chosen by the
media to always do wrong. (2nd; 5/ 25/ 99)

Julia was not able to provide such detail and elaboration in the Progressive
Era unit. Furthermore, her less specific knowledge hindered her ability to use
the time line representation for the purpose she intended. She created the time
line activity (see Figure 2) to illustrate history as a ”decision-making thing,” to
challenge the propensity to treat historical events as inevitable. She planned to

have students respond to a series of questions about the time line - first by

writing in their ”Learning Logs” and then by sharing their thoughts out loud.4

 

4 The Learning Logs were spiral notebooks each student brought to class
and Julia regularly gave short writing assignments of this nature.

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Meat packing 16th, 17th Wilson
exposed NAACP Amend. reelected 19th Amend.

I I I I I
1904 1906 1908 1909 1912 1913 1914 1916 1917 1920

 

l l I P 1
TR Elected Taft elected Wilson WW US enters WWI,
elected 1 18th Amend.

What if Upton Sinclair had not written his book about the
meat packing industry?

What would society be like today if the NAACP had never
been founded?

How do the 16th and 17th Amendments directly impact our
lives?

How long have women had the right to vote? What does
that say about respect for women? What can you infer
about "catch up time?" Where else does the Constitution
mention women?

How does understanding these events help us to understand
where society stands today?

Figure 2: Progressive Era Time Line Activity

Julia introduced the writing assignment with her intended goal in mind:

I don't like that time lines are linear. It makes it look like this is the way
history goes, that it’s the only way it could have gone. By looking at time
lines, it teaches us to memorize these dates and events and think that is
history. But that wasn't history, that was a result of history. . . . The history
is the eople who make decisions, like Wilson making the decision to go into
Worl War I. When we look at a time line, it 'ust looks like, ”Oh, World War
I [l/iap/rpenedlf’ It's very unemotional. But w at if we had never gone? (3rd;
12 8 98)

But during the subsequent class discussion, in which she asked students to share
what they had written in their Learning Logs, she did not use their responses to
explore the nature of history. Rather, Julia treated the exchange as an
opportunity to have students reproduce information from lectures:

114

Julia: What if Upton Sinclair hadn't written Ihelungle?

Student: Food would be really gross

Student: It was probably a lot worse than what he wrote.
Student: The government wouldn't have known what was going on.
Julia: What about the NAACP? What would society have been

like if they'd never been founded?
Student: We wouldn't have any blacks in high jobs.

Student: Blacks developed, they broke the barrier in the law. It ended
segregation in the schools. Laid the ground for the Civil

Rights Movement.
Julia: What about the 16th Amendment?
Student: We pay only a percentage, we're not paying as much as we

would. (2nd; 12/9/98)

Julia seemed satisfied with a few responses to each question, moving to the
next question without probing to access more of students’ thinking. Perhaps
Julia had said everything she knew about the Progressive Era in her lectures and
was reluctant to create a situation in which students asked questions or made
comments to which she could not respond. After all, in her Autobiographical
Interview, she had expressed the sentiment that her ”weak” knowledge of
history made her anxious that she hadn’t ”come across all the facts that your
students could ask you about.” At any rate, Julia used the time line
representation to restate the narrative: life today is much better because of
what the progressives did. The idea of ”what if” was sub-text and she did not
develop it by identifying the ideas and influences which contribute to historical
actions, because she lacked the topic-specific knowledge that would have enabled

her to do so. For example, Upton Sinclair did not write Thelungle in isolation;

he was a member of a group of journalists who developed a provocative style of
writing intended to shock and anger readers. The NAACP wasn’t just

”founded” in a vacuum; W.E.B. DuBois garnered support from educated

115

northerners, whose positions formed in opposition to the views of another
African-American, Booker T. Washington.

The dynamic was different in the Civil Rights Movement unit. The more
Julia talked about the Black Panthers, the more she uncovered layers of relevant
content knowledge. And the more she realized what she knew that helped her
to appreciate rather than reject the militant views of northern blacks, the more
representations she generated in an effort to challenge her students’
misconceptions.

As she presented the same information about the Black Panther Party for the
third time one day, Julia became aware that the point she was trying to make
about the militant perspective related to issues of race and power. The slogan
”Black Power” emerged from a social critique of white privilege as a system of
advantage and power. This was not something that had entered her
consciousness while she was planning the unit. The relationship between race
and power became newly-conscious knowledge in the act of teaching. In her
fourth period class, in the instant she became aware of the nature of the social
critique implied by the phrase ”Black Power,” Julia decided to insert this new
content into her lesson. She wrote the words ”Black Power” and ”White Power”
on the board and asked the class to imagine a slave saying the first phrase and a
slaveowner saying the second. ”What is the difference in meaning?” she asked.

When Julia spontaneously created this representation - ”Black Power vs.
White Power” - she drew upon a conceptual understanding of race and power
that was quite abstract and complicated. Black Power was a cry from the
oppressed, calling for the redistribution of power so that African-Americans
would have greater access to jobs, housing, and higher education. White Power,
on the other hand, signaled the desire of members of the dominant social group
to maintain unequal power structures. Again, because her knowledge of the

Progressive Era was thin, Julia was not able to generate new representations in

116

her unfamiliar unit.

Despite the advantages associated with topic-specific knowledge of the Civil
Rights Movement, her knowledge was not sufficient to help her avoid
misrepresenting the content, both substantively and epistemologically.
Although Julia was familiar with the social thinking about race and power that
influenced historical actions, she was inclined to play freely with chronological
time and historical groups. In other words, she equated the experience of slaves
and slaveowners with the experience - 100 years later - of Black Panthers and
whites. From an historiographic point of view, past events must always be
”historicized,” understood in terms of the contexts in which they occur. Social
phenomena such as the experience of race and power change over time - not
necessarily for better or worse - but in the sense that categories that once held
meaning may break down or be replaced. Blum (1999) points out, for example,
that:

In some cities, and institutions blacks hold substantial power . . . Latinos, for
example have sometimes complained of racial discrimination by blacks in
excludin them from jobs . . . . Similarly, a white child in a predominantly
Latino 551001 excluded from social life because of racial hostility is still a
victim of racism, even if in the outer society whites as a racial group are
more powerful than Latinos as a racial group.” (p. 871).

Because Julia did not appear to hold this historiographic understanding
about importance of distinguishing past and present, she misrepresented this
aspect of the nature of history. She also misrepresented the substance of her
message about the Civil Rights Movement. While the historical record supports
Julia’s statements about the Black Panthers’ political efforts to broaden African-
American access to jobs, housing and higher education, the facts do not (and
cannot) resolve the question about whether there is (in fact) a difference between
Black Power and White Power. But in stating emphatically that such a difference
exists, Julia blurred the distinction between historical facts and subjective

perceptions. Those historical events were as much about the clash between

117

meanings constructed by historical actors as they were about undisputed
historical fact. But Julia tended to treat phrases such as Black Power as if there
was only one legitimate meaning rather than several points of view in an
historical (and ongoing) debate.
LeamingabmrtStudentsandContentinPractice

Julia’s more familiar knowledge of the Civil Rights Movement did not
prevent her from misrepresenting certain aspects of content in her teaching. It
also did not provide her with an obvious advantage in learning about students
and content from practice.

In her attempt to transform her abstract understanding of race and power
for students, Julia chose the analogy of slaves and slaveowners, something with
which she thought her students would be familiar. She imagined that the
analogy would make the difference between ”empowerment” and ”power to
oppress” so obvious to students they would have little difficulty accepting the
distinction. Thus, she was surprised when several fourth period students insisted
emphatically that there was no difference between Black Power as spoken by a
slave and White Power as expressed by a slaveowner. Power was power, these
students claimed, no matter who held it. Julia recounted the discussion:

I had one girl who had a real hard time with things that I was saying. . . . She
was one of those who said that the slaves did have choices, the consequence
may have been death but they did have choices they could have made.
(Post-Ob II, 6/ 2/ 99)

According to Julia, several students adamantly agreed with this girl. One
called Malcolm X ”a racist.” Another said he simply did not believe that the Black
Panther Party ever accepted white people as members. Julia was taken off guard
by their reactions. She had thought the answer was obvious - a slave has less
power than a slaveowner, so a slave’s call for Black Power is a cry for justice; a
slaveowner seeks power to oppress. But the distinction was not so obvious to
some students, whose responses told her that they would not simply accept her

interpretation.

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Perhaps because Julia tended to treat the distinction as historical fact rather
than subjective perception, she could not view her students’ contrary ideas as
points of view in an historical and ongoing debate. However, as Julia reflected
on the Black Power vs. White Power incident, she gained a bit of insight into
students’ minds. At first, she identified two possible explanations for their
reactions. Perhaps they didn’t believe her because she is biracial and assumed
she was putting a ”rninority spin” on things. Or, perhaps they simply
misunderstood what she was trying to say. Either way, Julia’s initial assumption
was that students would not have had ”a hard time” with the representation if
she had presented it better or differently. Her preliminary reflections did not
include trying to understand the nature of students’ prior conceptions. But
neither did Julia simply drop the topic and move on. The incident in fourth hour
preoccupied her for the rest of the day. When she happened to see one of her
fourth period students in the hallway, she pulled her aside:

I said [to her] ”I think maybe you've gotten the wrong idea. I wasn't trying
to say that Black Power the way it was interpreted was necessarily a good
thing, that it may have been interpreted wrong. But if that's how it was
interpreted, then that's what it communicated to people.” She said ”I know
Mrs. Richards, it's just so hard to figure out what your Opinion is. Everyone
in the class has a different one." (Post-Ob II, 6/ 2 / 99)

In this one-on-one exchange with the student who ”had a real hard time”
accepting Julia’s distinction, Julia framed the matter as an ”interpretation.” Here,
she was suggesting that concepts like Black Power were interpreted in various
ways by the public. In a sense, the idea that people construct understanding was
confirmed by the student’ 5 response. The statement that ”it’s so hard to figure
out what your opinion is” triggered something in Julia, a slight change in her
explanation of the fourth period incident. Students may have reacted the way
they did because that is what learners do when they encounter new information.
The insight made her feel ”euphoric” instead of defensive:

I ended up feeling euphoric that she said she was trying to figure out her
opinion. Because that's what I was trying to do all the time - [get them to]

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figure out their own opinion and hope that they'll come to what I consider
to be the right opinion. Hopefully it will match mine. . . . That means when
she's out there and watching something she'll think either, ”Am I conceiving
this correctly” or ”I don't really know what's going on here, maybe it's
something else.” (Post-Ob II, 6/ 2/ 99)

Before this encounter, Julia had not explicitly discussed the fact that her goal
was to help students think through their opinions. Her lesson plans and teaching
about the Black Panthers built on the implicit assumption that she could
challenge her students’ misconceptions by simply providing them with new
information. She assumed that students simply did not believe her assertions
because she is biracial or because she had poorly communicated the information.
But the student’ 3 statement that ”it’s so hard to figure out what your opinion is”
suggested that students were having a hard time accepting the truth because it
ran counter to the conceptions they already held. Julia gained an appreciation
for the amount of time and effort it might take for students to change their
conceptions. Thus, it seemed more realistic to expect students - even if they did
not learn the ”right opinion” (still blurring the distinction between fact and
perception) - to at least leave her classroom more inclined to question their prior
knowledge.

The incident is also significant considering what Julia did not appear to learn
from it. She did not question her choice of content; the end point of instruction
continued to be the assertion that Black Power is not as racist as White Power, as
if this were historical fact. The disciplines of history and sociology make critical
distinctions between fact and interpretation, but Julia was not viewing her
subject matter as an opportunity for students to participate in debates over the
meaning of racism so much as for them to accept the meaning which seemed
incontrovertible to her. Neither did the incident in her fourth period class cause
her to make significant adjustments in her beliefs about the kinds of
representations needed to help students construct new understandings. Indeed,

although Julia stated that the conversation with the student provided her with

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new insight, the insight did not represent a major shift in her thinking. The next
day, Julia devoted more time than she had originally planned to the sub-topic
about Black Power and White Power, but continued - with one exception - to
present information didactically.

Julia’s new insight was that students might need more time to change their
conceptions. So, instead of moving on to the lesson she had planned - a video
about the life of Malcolm X - Julia experimented with two new representations

designed to convey the distinction between Black Power and White Power.
This is how she introduced the next day’s lesson: 5

These things are difficult to talk about . . . . Yesterday there was a little
misunderstanding about the Black Panther Party. It was a political dim,
with candidates running for office. And people get upset because '5
counters what they’ve been told all their lives. . . . Now we know from
yesterday that the Black Panther Party wasn’t a ang, but the FBI labeled
them a militant nationalist group. (2nd; 5/ 26/ 99%

Julia’s opening remarks indicated that she continued to frame the disagreement
as a ”misunderstanding” rather than as historical debate. Her explanation for
why there had been a misunderstanding was evidence of her new insight:
students’ prior misconceptions seem true to them. And then she repeated as fact
the interpretation that the ”Black Panther Party wasn’t a gang,” as a transition
into the first representation. Julia had found an historical document in one of her
college texts: a speech by a Black Panther Party member. She read the speech
out loud. In it, a Black Panther Party member stated that the party welcomed
anyone who supported the cause. Julia used the document as a piece of evidence
to counter disbelief that the party had been open to white membership: ”I
wanted to read this because it’ 5 hard to believe the things that happened during
that time,” she told her students. Julia’s representation implied that yes, the

truth is hard to believe. But here are some facts over which there should be no

 

5 Although the heated discussion had taken place only in her fourth period
class, the next day Julia summarized the discussion and taught the same follow-
up lesson to each class.

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disagreement, facts supported by an historical document, not something skewed
to support a minority viewpoint.

Julia had planned to show the Malcolm X video at this point, but as she
looked around the room, she noticed her students staring back at her blankly.
”Sometimes I just don’t know what you’re thinking,” she mused out loud. She
cast about for another way to represent the content. Significantly, in that
moment, she drew on knowledge about students’ present experience. She had
done this earlier, when she chose the analogy of slaves and slaveowners,
reasoning that students were familiar with those historical perspectives. But
students living in the late 20th century have had no direct experience with slaves
and slaveowners and for her next representation, Julia landed on an analogy
much closer to home: politicians vs. janitors. "Close your eyes" she told her
students. ”Irnagine a politician: how old are they, male or female, what are they
dressed like, how much education and what race?" After a few gentle proddings,
her students closed their eyes and were quiet. She asked them to picture a nurse,
a janitor, and a business person. Then she told them to open their eyes.

Julia: Which of these people has power?

Student: A politician

Julia: What kind of power does a politician have?
Student: To make laws

Julia: And those laws affect you, even if they don't care that the seat
belt law inconveniences you, because you don't vote. Think
about what power is and the difference between racism and
oppression. Yesterday we talked about Black Power — what's that
saying? It's like slaves saying it - the power to vote, own land,
own business, to change things in your own life, not about
power over. That's when a slaveowner says White Power.

What do you think of?

Chrissy: Violence
Julia: That's power to oppress. That's why there's a difference between

saying White Power and saying Black Power. So you don't think
of a person in color being in business because they don't have

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the power to oppress. What do you think people thought of the
nurse?

Student: Female.

Julia: This is not to tell you you’re racist, but to understand power. If
you thought of white people in power - it's not wrong to think
that - let's look at the reason you did.

Latia: How society portrays them on TV.

Julia: What's socialization? It's a process of learning social rules
and norms. In what ways are we socialized?

Cody: TV, radio.

Julia: We think a nurse is a woman, a politician is a man. It used to be
that the only roles for blacks on TV were as maid or chauffeur.
Think of the top 10 shows (Students nominate their favorite
sitcoms). How many have black people in them? How many
are Hispanic shows or Native American? Does TV represent
how diverse society is? Friends takes place in New York City,
but does it look diverse? So what sneaks into our thoughts
without our realizing it?

Student: Racism.
Julia: Maybe. You're socialized into sitting here. (3rd; 5/ 26/ 99)

The Imagine a Politician representation underscores what Julia did and did
not appear to learn from teaching this unit. She wanted students to adopt her
conception of the difference between Black Power and White Power. She had
gained a new insight that they were ”working through their opinions.” She read
from an historical document, but couldn’t tell from students’ faces what they
were ”thinking.” She seemed to have some sense that she needed an
instructional representation that revealed to students the presence of racial
inequality in their own experience. For the first time in this unit, she
intentionally elicited a response from students: ”Close your eyes and imagine a
politician.” Likely, the representation conjured various images, connections and
ideas in students’ minds, but we get little sense of students’ mental activity from

the discussion that followed. After two cryptic statements from students, Julia

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asserted the conclusion: Black Power refers to the ”power to vote and own
land,” not the power to oppress, which is the meaning of White Power. 80
while Julia’s new insight led her to stay with the topic and generate new
representations - including one that directly linked to students’ experience - the
new representations were just as didactic as the earlier ones.

Another observation about the Imagine a Politician representation is that,
although Julia entered into it with the intention to teach historical content, she
never made the connection back to the Black Panther Party. Instead, Julia
moved the focus of the lesson from power to socialization and finally to the
importance of communicating across differences. Perhaps some of this
movement is a consequence of the fact that the Imagine a Politician
representation was unplanned. Julia had not predetermined what the central
message of the representation should be. Thus, the reference to nurses
reminded Julia of the topic of gender inequality; the influence of television led
her to consider the concept of socialization, which in turn triggered the example
of students’ socialization into ”sitting here.” In the end, Julia decided the lesson
wasn’t really about developing historical understanding after all. Instead, the
lesson was about developing the willingness to ”talk and listen to one another”
about ”tough issues.” She closed with a statement - not about historical ideas or
events or the regional differences she had originally wanted them to learn - but
about the group process:

If you haven't heard this stuff before, it's hard not to get defensive and for
some of you, I'm challenging what you thought you knew. But you've done
a great job talking and listening to one another, not at one another. I'm
proud of you. I want to congratulate you on talking about tough issues that
adults, even the United Nations, can't talk about it. (3rd; 5/ 27/ 99)

Julia’s students responded with a spontaneous cheer, " Yeah!" She liked this way
of ending the lesson, though it wasn’t what she had planned:

It ended up that talking about communication was the big theme of the unit.
I thought it was going to be tolerance, but where I ended up was how lack
of communication and misconceptions perpetuates racial misunderstanding

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and how that leads to resentment, which leads to anger which leads to
hatred. . . . The more I realized how many misconceptions were out there,
the more I really wanted them to understand if we don't talk about these
misconceptions, they're going to remain misconceptions and if we don't
know the answers, we just give them to ourselves and they're usually
wropg} St; it turned into something that I couldn't have predicted. (Post-Ob
H, 6 2 99

She felt exhausted by the attempt to teach a controversial topic. She felt she
needed ”enough time to recover and heal” before she would raise such issues
again. But even though it was difficult:

I would want to have those discussions again. In a way, I don’t want to
because it is difficult, stressful and ignorance is bliss. . . . [I]t was hard on me .
. . . Next year I can predict who it’s going to be and what they’re going to
say [about Black Power]. I’ll have more wisdom about how to conduct a
discussion like that. (Post-Ob II, 6/ 2/ 99)

Even though the experience had an emotional toll, Julia felt it was so important
to ”talk about misconceptions” related to race and power issues that she was
glad she had not abandoned the effort.

The same thing happened in the Progressive Era unit. In the end, Julia
valued most a lesson involving an extended exchange on women’s status in
contemporary society, during which Julia made no connections to the women’s
suffrage movement although that was the topic which initiated the discussion.
She was pleased that the focus had been on the power of socialization, and
thought that her students were learning, not just how to "think about what we
see in our everyday lives, how we treat our mothers or how we're going to treat
our girlfriends, but look at the whole society and how we're [women] being
represented."

In both units, Julia replaced historical content with contemporary social
analysis. This seems less surprising in the Progressive Era unit, since it would be
natural for her to want to shift the focus of the unit toward a topic she knew
more about, such as contemporary gender inequality. Yet the fact that she was
more familiar with the content of the Civil Rights Movement - she knew details

and held a topic-specific interpretation of regional differences between north and

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south - seemed to have little bearing on her tendency to gravitate toward
contemporary social and political issues.

One possible explanation for this lies in Julia’s ”disciplinary perspective”
(Wilson & Wineburg, 1988). Julia’s content knowledge reflects her subject
matter beliefs, the content she believes is worthwhile to know. She is a political
science major with a strong interest in civil rights law. She is drawn toward
current issues related to social inequality and generalizations that emphasize the
power of socialization in shaping attitudes and behavior. Even when she held
more topic-specific historical knowledge, Julia gravitated toward the topic of
socialization and issues of race, gender and power in contemporary society. Her
subject matter beliefs were such that she dropped historical content in favor of
social commentary, even when her historical knowledge was stronger.

It may be that Julia’s disciplinary perspective also impacted what she was
likely to learn about the Progressive Era and the Civil Rights Movement from
practice. She read the textbook selectively in her planning for her unfamiliar
unit, choosing only the details that supported her narrative. For instance, she
decided that the election of 1912 in which Roosevelt formed a third party because
of ideological differences with Taft wasn’t "very important." The election didn’t
seem directly relevant to the theme of democratic citizen action. She ignored the
substantial section on conservation because it did not deal with intolerance and
inequality:

I decided to skip that. It does have a lot of bearing on the present, but I
want them to think about tolerance, acceptance and be more socially
conscious people so I spend more time on that, rather than have all these
thi/ngs/thrown at them. . . .That's how I try to hold this class together. (CK I,
12 10 99)

The only time Julia expressed concern about her historical knowledge was at the
beginning of the school year. She ”felt weak walking in” with only a minor in
history. And, when I asked her whether she was familiar with alternative

interpretations of the Progressive Era, she replied, ”I don’t have time to read a

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book on progressives and another on World War I and then several books so I

can get all these different views.” No doubt, lack of time is a huge factor for

teachers, but another plausible explanation for Julia’s satisfaction with her

teaching is that her beliefs about history play a mediating role. Ultimately, she

hopes to influence students’ social attitudes, a goal that in her mind doesn’t

require a greater knowledge of history than other social or political knowledge.
Conclusions about Julia

Julia’s topic-specific historical knowledge of the Civil Rights Movement,
organized around two competing interpretations of events, provided her with
some advantages. She was able to critique textbook content, select a topic-
specific narrative to frame her unit, illustrate the narrative with concrete images
and descriptive detail, anticipate student misconceptions and respond to the
unexpected with additional lessons and representations. These would all seem to
be important tools for transforming content. In contrast, her more general and
thin knowledge of the Progressive Era led her to accept a ”history as progress”
narrative, make vague assertions unsupported by concrete images or descriptive
detail, and generate fewer representations which she was unable to use as
intended. This finding suggests that novices benefit from indepth study of
historical topics. In addition, knowledge of one topic does not necessarily
compensate for thin knowledge of another topic.

But as useful as Julia’s topic-specific historical knowledge was, it was not
sufficient to prevent her from misrepresenting content and shifting the focus
from the historical narrative to contemporary social commentary. She treated
the meaning of Black Power as timeless, never suggesting that there might be
differences between the way slaves, Black Panthers and Fairmont High School
ninth graders experience power inequality. Furthermore, she treated the
distinction between White Power and Black Power as indisputable, historical fact,

because in her conception, the two views did not express subjective perception

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but right and wrong understandings. This finding suggests that even though
novices may be familiar with epistemological aspects of history (e.g. that history
is a ”decision-making thing,” that it involves studying the lived, social experience
of people, including those experiences omitted or distorted in popular accounts),
this knowledge may not be sufficient to avoid other misrepresentations of the
discipline.

In spite of Julia’s more specific knowledge about the Civil Rights Movement,
historical content eventually all but disappeared from her unit. Despite her
intention to frame the unit around regional differences, the theme evaporated.
As in the Progressive Era unit, Julia concluded that the main message was about
socialization and practicing a form of civic discourse. This finding underscores
the potential power of novices’ subject matter beliefs. Disciplinary perspectives
and beliefs about what content is worthwhile to learn may determine whether or
not students are exposed to historical content in a US. History course as well as
whether novices are inclined to develop their historical knowledge as they teach.

As a first year teacher, Julia naturally had little experience teaching her
content, experience upon which she could develop knowledge of common
misconceptions and difficulties. Rather, Julia based her beliefs about what
students knew, did not know and could comprehend on the evidence provided
by her content knowledge, which was shaped by her own memories of learning
the content. These beliefs substituted for her lack of experience in the classroom
and enabled her to make predictions about her learners, although one prediction
was general and one specific to the content.

Likely, Julia’s knowledge of students will develop as she teaches. But just as
we saw that her subject matter understandings and beliefs sometimes led her to
misrepresent content, Julia’s assumptions about learners seemed to constrain her
ability to work with their ideas. Although she wondered what students were

thinking and even sought out a particular student for a follow-up conversation,

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her teaching was heavily didactic. Although she gained some insight into the
tenacity of prior understandings, this did not change her inclination to treat those
prior understandings as problems to be corrected. Her belief that students held
misconceptions and wrong ideas supported a practice in which her role was to
present correct information. Students did not interact with the Black Panther
speech; Julia read it aloud as if to say, ”Now do you believe me?” The Imagine a
Politician activity treated students’ experience as a resource - specifically, their
familiarity with occupational status and television sitcoms - but Julia was quick to
insert her conclusions: ”That’s power to oppress;” ”You’re being socialized.”

Apparently, ”think[ing] one’s way from the subject matter as understood by
the teacher into the minds and motivations of learners” (Shulman, 1987, p. 16)
demands something more than detailed content knowledge and beliefs that
students need time to develop new understandings. Although her content
knowledge and beliefs provided Julia with some pedagogical tools in her efforts
to transform content, this was not sufficient. One explanation might be that Julia
was lacking certain knowledge that she should have learned in her preparation
program, such as an awareness of the importance of historical context when
comparing past and present and a repertoire of representations for facilitating
students’ active constructions of subject matter knowledge. Another hypothesis
might be that there are problems with her beliefs, including an assumption that
her own memories of learning content are a legitimate basis for determining
what ninth graders are capable of comprehending and an inclination to treat
students’ prior knowledge as problematic. There is no apparent need to
investigate students’ ideas if the assumption is that their conceptions are deficient
and misinformed.

Yet a third possibility is that there are certain features of beginning practice
that interact with Julia’s knowledge and beliefs. As a first year teacher, Julia was

communicating much of her content knowledge for the first time to a live

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audience. She was aware of this as a routine experience during that first year of
teaching:

Sometimes I’m concentrating so much on "Am I saying thisri ht?" Trying
to get at so many different aspects [of a topic], where I say it 5 way and

that way and then twist it and turn it and try to say it another way. (Post-
Ob II, 6/ 2/ 99)

The more Julia talked about the Black Panthers, the more she uncovered layers
of her content knowledge. And the more she uncovered her own
understandings, the more she realized what she knew that helped her to
appreciate rather than reject the militant views of northern blacks during the
Civil Rights Movement. As she taught her lessons, there was a sense in which
she was actually teaching herself. Although she invented the Imagine a Politician
representation with her students' experience in mind, in the dialogue that
followed she was primarily listening to herself. To some extent, this may have
been because the representation was unplanned. Julia hadn't anticipated the
kinds of questions that would elicit students' descriptions of and reflections on
their own experience of occupational status and television sitcoms. At the same
time, if Julia was indeed occupied with the important task of uncovering her own
knowledge of the topic, it was understandably difficult for her to pay attention
simultaneously to both newly-conscious content and students' constructions of
meaning.

This analysis of Julia’s knowledge and beliefs raises several questions. What
kind of knowledge and beliefs help novices avoid misrepresenting the nature of
history? What do novices gain from prior experience teaching particular topics
to young learners? Are they less dependent on their own memories of learning
the content? Do they spend less time surfacing their own content knowledge
and more time exploring students’ constructions of meaning? Do they make
fewer miscalculations about students’ prior knowledge? What kinds of

knowledge and beliefs influence novices to maintain the focus on historical

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content? One way to begin to answer these questions is to compare Julia’s
knowledge and beliefs with those of another beginning history teacher: David
Parker.

David: Transforming the Communist Revolution
and the American Revolution

As a third year teacher, David held an advantage over Julia. He had taught
both his unfamiliar and his familiar topic once previously. In both instances, he
had already gone through an experiencing of initially discovering what he knew,
realizing what the topic was about and learning about students’ reactions. Still,
David was a beginner, and there was variation in his content knowledge. He felt
his knowledge of the Communist Revolution was ”shaky,” although for
different reasons than Julia’s unfamiliar knowledge of the Progressive Era.
GeneraLandIopic—SpecificKnowledge

David readily admitted that he didn’t ”know much about the Russian
Revolution.” He blamed this on the fact that he hadn’t taken any world history
classes in high school and in his college European history survey course, the
professor spent only two days on the topic. And even after one experience
teaching this content, David felt ”shaky” about his knowledge:

The eriod between Lenin and Stalin is vague to me even now . . . I know
the c onology . . . but the period between the revolution and World War 11,
I’m missing most of the fence. It’s shaky, a couple of beams in there but not
many slats. (CK H; 4/13/99)

In part, his self-assessment was based on that previous experience, in which he
first realized how much he did not know. The first time he taught the unit, he
had planned to teach about the huge inequities in pre-revolutionary Russian
society that made communism appealingto the peasant majority. This was a
topic with which he felt reasonably comfortable since it was something he
remembered learning about in college and since he had seen the movies Dr.
Zhivago and Anastasia. But in the middle of teaching the unit, David realized

that he was leaving out important information by focusing on pre-revolutionary

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Russia:

It was an interesting way to frame a course about the causes of the
revolution, but once you get into it . . . I was constantly saying - and I
remember this very, very clearly - "Oh, this is important too." Right in the
middle of teaching it, I'd . . . come across this terminology and stuff [in the
textbook] and I thought "Geez, I totally missed this, I haven't mentioned
anything about these arties. " So I'd say something about the parties, then
" my God, Stalin's 've year plan and collectivization - I didn't teach them
anything about that. . . . Oh shoot, I have to fit this in somehow because this
is the place they have it in there. We have to talk about the command
economy right now, otherwise where will this appear again?" (Post-Ob II, 5-
4-99)

It bothered David enormously that the textbook contained terminology and
factual content with which he was unfamiliar. He felt obligated to teach what
was in the textbook, but this seemed inadequate because it didn’t provide him
with ”an overarching theme that encompasses everything:”

I was very detail-oriented; I wasn’t comfortable with the material. . . . But I
can’t just drop this story [about pre-revolutionary Russia] with the death of
the czar. The civil war, Lenin, the society he tried to create, the takeover by
Stalin - those are still important. . . . So [pm-revolutionary Russia] is a great
beginning, but it can’t really provide an overarching theme that
encompasses everything. (ROA II, 4 / 16/ 99)

For his second attempt, David was determined to make the unit more

II

coherent by selecting an ”overarching theme. This was similar to Julia’s
impulse to frame even her unfamiliar unit with some kind of narrative. David’s
desire for coherence - along with a preference for intellectual history - led him to
adopt as an overarching theme the idea that the Communist Revolution and
subsequent changes in the structure of Soviet government can be understood in
terms of ideological conflict between various political groups. For example,
Bolsheviks envisioned a revolution led by party members. Mensheviks
advocated leadership by the working class. Constitutional Democrats wanted a
constitutional monarchy. Although the textbook did not suggest it, David
perceived these ideological conflicts along a political spectrum, with Bolsheviks at

the far left and the czar and his supporters at the far right. The political

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spectrum, David thought, was a model for organizing the entire unit, since it
portrayed pre-revolutionary ideologies as well as ”the difference between Stalin
and Lenin. If you can see it as a struggle between moderates, conservatives and
liberals; that's one way of understanding the Communist Revolution."

David also thought that by treating the Communist Revolution as the
outcome of power struggles among various interest groups, Czar Nicholas'
assassination "makes 100 percent sense" because he would be viewed by the
revolutionaries as a "unifying force for the conservatives. . . . He was killed so he
wouldn't be a focus during the civil war for the conservatives to try to make an
attempt to put him back into power."

It does have to make sense. Otherwise it's just a good story and I want
them to come away from this with something. Not just a content base, but .
. . that you can learn something here that becomes a model, that you can
use. (ROA II, 4/ 16 / 99)

David found his ”overarching theme” - represented by the political spectrum
- appealing for some of the same reasons as Julia did with her unit narratives.
The theme organized content into a coherent narrative. The theme also linked to
other content in his curriculum. The political spectrum was a ”universal model”
which could be applied, not only to the Communist Revolution, but to the
"American system [which has] a variety of interest groups and people with
different approaches, different political parties." David, like Julia, seems
interested in portraying history as something more than a collection of facts, so
that students ”come away with something” applicable beyond the particular
unit topic.

David also chose a narrative for his Age of Revolutions unit, but this time,
the narrative was topic-specific. He used a theory about revolutionary change
he had learned in college from a professor who had applied the theory to three
revolutions in the World History curriculum: American, French and Industrial.
The theory states that revolutions typically evolve through three stages: 1) a
segment of the population (usually the middle class) becomes dissatisfied with

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things as they are; 2) their actions lead to revolution; and 3) there is a
reactionary movement which causes society to return (ironically) to a condition

similar to (although not exactly the same as) the earlier pre-revolutionary
situation.6 David referred to the theory as the ”revolutionary dialectic” or

”pendulum.”

The revolutionary dialectic appeared nowhere in the World History
textbook, but that didn’t seem to matter to David. As an overarching theme,
the theory was compelling for several reasons. For one, it enabled him to treat
each revolution - the American, French and Industrial - as an instance of a
”universal model.” It provided a generalizable explanation for revolutions, in
contrast to the detailed descriptions of events found in the textbook:

The textbook gives all the background - from the [Intolerable] Acts to the
battles . . . and it’s interesting if you want to go reall indepth. But for a

survey course it’ s more important to understand w y these are revolutions.
(CK Interview 1, 11 / 3/ 98)

Secondly, David noted that the revolutionary dialectic linked to future units
in the World History curriculum. His next unit - called Changes in Ideas - would
include contrasting views of human nature; each revolution contained elements
of faith in human reason alongside evil and corruption. Furthermore, these
views would reemerge in World War I, the interwar years, World War II and the
post-war "age of anxiety." David wanted his students to see how firmly people
during the Age of Revolutions believed in "the concept of perfection, that they
could conquer nature, constantly improve and have progress" because:

that dies in World War I. . . . They believed they had created the ultimate
society in the Victorian Era, but ey end up massacring millions. Thousands
die in the Titanic [shipwreck] because of their arrogance in assuming they

 

6 Although David mistakenly attributed this theory to Karl Marx, the model
closely resembles one proposed by Crane Brinton (1938) in TheAnatomny
Revolution. It is likely that David was exposed to this theory in college,
subsequently associated it with the Hegelian notion of the ”dialectic” and
misremembered it as Marxian. This is yet another indication of how individuals
contribute to the construction of their own historical knowledge.

134

had created something perfect. So in the 19205, you find in the ears
between the wars, around the world and especially in Europe, '3 ennui, this
malaise, this boredom, an alienation and disenchantment with society. They
pull back and say things aren’t so great, progress may not be possible,
maybe we’re worse than we were before. . . . When you hit World War II,
of course things get even worse and peo le get bitter and question human
nature. So this positive, optimistic Enlig tened ideal is very important as a
theme, because when we get to World War II, we're going to see that the
post-war time is called the Age of Anxiety and we fall back and say maybe
society isn't the greatest and start to really question ourselves. (ROA I,

11/ 18/ 98)

Like Julia, when David was less familiar with a topic, he was forced to choose
a more general narrative or theme for his unit. The political spectrum is not a
topic-specific model for relating the events of the Communist Revolution,
whereas the revolutionary dialectic was a scholarly interpretation specific to the
topic of revolution and the American and French Revolutions in particular. But
unlike Julia, David was able to support even his less familiar topic with detailed
historical knowledge. He could do more than make vague assertions about
ideological conflict as a cause of the Communist Revolution. He could place
specific political parties along the continuum and explain why one group was
considered conservative, another liberal. Because of this knowledge, David was
able to avoid oversimplifying historical events with vague assertions and
misconstruing history as a story of linear progress.

On the other hand, his inclination toward ”universal models” tended to
obscure some complexities. Although the political spectrum can be applied to
both societies, the meaning of ”conservativism” varies across time and place.
Likewise, although all revolutions may share some characteristics, suggesting
that all follow the same stage-like pattern comes close to subscribing to what
Mink (1978) calls ”Universal History . . . the claim that . . . there is a single central
subject or theme in the unfolding plot of history" (p. 137). The notion of
Universal History was popular among historians for centuries, but, says Mink,
historians now widely recognize that ”the idea of Universal History never made

room for the uniqueness, vividness, and intrinsic value of individuals, whether of

135

individual persons, individual cultures or individual epochs” (p. 138). We shall
see how David’s knowledge enables him to deal with epistemological issues
related to his interest in ”universal models” as he develops and uses instructional
representations.

Pedagogical Understanding (2inst

There was a slight, but significant difference in the way David used his
narratives compared to Julia. Julia’s narrative helped her organize her units and
make decisions about the sequence of content: Progressive goals first, then
achievements; the southern Civil Rights Movement followed by the northern.
She introduced her lectures by telling students the overarching themes in the
same manner that she typically presented content: as facts and concepts to
which students listened and committed to memory. In contrast, David viewed
his narratives as something for students to recreate. The representation of
ideological conflict in the form of the political spectrum evolves from examining
facts about inequities in Russian society and the various agendas of political
groups. David planned to have his students investigate and compare the political
groups before introducing them to the concept of a political spectrum.

Similarly, in the Age of Revolutions unit, David planned to have students
recreate the narrative, or, in his words, ”inductively discover” the pendulum
pattern. He would have students "look at the American, French and Industrial
Revolutions to build a generalization of what revolutions are composed of." In
the case of the American Revolution, for example, David planned to have
students look at the causes and effects of revolution in such a way that the
pendulum pattern would be apparent. The initial idealism - represented by such
revolutionaries as Thomas Paine and Patrick Henry - led to an extreme form of
government in the Articles of Confederation and finally to a more moderate
form of government in the US. Constitution. He would present his students

with some facts about these events and help them reflect on them until they

136

could see the pattern themselves:

We will look at the French, American and Industrial Revolutions and see
how the revolutionary dynamic is there. . . . [The oal is] to determine a
pattern for revolutions, . . . what leads to them, w at happens in them, the

outcomes and to look at whether these are necessarily good things. (CK 1,
11/3/98)

In designing both units, David revealed a pattern in his pedagogical reasoning:
first, have students work with the basic facts pertaining to a particular case and
then look for patterns and see if the generalization fits other cases. His historical
knowledge enabled him to identify aspects of the historical content that students
could reconstruct. Also, perhaps his reasoning was supported by the fact that he
had taught each topic once previously. Since he had already been through an
experience of realizing what he knew about the topic, he could focus his
attention on involving students more actively in lessons.

David was, like Julia, more inclined to predict student misconceptions with
his more familiar knowledge. For example, for one of his first lessons about the
American Revolution, David wanted to address the misconception he had
identified as a ”self-congratulatory view of history.” He presumed that students
would have difficulty seeing the revolutionary dialectic in the American
Revolution because they would be inclined to view the outcome of the
revolution as the successful implementation of revolutionary democratic
idealism. But the revolutionary dialectic suggested that the new US. government
was similar, in several key ways, to the British monarchy that had been
overthrown:

People don’t often see the revolutionary dialectic in the American
Revolution because they don’t consider the Constitutional Convention. . . .
We do leave the idea of a limited monarchy, but what do we do? We create
a parliament with an upper and lower house, which is the same. We create a
king we call a president, but then there are checks and balances that aren’t
there with a king. . . . The US. Constitution isn’t as democratic as everyone
thinks. The only group that’s elected is the House, not the Supreme Court
or the president or the Senate. (CK I, 11/ 3/ 98) '

Like Julia, David’s ability to identify a misconception is linked to his

137

knowledge of alternative interpretations. He knew that textbooks often depict
the US. Constitution as a triumph for democracy. He also knew a counter-
interpretation: ”the US. Constitution isn’t as democratic as everyone thinks.”
Whereas Julia explicitly recalled her own experience of learning a new
interpretation of the Civil Rights Movement, David did not mention how he
developed his knowledge of alternative interpretations of the American
Revolution. Regardless, such knowledge enabled him to predict a possible
student misconception, something he did not do with his unfamiliar topic.
Furthermore, such knowledge guided his creation of representations designed to
challenge those misconceptions.
Representingfiontentjo Students

David had other knowledge about historical content that enabled him to
create representations we did not see in Julia’s teaching. It was not just that he
knew that the notion of clashing political ideologies could be represented by a
political spectrum. He also knew that pre-revolutionary Russian society was
highly stratified - rather like a pyramid - and to some extent, Russian citizens'
social positions shaped their political views. The few who held positions of
power and wealth wanted to maintain the status quo; groups lower on the
pyramid supported a variety of political changes. David also knew that social
hierarchies did not just exist in 19th century Russia; ninth-graders experience
social hierarchies everyday. In other words, he noticed a measure of continuity
between students’ present experience (as high school freshmen at the bottom of
their social hierarchy) and the historical content he wanted them to learn (the
revolutionary impulses of citizens in late 19th century Russia). Once he realized
this, David was able to create a representation intended to mediate between
students and subject matter. He provided his students with a visual aid on the
board:

138

Czar and Aristocracy Student Council Co-Presidents

The Middle Class Sophomores, Juniors

Serf s, / \Frcshmw
Peasants

Figure 3: David's Representation for the Communist Revolution Unit

 

After labeling the left side of the pyramid, David asked his class to "describe the
structure of student government." He pointed to the pyramid: "Who's at the
top?" The students agreed that it was the co-presidents of the student council, so

David wrote their names next to "Czar and Aristocracy. 'Then you have
sophomores and juniors in the middle and freshmen at the bottom." David
placed these labels along the pyramid next to "Middle Class" and "Peasants."

At this point, the conversation became quite lively. When, for example,
David pointed out that in the hallway, it is the freshmen who move out of the
way of the seniors, not the other way around, his second period class expressed
skepticism. Teresa said she thought freshmen moved out of the way because of
"politeness" rather than power. Brian reacted negatively to David’s suggestion
that some students were perceived as "intellectuals" and others as "geeks."
"That’s being judgmental," he protested. Sean commented "I don’t think anyone
has power either way."

David offered counter-evidence: "Why is it that student council is trying to

change the code of conduct to allow smoking off campus, instead of some issue

139

that affects freshmen?" He told his fourth period class: "In my second hour,

someone thought that we really don’t have social classes in the school." That got

an immediate reaction:

Corey: That is so wrong, you’re judged on your car, your clothes.
David: Shhh. So, it sounds like a lot of you agree with Corey.

Jack: If you get good grades and suck up to the teacher then they
give you power.

Dennis: Seniors have power. They set up Spirit Week so they would win
everything.

David: Spirit Week is very clear, isn’t it? Shows who’s the boss. It’ s an
opportunity for them to exercise power and authority.
Remember the first week of school, at the assembly where
freshmen were duct-taped to the floor? You guys felt like
nothing.

Jack: That’ s because we are nothing. (4th; 4 / 16 / 99)

This highly interactive discussion continued until the bell rang; nearly every
student had something to say about social power at Sycamore High School:
popularity, awards ceremonies, student council elections. He had to postpone
until the following day an activity in which he divided students into groups
corresponding to the Bolsheviks, Mensheviks, Nihilists, Social Revolutionaries
and Duma, with instructions to "show how you will overthrow your student
government, based on what your party believes."

To the extent the analogy itself drew out aspects of students’ experience that
were continuous with the content, there was potential to mislead or confuse
students about the historical facts and events. After all, a student council
president isn’t exactly like Czar Nicholas; the lives of high school freshmen and
Russian serfs are quite different. David was able to avoid misrepresenting
history because of a combination of his specific knowledge of Russian society
and a more general knowledge of history. This knowledge helped him to

identify a flaw in one student’s comment. The student mentioned that freshmen

140

would not remain freshmen forever and in fact, they could look forward to
being seniors who could flaunt their power over others. David knew right away
that if he let that comment go unchallenged, it could ”teach the wrong lesson" by
suggesting that Russian society was just as fluid as Sycamore society. He
interjected: "So one of the issues is - in Russian society, there is no way to move
up, but here, you know you'll be up there. But what if you knew you'd never
move up?” A student immediately replied, ”Revolt.”

David’s knowledge enabled him not only to precisely identify the error, but
also to respond immediately and later, to assess the limitations of the analogy:

When they talked about ”It’s just jokes and when we’re seniors we’ll do the
same thing,” . . . I [was] thinking on my feet about how this applies. What
can I turn this into in terms of the application of Russian society to ours? So
I think I said, ”How would it be if you knew you could never move out of
that position?” And someone said ”We would revolt” and that’ 5 what I
wanted to hear. . . . At that point, they had hit upon something that’ s in their
world - it’ 5 true in their situation and in the school - but it wasn’t true in
Russian society. So I had to say, ”That’s not true there.” (ROA II, 4 / 16/ 99)

Central to David’s historical understanding of the Communist Revolution was
the fact that the Russian hierarchy was extremely rigid. High school freshmen
could wait a few years to become seniors. The only avenue for Russian serfs to
improve their social standing was to enter the monastery. David knew about
this distinction; he also had a sense for the dilemmas such distinctions create in
terms of developing historical understanding:

Presentism - a recent debate among historians - is the danger of placing
modern day values on the past. It’ s really hard not to do and fairly
controversial because some people believe that the only reason to study the
past is in order to judge it, so we can learn from our mistakes. But if all we
do is judge the past, do we really try to understand it? Do we really want to
understand a man like Adolf Hitler, or do we want to say that he was
wrong? This is a weird, difficult thing. . . . My personal bent is that history
without a lesson is pointless. If you don’t learn something from history
about your world today, then you’re not spending time wisely. So as long
as the can see the [historical] points of view, it’s OK to extract a lesson [for
today]: (Post-Ob I; 12 / 21 / 98)

David wanted to make sure that students developed ”the historical point of

view” about Russian society, which in this case meant moderating the tendency

141

toward universalizing human experience. He was quick to insert information
into the discussion that emphasized what was ”true in the school but not true in
Russian society.” Yet in his pedagogical reasoning, David did not subscribe to
the view that drawing ”lessons from history” represents a misuse of the

III

discipline, as Craig (1989) lamented in regard to politicians tendency to
universalize particular problems by force-fitting them into overarching historical
or dialectical patterns and then using such ’patterns’ to justify policy and
strategy” (p. 116). As a teacher of ninth-graders, David expressed a ”personal
bent” toward using history to ”learning something about your world today.”
This is the reason he created the analogy and aimed his lessons toward the
political spectrum as a ”universal model,” applicable to events across time and
place. Although David was aware that some historians argue against the practice
as a form of presentism, he regarded the process of generalizing to be an

important feature of students’ mental engagement with history:

How do I go from the content of the [Communist] Revolution into a concept
that they . . . take and apply it and say it has some universality - to be able to
use it in other contexts. Like whenever a kid says ”T his is

like--” I get horribly excited. . . . because then you know their minds are
taking whatever it is you’re doing and applying it to something. And the
next step is saying ”Is there something here, since I’ve noticed it came up
twice, are there other examples where it may fit into, where it’s a universal
truth or a generalization I can use? . . . . If you allow for exceptions [to the
generalizations] then kids begin to create a pattern of what fits. . . . It’s hard

to get there though, really hard. (ROA ll; 4 / 16/ 99)

After the lively discussion about social inequality at Sycamore High School,
David divided the class into groups representing Bolsheviks, Mensheviks and the
others, assigned the relevant textbook pages, equipped each group with paper
and crayons and gave instructions to create posters showing " how you will
overthrow your student government, based on what your party believes."
David believed the pyramid representation had set the stage for students to
"critically think and make connections on their own." Now students would have

to apply the textbook’s descriptions of party leaders, visions, methods and

142

timing to the points of view held by the various high school groups. The
activity required students to imagine they were - not freshmen - but members of
a Russian political party overthrowing the Sycamore student government.

However, the activity did not work exactly as David envisioned. Although
students seemed eager to get to work, within a few minutes, he detected
problems. Most groups ignored the textbook depictions and drew posters
advocating some form of torture or murder of the student council presidents -
without reference to the particular ideological beliefs of the group they were
representing. Thus, their posters depicted freshmen, burnouts and losers of the
school arresting, burning or blowing up the student council. David noticed this
and said loudly: "You have to get out your books. Do you know all this
information?"

David had intended the pyramid representation to serve as "a step in
between" students’ experience and the historical content. The analogy that he
depicted on the board was something for students to refer to as they applied
Russian political parties’ beliefs to Sycamore’s social structure. But David under-
estimated the power of students' prior experience. The pyramid representation
had suggested that freshmen were like Russian serfs. So, students interpreted
the poster-making activity from the perspective of "serfs." As ninth-graders at
the bottom of the pyramid, they naturally identified most with revolutionary
groups attempting to overthrow the czar. When they drew posters of freshmen
killing seniors, they were simply using the historical empathy David had
intentionally triggered the previous day. Instead of scolding students for not
using the textbooks, David could have stayed closer to the point of continuity.
He could have encouraged students to do what they were inclined to do
anyway: create the most extreme revolutionary governments seeking to
overturn the social hierarchy. Perhaps after they did so, they would be ready to

examine the actual consequences of the Communist Revolution, in which radical

143

changes resulted in more, rather than less, repressive policies toward serfs.

However, David interpreted students' disinterest in the textbook definitions
of political ideologies as a problem. His goal was for them to learn the
information in the textbook and it appeared that his attempt to use the pyramid
representation toward this end had failed. So he reverted to a transmission style
of instruction, drilling students on the basic facts about the Russian groups:

David: The czar is giving the Duma its power. The czar’stpower is
unlimited, so it’ 5 really fake power he’s giving to e Duma.

Student: Yeah, and that’s how it is in this school.

David: So this is the bourgeoisie sparking the revolution. Why is the
Duma made up of the bourgeoisie? Who are the bourgeoisie?

Student: Factory workers.
David: Doctors, lawyers, professionals. Serfs are not in the Duma.

Student: So the juniors would overthrow the seniors. And make the
freshmen think they have more power but they don’t.

David: The Duma wanted a constitutional monarchy. They would allow
[the seniors] to remain in control, but their power would be
limited. The rest of the power goes to the Duma. (2nd; 4 / 19 / 99)

Instead of developing the representation in terms of the continuity between
students and subject matter, David became concerned with transmitting subject
matter. He did not use the Russia-Sycamore analogy, even when some students
tried to raise the connection. In the end, David concluded that he had made the
activity too ”subjective” when in reality there was ”a wrong answer:”

I always want to be careful. Even though I say this is subjective, there is a
wrong way to do this. There is a wrong answer. And so what I wanted
them to do was to read, say, the beliefs of the Bolsheviks, what did they
stand for, what did they believe should happen in the revolution and then
they could go directly to that chart [the pyramid] and say here are the serfs,
so we want the freshmen and these other groups to be our revolution. I had
that on the board intentionally . . . it was a step in between. They should be
able to take [the Russian groups] and look directly at the board and say this
is the [Sycamore group]. So when I heard that everyone wanted the
freshmen to overthrow [the Sycamore student government], that's not
right, that's wrong in a couple of cases. That's not what the Mensheviks

144

wanted and that's not what the Duma wanted. (ROA II, 4 / 16/ 99)

A similar thing happened in the American Revolution lessons. In order to
generate a list of causes and effects of the American Revolution (which were not
included in the World History textbook), David counted on students’ prior
knowledge. After all, they had taken US. History the previous year. His plan
was to assign categories - such as ”economic” or ”social” — and have students
write down on an index card one cause of the American Revolution that fit under
their assigned category. He liked the activity because it taught about multiple
causation:

That's an historian's skill - to categorize, synthesize and analyze, tear causes
apart and group them into categories to see how they're connected and
interconnected. If you can't see multiple causes of events in history, then
you aren't at the stage of an historian. (Post-Ob I, 12 / 18 / 98)

However, when his first period students returned to class the following day,
index cards in hand, David was taken by surprise. Nearly every student had
written the same cause: ”taxation.” This uniformity of response was not getting
at the idea of multiple causation and David realized the problem. His students
obviously did not remember as much from their eighth grade US. History
course as he assumed. Now what to do? He had planned to categorize multiple
causes of the American Revolution according to the headings he had posted on
the board and then move on to talk about the Articles of Confederation and the
US. Constitution, which, perhaps also mistakenly, he had assumed would be
familiar. By the end of the hour, David had planned to have students identify the
pendulum swing pattern in preparation for applying it to the French and
Industrial Revolutions.

Just as he did when he realized students had not learned the textbook
information about Russian political groups, David adopted a transmission mode
of instruction to provide students with the lists of causes. He became a geyser of

information, adding cause after cause to the list until there were nine. This was,

145

he believed, information students would need before they could comprehend
the revolutionary theory. And, although he had originally planned to have
students ”inductively discover” the revolutionary dialectic, he changed his goals
after the first lesson. When he realized students simply did not have the
background knowledge he anticipated, he decided to ”order it for them:”

So rather than struggling with ideas, we were battling content. Like with
short term and long term effects, they didn't have the knowled e to reorder
and reorganize it. Historians face that. You have data and you ave to
organize it. . . But they didn't have the basic data, so I was giving them
information and ordering it for them." (Post-Ob I, 12 / 18 / 98)

After the unit was over, David’s reflections focused on regrets related to his
students’ lack of background knowledge:

I'm not blaming middle school teachers, but I just don't think they got it.
They didn't make the connection that our government is in England, that we
were sort of second cousins, that whole issue of mercantilism which I
decided to skirt completely, that the poor weren't often taxed but had to pay

prices. It's complicated, but not too hard for ninth graders. (Post Ob I,
12/18/98)

He blamed himself: “Considering that l was counting on prior knowledge, I
should have checked more carefully.” He regretted asking students to generate
causes and effects on their own, because this "was a lot more than I could chew, a
lot more than I'd wanted to do with the kids. . . it was a can of worms but
without enough worms in it." His original plan had been to spend one day
teaching about the American Revolution. Instead, the lessons lasted four days
which made him feel rushed to get through the French and Industrial
Revolutions in order to keep the unit within four weeks, which was the
maximum time he could afford to spend. Next time, David declared, he will not
ask students to generate causes and effects on their own: ”I’ll give them the
causes and they figure out the categories . . . . But this could turn into a whole
unit on the American Revolution if I’m not careful. . . . So [I'll] abbreviate the
whole thing into one lesson, all in one day.”

Unlike Julia, even with his unfamiliar topic David could teach students about

146

 

 

H

 

aspects of the nature of history, such as the limitations of relating past and
present, because he was familiar with contextual details that set Russian society
apart from his students’ experience. He had also developed a pedagogical view
of relevant historiographic issues, treating the process of universalizing as an
important feature of students’ mental engagement with history, even though
some historians are more cautious about encouraging students to ”extract a
lesson for today.” In comparison to Julia, David seemed more committed to
maintaining the focus of his units on historical content, perhaps because of his
beliefs and knowledge.

But in both units, David over-estimated students’ prior knowledge or their
attraction to using their own experience rather than the textbook. They had not
utilized the textbook definitions of Russian political ideologies; they had treated
the activity as ”subjective” when in fact there was ”a wrong answer.” He did
not’ t want to ”blame the middle school teachers,” but he was taken by surprise:
his ninth graders had no apparent conceptual understanding of the American
Revolution; they could recall only that ”taxation” was a cause; they could not
generate an effect beyond the revolution itself. When David realized his error,
he abandoned his initial plans designed to involve students more actively in
developing historical understanding and resorted to recitation-style instruction.
He took the reins of discussion, in order to deliver the information his students
apparently lacked.

Under the circumstances, the approach made sense. David had not
anticipated the situation and he reasoned that students needed basic factual

Ill

information in order to make sense of the units overarching themes.” But the
end result was that, instead of Russian political parties or causes and effects of the
American Revolution serving as prerequisite knowledge, tools for constructing
historical meaning, they became the instructional goal. The political spectrum

and revolutionary stages theory became more pieces of information to be

147

”ordered.” David only realized afterwards that he should have ”checked more
carefully” and assessed students prior knowledge before making the
assignment. But it is unclear what David might have done differently if he had
pre-assessed his students’ understanding of the American Revolution. Next
time, he plans to assume that students’ background knowledge is weak and
provide the information they need in a one-day lesson. The lesson he appeared
to learn from the Communist Revolution unit was that he needs to be clearer
with students about when an assignment is subjective and when it is not, rather
than a lesson about using students’ subjectivity as a tool for developing historical
understanding.
Learning aboutLontentandSmdentsinPractice

Both David and Julia were more selective in their use of textbooks with
familiar topics than with unfamiliar topics. Therefore, we might expect that
David - who had some knowledge of the Communist Revolution - to be more
selective in his textbook use than Julia - who remembered almost nothing about
the Progressive Era. In fact, the reverse was true. David felt responsible to
teach about Lenin, Stalin and command economy even though he hadn’t yet
figured out how those facts fit together into a meaningful narrative:

Right in the middle of teaching it, I'd . . . come across this terminology and
stuff [in the textbook] and I thought "Geez, I totally missed this, I haven't
mentioned anything about these parties. " So I'd say something about the
parties, then "Oh my God, Stalin's five year plan and collectivization - I didn't
teach them anything about that. . . . Oh shoot, I have to fit this in somehow
because this is the place they have it in there. We have to talk about the
command economy right now, otherwise where will this appear again?"
(Post-Ob II, 54-99)

It bothered David enormously that the textbook contained terminology and
factual content with which he was unfamiliar. He felt obligated to teach what
was in the textbook. Even after twice teaching about the Communist
Revolution, David considered his knowledge of the time period inadequate.

One reason David differed from Julia in his use of the textbook for his

148

unfamiliar unit was his conception of what constitutes sufficient historical
knowledge for teaching. There was a felt difficulty built into David’s subject
matter understanding that led him to frequent used bookstores, collect historical
texts on topics in his curriculum and commit himself to evaluate historical
significance in light of scholarly accounts. For example, he felt his knowledge of
the Communist Revolution was inadequate because it was largely ”anecdotal” -
based on historical fiction and films. In order to be able to teach ”valuable”
content, David believed he needed to read scholarly accounts of history, to
discover the facts historians rely upon to construct their narratives. In the
meantime, he perceived an obligation to trust the facts provided by the
textbook. Julia expressed no such felt difficulty in regard to her historical
knowledge. She gave no indication that, after teaching a topic once, her
knowledge was inadequate or that she would seek out additional resources.

To understand this difference, we must consider David’s and Julia’s prior
experiences with subject matter. David fell in love with history at a young age
while Julia found history meaningless until she discovered its connection to her
experience as a biracial woman. David became interested in a wide range of
historical topics, while Julia’s interests centered on civil rights history and
contemporary social issues. David enjoyed his encounters with historical texts,
while, with a few exceptions, Julia didn’t particularly care for the assigned
reading in college. Thus, David’s historical knowledge and beliefs are such that
he is more likely than Julia to keep learning history as he teaches.

But David is more similar to Julia in regard to learning about his students
from practice. Like Julia, his interactions with students around content tended to
reinforce his inclination to treat students’ prior understandings as problems to be
corrected. His belief that students held misconceptions and wrong ideas
supported a practice in which his role was to present correct information. For

example, in David’s first lesson about the American Revolution, he created a

149

representation involving a hypothetical election (in which he identified students

as candidates and voters). His purpose was to dispel the anticipated ”self-

congratulatory view of history” by pointing out to students that the American

system of government wasn’t as democratic as they might have thought:

David:

LeAnn:

David:

Corey:
David:

Jack:
David:

LeAnn:

David:

Jaclc

We say we vote for the presidency - people believe that -
but the truth is, you don’t. Never has a vote been cast
directly for the president by an American citizen, we don’t
vote directly. There’s a group - a shadow group - that
most people don’t know about, called the electoral college.

Only once or twice has the electoral college voted different
from us.

Whoa, whoa, let me explain something. When we vote
for Clinton or Dole, we are actually voting for a group of
people called electors and it is they that vote.

Why don’t we vote for the electors?

We’ll talk about that in a second. The question is, what
does the electoral college do? It actually chooses the
president, they can choose anyone they want to--Mickey
Mouse if they want to, it doesn’t have to be someone on
the ballot. Usually they follow what we want; if we all
vote for Clinton, then they vote for Clinton. But they are
totally independent. Why? What does this say about
what they believed about the American People? Let’s say
we chose Adolf Hitler for our president, he’s like ”Ein
Volk, Ein Reich ” and we vote for him. What’s the role of
the electoral college? To stop our choice for the good of
the country. We don’t vote for the president, we vote for
the electoral college.

We're screwed either way.

Because of this system, the electors have always chosen
the president we elected, so far.

No. who was it who--

Hold on, hold on. They confused you. . . . [Goes on to
explain how electors are chosen and when they cast their
votes].

With this electoral college, I don’t know who it was who

said we should be able to pick our leaders , and if they
don’t change things, shouldn’t we revolt and-

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David: That’ s Locke. He says if you don’t get a government that
protects your rights, you have the right to revolt. . . . How
democratic is our system?

Marty: Why does it matter?

David: Why does it matter? Because we say we’re a democracy
and in a democracy you’re supposed to choose your own
leaders.

Marty: So are you encouraging us to revolt?

David: No, I’m asking you are we a democracy? (4th; 11 / 18 / 98)

David’s purpose in using the electoral college representation was to cause
students to rethink their assumptions about the US. system of democracy. But
none of his students seemed particularly shocked at David’s implication that the
government may not be such a glowing example of democracy after all. LeAnn
already knew about the electoral college. Jack noted that whether citizens voted
directly for the president or not, the country was ”screwed.” Marty wondered
why David was even raising the issue. Afterwards, David worried that he had
gone too far in creating disillusionment:

There is a point to voting. We can still influence our government. I know
there’s bitterness here because you’re being disillusioned, but the reality is
that this is how the government is actually structured. So if you understand
that, then you know what you’re doing. (4th; 11/18/98)

However, these were David’s fourth period students, the same ones who had no
trouble accepting the notion of power inequities. This particular group of
students typically reacted with more cynicism and savvy than David’s second
period class to issues dealing with politics, social conventions and human nature.
Although David didn’t appear to interpret the situation this way, it wasn’t so
much that he created disillusionment as that he provided an occasion in which his
fourth period students revealed their prior conceptions, which, as it appeared,
may have been quite removed from his entering belief that all students carried

the same misconception. And yet David interpreted the discussion as an

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intervention in which he provided new information.

Neither did David’s pedagogical understanding of history help him out
when it came to working with Stephen, an African-American student whom
David described as "at risk, on the edge." Stephen frequently rested his head on
the desk. He was a "school of choice" student which meant that he lived in an
urban school district but applied to attend Sycamore because of its reputation.
David surmised that Stephen ”didn’t have all the tools he needs to be successful,
[such as] turning your homework in on time, going home and actually doing
assignments, taking notes in class, little things about how to be a student. Those
things lead to success and we generally reward them with success." David called
him "a nice kid" but predicted that "if he continues with what he has done in the
past, he's not going to make it, he's not going to graduate."

In the Communist Revolution unit, David had created an assignment in
which students were to write "ten sentences on where you fall in terms of your
beliefs along the political spectrum," Stephen wrote:

I don't think I fit into politics period. The only reasons I have to support my
perspection is that politicians lie. There is nothing worse than lieing for
money. Plus my religion teaches me not to lie. I know I could be forgiven
but I'd rather not take that chance. I know that they lie for sure. Here's an
example for 1. you can't tell the people what the want without lieing
because people want to much. 2. People today don't respect the truthful
ones the think they do, but they are deceived. 3. And if you do lie or commit
any other personal crime you will be persecuted for it. (Student work;

4 / 20/ 99; phrasing and misspellings unaltered)

David was quite critical of Stephen's essay. He believed that it revealed that
Stephen did not understand the point of the assignment and tried to bluff his
way through:

I would say he totally missed the point. "I don't fit into politics period," that's
fine, but your beliefs still fit along this spectrum. Even being anti-politician
fits on that spectrum. I think he didn't get it. When I read aragraphs like
that, a big part of me wonders: is it a snowball job? Did ey not
understand the assignment, the olitical perspectives, so they're going to
answer something to do with w at we were talkin about? It's like if you
ask someone to write about their favorite pet and ey write about their last
vacation. I don't get it, the connection isn't being made. (Post-Ob II, 5/ 4/ 99)

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It didn’t seem to occur to David that Stephen’s response may have provided
insight into Stephen’s view of the political process, a view which may influence
his interpretation of terms like ”conservative” and ”liberal,” as well as counter
what David earlier identified as ”a self-congratulatory view” of the democratic
system. Instead, David focused his evaluation on the issue of whether or not
Stephen did a ”snowball job,” a deliberate attempt to avoid answering the
assigned question.

Although David was able to recognize gaps in his historical knowledge, he
was less inclined to do so with his knowledge of students. Perhaps, like Julia, he
believed he had sufficient knowledge of students because he considered his own
memories as a learner a valid substitute for lack of teaching experience. Another
possible explanation may have to do with the nature of beginning teaching, in
which novices are learning to manage their newly-bestowed authority vis-a-vis
their students. One way to manage this authority is through content: assuming
that students’ prior knowledge is deficient and misinformed, it makes sense to
control the flow of information from teacher to student. David could be clear
about his role in the classroom as the bearer of new, correct information as long
as he interpreted students’ comments as indications of their "self-congratulatory
views” and ”snowball jobs.”

Conclusions about David

The observation I made in regard to Julia seems to hold true for David as
well: more detailed, fact-based historical knowledge and knowledge of
alternative historical interpretations provides advantages when it comes to
transforming content. David held this kind of knowledge for large portions of
both units and he used that knowledge to supplement the textbook, select
narratives to frame his units, support the narratives with concrete images and
descriptive detail, anticipate student misconceptions and respond to the

unexpected with additional lessons and representations.

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There were features of David’s historical knowledge that were missing or
weak in Julia’s knowledge. He could teach students about aspects of the nature
of history, such as the limitations of relating past and present, because he was
familiar with contextual details which set Russian society apart from his students’
lived experience and because he was familiar with relevant historiographic issues
in the discipline of history. He had also developed a pedagogical view of
relevant historiographic issues, treating the process of universalizing as an
important feature of students’ mental engagement with history, even though
some historians are more cautious about encouraging students to ”extract a
lesson for today.” Whereas Julia’s subject matter beliefs made her inclined to
ignore content that did not fit her narrative and shift the focus of her units from
historical to sociological content, David’s subject matter beliefs had the opposite
effect. He had fallen in love with history as an early age - particularly intellectual
history - and he wanted his students to develop this same love for chronology,
context and abstract ideas that shape historical events. Thus, he tended to be
self-critical of his own historical knowledge and quite committed to maintaining
the focus of his units on the historical content.

David’s pedagogical understanding of history was more developed than
Julia’s. In contrast to Julia, he seemed more willing to have students play an
active role in recreating a unit’s ”overarching theme.” Regardless of whether he
was teaching a familiar or unfamiliar topic, he began his lessons by first eliciting
some aspect of relevant student experience. Then he tried to bridge these
experiences and the themes of the political spectrum or revolutionary dialectic by
identifying basic facts pertaining to a representative case: the political agendas of
Russian revolutionary groups or the causes and effects of the American
Revolution. He planned to have students look for patterns and apply the
generalizations to other cases, although he abandoned this part of the lesson
when he realized that students had not yet mastered the factual information.

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Perhaps it was not simply David’s historical knowledge that contributed to his
grasp of continuities between subject matter and students. Since he had taught
each topic once before, he did not have to teach himself about the relevant
content to the extent Julia did. He could focus his planning around identifying
points of overlap between subject matter and students and designing
representations intended to more actively involve students.

The result was a set of lessons that facilitated a kind of student engagement
with content that we did not see in Julia’s teaching. David’s students worked in
groups to generate and depict their ideas about revolution using paper and
crayons. He gave them index cards on which they tried to describe multiple
causes of the American Revolution. Such representations suggest that David
considered his students to hold at least some prior knowledge upon which they
could draw as a resource for learning. But this was the exception rather than the
rule in David’s teaching. Like Julia, David seemed more inclined to perceive
deficiencies than possibilities in students’ understandings. In both units, he
abandoned his initial plans to have students recreate his unit theme. Instead, he
took the reins of discussion in order to deliver the information his students had
apparently failed to acquire. Perhaps one explanation for this lies in the nature of
beginning teaching, in which novices are learning to manage their pedagogical
authority. David could be clear about his role in the classroom as the bearer of
authoritative information as long as he focused primarily on students’ deficits.

Toward Understanding Historical Knowledge
in Beginning Teaching

Transformation, as described at the beginning of this chapter, is built on the
presumption that the most appropriate representations are those which mediate
between the raw, present-oriented experiences of students and formulated,
organized disciplinary content. David and Julia were highly-regarded beginning
teachers, graduates of a teacher preparation program which - unlike most -

required a disciplinary major and a year-long internship. And yet, for the most

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part, their practice did not meet the standard; they did not transform content so
much as they transmitted it.

The analysis of their practice revealed that more familiar content knowledge
did not necessarily translate into more sustained use of students’ experience and
ideas as a teaching resource. In fact, the more Julia and David knew about their
content, the more likely they were to deliver content in the form of extended
monologues and recitation-style instruction. Three variables that may affect
novices’ attempts to connect students and subject matter are related to features
of beginning practice. Naturally, novices have undeveloped knowledge of what
young learners know, don’t know and can comprehend. We might expect
beginning teachers’ knowledge to develop as they interact with students,
particularly around occasions in which students react in unexpected ways. But
novices’ beliefs about students’ prior knowledge - which substitute for their
temporary lack of experience — may intervene. Their beliefs may be
generalizations novices construct from their own memories of having
misconceptions challenged. As such, these beliefs are compelling, perhaps
shaping how novices are likely to interpret students’ ideas and limiting what
novices are likely to learn about students from practice.

A second variable is that when novices are communicating subject matter for
the first time, they may be primarily teaching themselves, surfacing their own
content knowledge, and figuring out the ”big theme of the unit.” If beginning
teachers are occupied with the important task of uncovering their own
knowledge, it is understandably difficult to pay attention simultaneously to
students’ constructions of meaning. Third, beginning teachers are faced with the
task of managing a new role in which they possess authority to influence what
happens to their students. They may attempt to manage their newly-bestowed
authority by ”ordering information.” One working assumption to aid them in

this effort is the notion that students’ prior knowledge is primarily a problem to

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be overcome rather than a resource for transforming content.

In the next chapter, I analyze these three variables more closely in an effort
to highlight aspects of beginning teachers’ knowledge and beliefs that make it
difficult to transform content in the normative way I have described. However,
the cases of David and Julia are not only illustrative of what is difficult for
novices; the cases also provide a glimpse into what is possible. This is so because
there were exceptions to the pattern of transmitting content; in a few instances,
David and Julia created representations which, to some extent, treated students’
prior experience and ideas as a starting point for instruction. When David
planned to have students recreate narratives or models by first manipulating
historical data, when he asked students to compare social inequality at Sycamore
High School and in Russian society and when Julia invited students to close their
eyes and ”imagine a politician,” they were transforming historical knowledge
with the ”needs and doings” of ninth graders in mind. By considering these
representations more closely in the next chapter, we may identify specific
features of historical knowledge that are pedagogically significant in the context
of beginning teaching.

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Chapter 5
HISTORICAL KNOWLEDGE FOR BEGINNING TEACHING

In Chapter 1, I outlined the research problem guiding this study. In order to
understand and theorize about what beginning social studies teachers need to
know about their content as they leave teacher education, I argued that we
needed to develop our understandings of the nature of content knowledge in
beginning practice. The cases of Julia and David provided insight into features of
historical knowledge and beliefs that may help novices transform content, as
well as features of beginning practice that may make it difficult for novices to
attend to their students’ learning. The purpose of this chapter is to theorize, first
about pedagogically powerful features of historical knowledge and, secondly,
about aspects of beginning practice which are relevant to content
transformation.

Historical Knowledge for Teaching
For some of their instructional representations, David’s and Julia’s

pedagogical reasoning exhibited a kind of historical knowledge that was less
evident elsewhere in their teaching.1 David’s Social Pyramid and Julia’s Imagine
a Politician representations reflected their ability to recognize some aspect of

historical content which was continuous with some aspect of students’ present

experience. David, for example, created a representation in which students

 

1 As I have done throughout this study, I am usin the term ”knowledge”in
the sense pro osed by Fenstermacher (1994). Althoug the historical knowledge
I describe in '5 chapter does not meet the epistemic warrant of ”justified true
belief,” it does meet the ”good reasons” standard. In other words, I do not
believe David and Julia were consciously aware of all their uses of historical
knowledge; I do not believe they held this knowled e as propositional
statements of belief. However, both indicated that t ey were pleased with the
representations they created and would use them again to facilitate student
understanding. They referred to the fact that these representations ”related to
students’ lives.” I would argue that by providing good reasons and empirical
evidence (Fenstermacher’s criteria), David and Julia were making ”practical
arguments” and to do so were drawing upon knowledge, including historical
knowledge.

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compared their own experience with the experiences of Russians before the
Revolution, and then used that comparison to apply knowledge of the six
political parties to a hypothetical revolution at their own school. The knowledge
that David used to construct this representation was something other than
”scientific subject matter.” It was historical knowledge for teaching: knowledge
of ideological conflict as a force behind historical events; knowledge of Russian
serfs and czars as central characters in a story about revolutionary change;
knowledge that social hierarchies did not just exist in 19th century Russia but in
his ninth-graders’ experience as well.

Julia created a similar kind of representation in her Civil Rights Movement
unit, although she did not have time to think through her representation
beforehand. She invented the Imagine a Politician representation in a matter of
seconds, when students surprised her with the perception that there was no
difference between Black Power and White Power. Like David, Julia did not
simply use her ”scientific subject matter” at this point. Rather, to create this
representation Julia used historical knowledge for teaching: knowledge about
race and power as forces in history; knowledge of the Black Panthers as central
characters in a story about civil rights; knowledge that the experience of Black
Panthers - the limitations they perceived to be imposed on them by the
dominant class and perpetuated by the media - was continuous with messages
her own students encountered in their social worlds.

In these examples, David’s and Julia’s historical knowledge for teaching
exhibits three interrelated elements: knowledge of historical forces, historical
narrative, and historical imagination. I have chosen these terms deliberately
because they appear in the historiographic literature as key concepts in historical
research. In the process of building historical explanations, historians attend to
the impact of social forces on institutions and groups (historical forces), impose
clarity on events by weaving relevant details into coherent narratives (historical

narrative), and use their own feelings and experiences to enter into past events

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(historical imagination). Although historians and history teachers differ in their
purposes, exploring each of these three concepts in more depth may help to
illuminate specific features of historical knowledge that are potentially
pedagogically powerful.
Historicalliorces

In practicing their craft, historians are not merely interested in
understanding the influence of individuals on history. Rather, historians are
trained to view the big picture and notice the larger forces acting upon
individuals - including economic, social, political, religious, technological and
ideological processes. Gustavson (1955) suggests that, although such forces
affect our daily lives, most people are unaware of their influence:

We think of the historical forces in the most simple terms of leading political
figures, Congress, Republicans, Democrats and so on. But these are the
manifestations of a less obvious reality which, in fact, determines the events
that pass before us. The energies and forces which play upon the
established institutions assail our senses all the time, are ever-existent, yet
form only a confused, meaningless, and scarcely observed series of
impressions unless we have additional training. (p. 25)

While historians use research techniques to detect and assess the impact of
historical forces on institutions and groups, history teachers may use their
knowledge of historical forces to create instructional representations. They may
begin with their own socially-constructed historical explanations, or what
VanSledright (1998) calls "historical positionalitiesz"

By position I mean what some call the thinker’s frame of reference on which
s/ he bases an understanding of the past, or in other words, the person’s
implicit theory about how things past hang together with things present
and make relative sense. (p. 8)

Both Julia and David refer to social forces to explain ”how things past hang
together with things present.” Julia views history in terms of social activist
movements and the forces of socialization in shaping attitudes, which in turn
influence actions and events. She likes ”to connect past to the present” because:

[Wlhen I am looking at the negative, it helps me to understand [that] it has
only been thirty-three years since segregation laws in the South ended. So if

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you think about it that way, we have made a lot of strides and how can you
expect someone who was racist thirty-three years ago to wake up one day
and say ”Oh, the law says I’m not supposed to do that so I’m not going to
anymore.” So that’ 5 why I like to connect past [realities] to the present. (CK
I, 12/ 10/ 98)

From the view of social forces acting upon individuals, it seems less surprising to
Julia that "the lower class is still having a hard time" and "people are still
prejudiced.” In fact, Julia is reluctant to focus her teaching on ”descriptions of
characters,” unless she can use their stories to teach a ”lesson about society.”
Thus, although she mentioned Upton Sinclair, she did so only to illustrate the
”whole belief system in reforming” that she perceived as an historical force. She
mentioned Bobby Seale and Huey Newton to underscore the notion that power
inequalities impact historical events.

For David, history is a drama in which ideas like humanism, Darwinism, and
Marxism take center stage more often than individuals or events. When he
taught about the Russian serfs or the American revolutionaries, for example, he
didn’t describe individuals so much as the ideological forces - political views and
assumptions about human nature - which shaped their actions:

My ideas about what is worthy [to learn] come out of my humanities
background. Ideas are the thing that I emphasize the most. [My students]
are going to forget who Pizarro is, I don't care. But if they remember what
humanism is, that means a lot to me. . . because those ideas are mind-
expanding, applicable and useful in life in general. (Autobio, 10/ 21 / 98)

When historians consider the impact of social forces on the past, a common
pattern they attend to is social conflict. The impact of social forces at any given
time is usually uneven: some groups may benefit at the expense of others;
groups within the same society or community may hold diametrically opposed
beliefs. Both David and Julia understood social conflict as a fundamental feature
of history. David understood that ideological conflict could explain a range of
past and present events, including the Communist Revolution, subsequent
changes in the structure of Soviet government, and the current ”American

system [which has] a variety of interest groups and people with different

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approaches, different political parties.” Julia understood that there was not one
Civil Rights Movement, but two, with regional differences between north and
south based on economic forces that pre-dated the Civil War.

With their knowledge of historical forces, including the awareness of social
conflict, David and Julia were able to create instructional representations. The
political spectrum represented the range of ideological views David wanted his
students to identify. The social pyramid represented the influence of economic
forces on the Communist Revolution. Julia’s Imagine a Politician representation
was her attempt to convey the impact of race and power in the past and present.

As pedagogically useful as knowledge of historical forces may be, teachers
run the risk of unintentionally communicating the message that there is no such
thing as human agency, that events are solely determined by impersonal forces.
Most historians these days are wary of two extremes: treating individuals as
mere pawns on the one hand and over-emphasizing the actions of a few ”great
men” on the other:

The Great Man theory comes naturally to us. Historical figures evoke our
interest, sympathy or hate far more than the impersonal functioning of
government machinery or the abstract interplay of economic forces.
History consists of stories and stories must have heroes and villains. . . . In
contrast to this conception of ”supermen” are the various theories of the
determinists. These often leave little more room for individual choice than
the possibility of gauging correctly the direction in which history is moving
and then ”leading” in that direction. . . . Each side has something to offer.
The Great Man theory . . . leaves room for free will and makes of history a
genuine struggle whose issue remains in doubt. The other side emphasizes
the dependence of a person upon outside factors. (Gustavson, 1955. p. 124)

Although Gustavson, an historian, asserts that ”the Great Man theory comes
naturally,” Julia and David tended to prefer historical explanations based upon
”outside factors.” As David explained, such explanations served particular
pedagogical purposes:

Sometimes as a teacher I’m pulled in different directions and I try to remind
myself in the back of my head that you only have so much on can teach.
Try to make it stuff that they’re going to be able to use or at they’re going
to see again . . . . Who cares about the Mensheviks, except as they

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[represent] moderate conservatives on the spectrum? (ROA II, 4 / 16 / 99)

Neither Julia nor David spent much time in their lessons on historical acts of free
will, whether by ”great men” or ordinary individuals. True, they mentioned
figures like Frances Perkins and Theodore Roosevelt, Bobby Seale and Malcolm
X, Rasputin and Lenin, Hobbes and Locke, but their primary emphasis was on
the ways in which impersonal forces influenced the course of history. One
possible consequence was that their students may have interpreted historical
forces as deterministic: socialization determines values and attitudes; social
position determines political ideology.

However, one significant difference between the two teachers was that on
several occasions, David displayed both his awareness that he tended to focus on
”universal themes” and his knowledge that this could be a problem. Julia
seemed oblivious to this aspect of her teaching. Although as a novice David
tended to teach what he believed to be ”most worthy to learn,” he was conscious
of the need for ”balance:”

Being able to transfer ideas, being able to understand patterns [in history] is
a very important thing. The detail makes no sense or little sense without
the pattern. . . . But I wouldn’t say that I only teach patterns, because I don’t
think that’s effective either. That’s just as bad as any other extreme. You
have to allow for exceptions to the rule. . . . I’m a big balance person. I hate
to commit to any one method or way of interpretation. My fear would be of
over-simplifying things. Just like I would beware of single causation.
[That’s] a horrible mistake in history, to look at anything through a single
lens or theme. (Post-Ob H, 5/ 4/ 99)

Besides his knowledge of historical forces, David exhibited ”historical-
mindedness” a ”way of thinking, a form of reasoning when dealing with
historical materials and present-day problems” (Gustavson, 1955, p. 5). To be
historically-minded requires knowledge of historiographic issues or tensions.
One such tension lies between ”Great Man” and deterministic theories. Another
tension lies in negotiating the relationship between past and present. While
historical events need to be understood from the viewpoint of those who lived

them, the past cannot be understood entirely apart from the vantage point of the

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present. Another tension exists between the notions of continuity and change:
the past is still at work in the present and yet societies are perpetually
undergoing a change process. David’s desire for ”balance” may be related to his
knowledge of the issues historians think about - his historical-mindedness.
HistoriraLNarratiye

Historians are story-tellers. Their research aims toward weaving relevant
details and facts into coherent, meaningful narratives. This process is
fundamental to historical understanding because, as Mink (1978) points out,
without narrative one is left with either a pile of concrete detail or a collection of
sweeping generalizations:

On the one hand, there are all the occurrences of the world - at least all that
we may directly experience or inferentially know about - in their concrete
particularity. On the other is an ideally theoretical understanding of those
occurrences that would treat each as nothing other than a replicable instance
of a systematically interconnected set of generalizations. But between these
extremes, narrative is the form in which we make comprehensible the many
successive interrelationships that are comprised by [an occurrence]. . . .

Narrative . . is a primary and irreducible form of human comprehension. (p.
132)

Mink describes narrative as a ”cognitive instrument,” which implies it may
serve pedagogical purposes. Indeed, history teachers’ concern to organize facts
in a way that is memorable and engaging to learners resembles the historians’
need to ”make comprehensible the many successive interrelationships that are
comprised by [an occurrence]” (p. 132). That is why it may be useful to history
teachers to organize their historical knowledge into narrative form in order to
present history to their students as story:

Story gives a context for data. Names, dates, legislation, places, struggles,
and choices have meanin as the building blocks of the story. . . . [A story]
can be the peg upon whic innumerable pieces of factual information are
hung.” (Ribar, 1989, p. 290)

One feature of David’s and Julia’s historical knowledge for teaching was its
narrative organization. When David planned his Communist Revolution unit, he

reasoned like a storyteller. The events associated with the revolution had to be

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held together by more than mere chronology; the social pyramid became the
introduction to a story about oppressed peasants, a wealthy few and middle-
class intellectuals competing for power. Similarly, Julia planned to tell a story
about the Civil Rights Movement in which northern and southern blacks
developed conflicting approaches toward fighting injustice. She was able to
spontaneously create the Imagine a Politician representation in part because she
had already chosen the story she wanted to tell.

In considering David and Julia’s knowledge of historical narratives, several
salient points emerge: the role of facts; the role of the historian; and the
existence of multiple narratives. For the most part, David and Julia relied on
narratives that bore some resemblance to historical interpretations they
encountered in college. But across their familiar and unfamiliar topics, there
were differences. With familiar topics, they knew a topic-specific narrative; with
their unfamiliar topics, they had more general ones.

In terms of their actual practice, this difference was only significant in Julia’s
case because of the role of facts in relating narratives. Julia’s thin knowledge of
specific details related to the Progressive Era led her to accept a ”history as
progress” narrative and make vague assertions unsupported by concrete images
or descriptive detail. She could not effectively counter the propensity to treat
historical events as inevitable because she could not illustrate her point with
reference, for example, to specific influences on people like Upton Sinclair and
W.E.B. Dubois. On the other hand, when Julia knew historical details, such as the
trial of Bobby Seale, she was able to avoid these particular problems. David had
a better grasp of historical detail even for his unfamiliar unit. Throughout his
teaching, he was able to provide his students with ”the peg upon which
innumerable pieces of factual information are hung.” (Ribar, 1989, p. 290).

This finding suggests that, in addition to holding knowledge of historical
forces and knowledge of narratives for organizing specific topics for instruction,

there is no substitute for knowledge of historical facts. Facts make stories come

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alive, they provide concrete points of reference for teaching about abstract social
forces and historical ways of thinking. But the cases of David and Julia also
suggest that ensuring beginning teachers leave their preparation programs with
factual knowledge is not a simple matter of exposing them to more content.
Certainly Julia had listened to lectures about the Progressive Era, perhaps even
read about the topic in college. But by and large, her prior experiences had led
her to perceive the content as ”fact-oriented names and dates” and regard
herself as ”not a memorizer.” She never experienced the Progressive Era as
story. She could remember details about the US. Constitution, Reconstruction
and the Civil Rights Movement because her own life story provided the ”pegs”
upon which she could hang historical facts.

Brooks and Brooks (1993) argue that when facts are encountered in the form
of stories - whether in school or out - the mind builds strong connections
between those facts. In this regard, David had an advantage over Julia. His
early encounters with history covered a wide range of topics, from the Civil
War, to the Titanic, to the Great Depression. He explored these topics through
visits with his grandfather to historic sites and historical fiction. Thu, his
orientation to history was primarily through story than isolated facts he was
expected to memorize: ”Even now when I look at history, I see it as a story with
characters.” David was extraordinary in his ability to recall historical facts and
dates, evidence of the intricate web of knowledge he has built over the years.

Another significant difference between David’s and Julia’s knowledge of
historical narrative related to their grasp - not merely of given stories and the
details which supported them - but of the vital interplay between fact and
interpretation in the process of creating history:

The relation between the historian and his facts is one of equality, of give-
and-take. As any working historian knows, if he stops to reflect on what he
is doing as he thinks and writes, the historian is engaged in a continuous
process of moulding his facts to his interpretation and his interpretation to

'5 facts. It is impossible to assign primacy to one over the other” (Carr,
1961, pp. 34-35)

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In other words, one aspect of historical knowledge is an appreciation for the
creative process that gives life to otherwise dead facts and checks the tendency to
assume that only one narrative is possible. Such knowledge may have
pedagogical power as well. In both of David’s units, he planned to have students
engage in the creative process by directly manipulating facts relevant to
particular narratives. He planned to have students build the political spectrum
model from the descriptions of six Russian political groups, just as he planned to
have students ”inductively discover” the pendulum pattern in the Age of
Revolutions unit.

David could do this because he understood the mental activity of historians
and to some extent imagined that students could engage in similar thinking.
Throughout my conversations with David, he frequently referred to history as
the work of historians. To David, what happened in the past is known (or not
known, as the case may be) by virtue of the fact that historians construct
interpretations. They ”take bits and pieces and try to see how they make sense,”
they ”create an order” out of otherwise meaningless details and ”tear causes
apart and group them into categories to see how they’re connected.” This is
further evidence of his historical-mindedness. Julia had some of this knowledge,
but it did not appear to factor into her planning and teaching. She had, like
David, taken a course in college where she learned to do historical research:

Dr. Johnson gave us primary source documents that were hard to interpret.
She had us do historian stuff and make conclusions and evaluate evidence
and go find resources of where this person was from and [reach] logical
conclusions. . . . That [course] helped me reason. (Autobio, 10 / 27/ 98)

But unlike David, Julia did not understand her narrative as the outcome of an
historian’s ”continuous process of moulding his facts to his interpretation and his
interpretation to his facts.” As a consequence, she used her knowledge of
historical narratives to organize her units and make decisions about the
sequence of content: progressive goals first, then achievements; the southern

Civil Rights Movement followed by the northern. She presented the narratives

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as finished products, something for students to listen to and commit to memory.

A third element in knowledge of historical narratives for pedagogical
purposes relates to historical interpretation. There is more than one way to tell a
story about the past. Because the historical record is incomplete, because we
cannot help but examine that record from particular vantage points, because
there has been an explosion of new interpretive lenses such as social, intellectual
history and discourse history, as well as ”history from below,” competing
historical narratives exist. When novices choose to tell one narrative to the
exclusion of others, they determine not only what students have opportunities to
learn about particular topics, but also what students may learn about the nature
of history itself.

Julia’s and David’s knowledge of historical narrative included preferences
for particular narratives. David’s students had opportunities to learn a narrative
that cast Russian peasants as oppressed, the middle class as eager for revolution
and ideological forces as deterministic. Julia’s students had opportunities to learn
a narrative that cast Black Panthers as heroes, the media as villain and the power
of socialization to shape attitudes and behavior. At no time did either teacher
suggest to students that historians might disagree over how to tell these stories.

One possible explanation for this is that novices may only be familiar with
one narrative, so they tell what they know. This seemed to be the case with
David in the Communist Revolution unit. He admitted that until he had time to
read several scholarly accounts, his knowledge of appropriate narratives was
”shaky.” Furthermore what novices know about an historical topic is partly a
consequence of their subject matter beliefs. Julia and David did not simply
absorb new information; they acted upon it, interpreted it in light of prior
experiences. Julia was drawn at an early age to historical and contemporary
individuals and movements directed toward social change. In contrast to other
possible narratives, the ones Julia preferred held explanatory power within the

context of family and minority group identity-building. David’s preferred

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narratives also bore the imprint of family and school influences, contexts that
valued Western intellectual thought and cultural literacy.

Even when novices are familiar with more than one interpretation of an
event, they may choose not to share all of them with students. Although Julia
was aware of alternative interpretations related to the Civil Rights Movement,
she related only one of these to students because, in her mind, only one
interpretation was correct. She'assumed that students had already heard the
wrong interpretation: that Black Panthers were ”violent” and the Civil Rights
Movement was ”all about Martin Luther King and the south.” More generally,
Julia’s sense of the discipline was that historians are more accurate in interpreting
history now than they used to be:

When you’re talking about history, it’s not as bad as it was. It has been used
badly in the past, [but now] people are trying to get the truth out of history
by interpreting documents instead of bending them. (Post-Ob II, 6/ 2/ 99)

This was quite different from David’s perception of alternative interpretations.
He held the view that all of history is told from a necessarily limited point of
view:

People sometimes refer to [one kind of historical narrative] as ”revisionism.”
It’s all revisionism. If we see the same set of events, we’re going to have
radically different interpretations. To say that we stick to the facts is dumb.
Even the facts we choose to present are slanted by the way we try to make
sense of them. The order we create is history, but it’s also us. You can never
take the bias out of it. People think that because they got it from a certain
book it must be true. Even the most primary sources are biased by the
individuals who wrote them, their choices about what to leave in and leave
cu}. Even with a camera, there are things you choose to ignore. (CK I,

11 3 98)

Furthermore, David described his ”agenda” as having ”students form more of
their own interpretations and be able to see that interpretation as being
imposed.” And yet, there were no opportunities for David’s students to
investigate the interpretive nature of history because, in both units, he offered
single narratives. This suggests that it may take more than knowledge of

alternative narratives for teachers to offer students more than one way of telling

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a story. 2

According to Collingwood (1946), historians make distinctions between
”the inside and outside of an event” (p. 213). The outside of an event is ”that
which can be described in terms of bodies and their movements;” the inside of
an event is the ”thoughts” of historical agents” (p. 213). In order to make sense
of the past, historians are required to ”re-think” or imagine past thoughts in
their own minds. Thus, says Collingwood, what makes an event historical:

is not the fact of its happening in time, but the fact of its becoming known to
us by our re-thinking the same thought which created the situation we are
investigating, and thus coming to understand that situation.” (p. 218)

In the process of transforming content - in which a major concern is with the
interplay between historical subject matter and students’ experience - teachers
may use historical imagination to identify the past thoughts that resemble some
aspect of students’ present thoughts. Although neither Julia nor David ever
explicitly stated that they were employing ”historical imagination,” they were
clearly able to recognize the ”inside of the event,” the thoughts, perceptions and
attitudes which make the actions of the past sensible to those living in the
present. David imagined the experience of Russian serfs who became receptive
to the idea of revolution because of vast inequities in Russian society. He could
enter into this aspect of the past because the experience of social hierarchy is

both historical and contemporary. Once he had identified this ”interplay,” he

 

2 Aside from the influence of teachers’ knowledge and beliefs, the prevailing
history curriculum may actually reinforce the practice of telling single narratives.
High school history classes are typically taught as survey courses that encompass
huge spans of time. Weaving historical facts into coherent narratives is one
obvious wa to deal with the problem of breadth, because it helps teachers to be
selective. T e notion of presenting multiple and competing narratives for each
t0pic may require adding on to a curriculum which is already too large. It takes
more time to foster understandings about the tentativeness of history than it
does to portray history as settled. However, given the current emphasis on
coverage rather than in-depth study, it is understandable why novices may
organize their units around single narratives which reflect personal preferences.

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created a visual representation - the Social Pyramid - to trigger his students’
awareness of realities they had experienced. Although some students were
more skeptical than others about the existence of social hierarchy in their school,
it was clear from the lively discussion that David's representation touched on
aspects of students' experience. The students themselves were able to offer
specific examples from their own experience that touched on the idea that social
positions influence political views. David allowed the discussion to continue for
the duration of the class period, reasoning that the time students spent
articulating their own understandings of social hierarchy would help them learn
about Bolsheviks and Mensheviks later on.

Similarly, Julia imagined the experience of northern African-Americans in
the 19505 and 603, using her knowledge of the continuity between past and
present experiences of racial inequality. She invented the Imagine a Politician
representation in a matter of seconds, drawing on her latent knowledge of
contemporary experiences related to racial inequality. The representation asked
students to first consider their own knowledge of occupational status and race as
portrayed on television. Then they were to relate their prior understandings to
race and power as perceived by Black Panthers. The Imagine a Politician
representation was the first strategy that came to Julia’s mind that enabled her to
make pedagogical use of this interplay between students and subject matter.
The representation elicited students’ prior experience with television and
occupational stereotypes before Julia linked those images to subject matter. In
Julia's case, it is more difficult to tell whether students were in fact identifying
with aspects of occupational status and television sitcoms that related to racial
inequality. Julia drew most of the connections herself and tended to use
questions rhetorically rather than eliciting student response. In comparison to
David's 45-minute discussion on student government, the Imagine a Politician
discussion lasted less than five minutes.

One purpose of learning history is to understand goals, values, beliefs and

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thoughts that are different from our own. (Lee, 1984).3 Wineburg (1999) argues

that students of history should encounter ”the strangeness of the past, offering
the possibility of surprise and amazement, of encountering people, places, and
times that spur us to consider how we see ourselves as human beings” (p. 490).
Thus, historians do not enter into the inside of events without also considering
contextual clues that set the past apart from the present. It is tempting — for a
history teacher who does not know better - to project a misleading universality
upon thoughts and actions. In fact, we witnessed this in Julia’s failure to
acknowledge that many contemporary African-Americans may experience the
effects of race and power differently than their predecessors, because social
conditions change over time. David, on the other hand, was acutely aware of a
problem he called ”presentism,” the ”danger of placing modern day values on
the past.” He was quick to remind students about the contextual differences
between Sycamore High School and Russian society, to avoid ”teaching the
wrong lesson."

The difference between David and Julia here can be accounted for by
considering, once again, a feature of David’s historical-mindedness. Among the
characteristics of historical-mindedness, Gustavson (1955) lists the following:

When we first travel into the past, we cannot avoid seeing it through eyes
accustomed to the twentieth century and, consequently, seeing it in
reference to that which seems familiar. . . . This initial stage in the

develo ment of historical-mindedness is definitely over when we begin to
sense t at when we visit another century we are, in fact, foreigners in a
strange land. We are then more ready to examine the surroundings as they
really were. (p. 178)

David was more likely than Julia to provide his students with information that
portrayed the past as ”a strange land.” He did this - not simply because he knew
the historical details, the contextual clues - but also because of his knowledge that

 

3 Lee (1984) argues that historical imagination is one tool for developing
historical empathy, or the ability to understand goals and intentions different
from one’s own.

172

concern for context is an important aspect of historical reasoning. He expressed
such a concern in defense of his chronological approach to teaching history:

You give up this sense of time [when teaching thematically]. . .
understanding US. history as a series of periods. You can link these things
across [time] - that’ 5 good - you should be able to see that the Alien and
Sedition Acts in 1796 have a lot to do with the Vietnam War and other
protest movements against the government and about civil rights. . . . But I
think you should also know that the Alien and Sedition Acts fit here, they
have meaning here in this context, outside of bein part of a story of civil
rights development in US. history. (Post-Ob II, 5 4 / 99)

Summary

Julia’s and David’s historical knowledge for teaching included three
interrelated elements: knowledge of historical forces, narratives, and
imagination. In addition, their subject matter beliefs shaped the particular
historical forces, facts and preferred narratives they used.

Knowledge of historical forces - including social conflict - may be
pedagogically useful to novices because it helps them connect topics across the
curriculum and relate past to present. As David said, the impersonal forces seem
pedagogically significant because they are ”mind-expanding, applicable and
useful to life in general.” Knowledge of historical narratives helps novices tell
stories about the past so that students might build connections between facts.
Narrative is a ”cognitive instrument” which avoids treating history as either a
pile of facts or a set of sweeping generalizations. And knowledge of historical
imagination serves pedagogical purposes because it enables novices to identify
past thoughts that resemble some aspect of students’ experience. Starting with
students’ present droughts and moving them in the direction of deeper historical
understanding is central to a Deweyian conception of content transformation.

Yet as useful as these varieties of historical knowledge may be, novices also
need to be aware of potential misuses. An over-emphasis on historical forces can
teach students that history is solely determined by impersonal factors. In the

telling of narratives, there is no substitute for accurate knowledge of relevant

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details, the mental activity of historians, and knowledge of alternative
interpretations. Even historical imagination can be misused if it is not
accompanied by contextual clues that highlight the strangeness of the past.

An additional kind of historical knowledge for teaching may be historical-
rnindedness, or knowledge of the issues about which historians think and
reason. When novices grasp some of the historiographic issues or tensions
within the discipline, when they understand the mental activity of historians,
they are better equipped to avoid creating instructional representations that
misrepresent the substance and epistemology of history. David’s historical-
mindedness included a desire for balance between emphasizing patterns and
details, caution toward portraying history as progress, awareness of the
tentativeness of historical interpretations, knowledge of the defining role of
context in historical understanding and a concern for differentiating between
past and present.

Still, historical-mindedness is no guarantee that novices will be successful in
transforming content with the ”needs and doings” of students in mind.
Although David desired balance, his lessons portrayed ideological forces as
deterministic. Although he planned to have students recreate narratives by
manipulating facts themselves, he ended up abandoning those plans in favor of
delivering basic information. And although he wanted his students to recognize
that ”all history is revisionism,” he presented narratives as if they were single,
uncontested versions of history. These findings would suggest that content
transformation does not just require pedagogical understandings of subject
matter, although historical-mindedness and knowledge of historical forces,
narrative and imagination seem pivotal. There are certain features of beginning
practice that may impinge on novices’ uses of their historical knowledge for

teaching for the purposes of transformation.

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Historical Knowledge in Beginning Practice

The notion of transformation is built on the presumption that the most
appropriate representations are those that mediate between the raw, present-
oriented experiences of students and formulated, organized disciplinary content.
This model implies that teachers need to know something about their students as
well as their subject matter. VanSledright (1998) offers one description of the
kind of knowledge of students that matters in history teaching. If students’
”historical positionalities” (their prior understandings about the past) influence
the new meanings they construct and if, as he asserts, there is more diversity
than similarity in the range of possible frames of reference students may bring,
then the implication for history teachers is that:

Questions drive much of what these teachers do in history classrooms
because they wish to understand how their students think, how students’
differing sociocultural, local, ethnic and familial backgrounds influence how
they reason. . . . [The ] spend much of their time listening to students in an
effort to understand ow the novice historical thinker’ 5 position shifts and

changes (and if not, why not) with each new round of historical study. (p.
12)

David and Julia were highly-regarded beginning teachers, graduates of a
teacher preparation program which - unlike most - required a disciplinary major
and a year-long internship. And yet, for the most part, their practice did not
meet VanSledright’s standard. Their curriculum was not so much driven by
questions as by assertions; they did not spend their time listening to students so
much as they transmitted their own historical knowledge.

More familiar content knowledge did not necessarily translate into more
sustained use of students’ experience and ideas as a teaching resource. In fact,
the more Julia and David knew about their content, the more likely they were to
deliver content in the form of extended monologues and recitation-style
instruction. Three variables which may affect novices’ attempts to connect
students and subject matter are related to features of beginning practice.

Naturally, novices have undeveloped knowledge of what young learners know,

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don’t know and can comprehend. We might expect beginning teachers’
knowledge to develop as they interact with students, particularly around
occasions in which students react in unexpected ways. But novices’ beliefs about
students’ prior knowledge - which substitute for their temporary lack of
experience - may intervene in the process. Their beliefs may be generalizations
novices construct from their own memories of having misconceptions
challenged. As such, these beliefs are compelling, perhaps precluding them from
asking questions and listening closely to what students actually knew and
believed.

Another factor affecting novices’ use of historical knowledge is that surfacing
and organizing ”scientific subject matter” while they teach may distract them
from asking questions and listening to their students. Novices may not know
what they know until they try to articulate subject matter to learners. The first
time they teach a topic, they are primarily teaching themselves. A third factor
relates to the fact that novices are just learning to manage their pedagogical
authority, coming to terms with their new position of responsibility over
content, students and the materials of instruction. One way to manage
pedagogical authority is to assume that students’ prior knowledge is a problem
to be overcome rather than a resource for transforming content. There is no
apparent need to investigate students’ thoughts, prior experiences and
knowledge if the assumption is that their knowledge is deficient and
misinformed. In the remainder of the chapter, I explore each of these factors in
more depth.

GenerahzingfromPersonalMemories

In addition to subject matter knowledge, content transformation requires
teachers to hold fairly specific knowledge of students: what learners of
particular ages and backgrounds are interested in, what they are likely to already
know about a topic, what they may find difficult. It may help beginning teachers

to read research reports about adolescents’ historical thinking, but reading about

176

to read research reports about adolescents’ historical thinking, but reading about
students seems a weak substitute for direct interaction with live children. And
direct interaction with live children is precisely what beginning teachers -
especially those in their early twenties - lack.

This is a huge knowledge gap for which novices are compelled to
compensate. Grossman (1990) has suggested that beginning teachers necessarily
enter teaching with very little knowledge of learners and consequently use
themselves as a frame of reference. They recall what learning subject matter was
like for them and assume that their students will be the same. Instead of using
more empirically-based knowledge of students - which they don’t yet have -
they treat their personal past experience as knowledge.

We saw evidence of self-referencing through Julia’s and David’s practice.
For Julia, having a past experience learning about the Civil Rights movement
was memorable because her own misconceptions had been challenged. This
experience was a powerful source of knowledge about students, since she
assumed that her students held the same misconceptions she had as a learner.
And yet such assumptions may have hindered Julia’s ability to notice differences
between her students, that their individual ”positions” may have resulted in a
range of prior conceptions about the Black Panther Party or race relations.

Both teachers tended to interpret their students’ academic efforts through
the lens of their own schooling. Julia, who found school difficult, believed that to
”honors” students, learning comes naturally and they do not need as much help.
David, who had always been an ”honors” student, believed that learners who do
poorly have only themselves to blame. Both teachers also tended to assume that
because certain concepts seemed so clear and understandable to them, ninth
graders should be able to grasp them with little difficulty. Sometimes their
representations were more like direct transmissions of mature, adult
formulations of content than adaptations reflecting the more limited prior

knowledge of students.

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Thus, content transformation in beginning teaching is complicated by the
ways in which novices may compensate for gaps in their knowledge about
students. When they treat their personal past experiences as knowledge - which
is understandable, given that this is all they have to work with - they may fail to
see a need to gather further information about their students. This is not to say
that they entirely shut down opportunities to learn about their students. On the
contrary, David and Julia were clearly developing knowledge about students.
David learned that he could not assume ninth graders remembered causes of the
American Revolution. Julia learned that her students were actively forming their
own opinions about race and power. But to some extent, what novices learn
from experience may be limited by their tendency to generalize from the
personal to the pedagogical. David interpreted students’ lack of background
knowledge based on his own memories of school, in which it seemed to him that
he learned facts and chronology prior to interpretation:

When you first start out learning anything new in history . . . you start out
with the basics, the details, so when you’re reading a history book, you’re
basically gaining factual knowledge. The interpretation of that and contrary
interpretations - it’s almost like Bloom’s taxonomy - those things come later.
(ROA, 4/ 16/ 99)

Julia interpreted students’ apparent reluctance to appreciate the viewpoints of
Black Panthers in terms of her own reluctance to accept Malcolm X until she
understood the social influences that shaped his views. For the most part, she
responded to the situation by providing students with more information rather
than materials with which to interact or questions to elicit more of students’
thinking.
Surfacinngontent Knowledge

The notion that people act in part on the basis of tacit knowledge has
fascinated philosophers such as Ryle (1948) and Polanyi (1958). More recently,
Schon (1983) has applied the notion of ”tacit knowledge” to professional practice.
Generally speaking, his claim is that much of what people know is ”implicit in

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patterns of action and in our feel for the stuff with which we are dealing . . . a
kind of knowing . . . not represented in words at all” (Schon, 1983, p. 59). One
question that arises is to what extent tacit knowledge needs to become conscious
and explicit, particularly in professional practice. In his descriptions of expert
practitioners, Schon explains that tacit knowledge is the consequence of expert
practice. Although experts may at one time have been conscious of their ”know-
how” - such as how to judge distance in a golf game or interpret children’s
behavior - after encountering the same situation over and over again this
knowledge becomes tacit. This suggests that there may be little need for
professionals to surface tacit knowledge, since tacit knowledge does not exist
until they have already developed expertise. But in a later book, Schon (1987)
argues that only conscious knowledge can be directly taught to others. Since
content knowledge defines the endpoint of instruction, it makes sense to argue
that it is more useful to teachers - both novice and experienced - when it is held
consciously rather than tacitly.

If beginning history teachers are to effectively transform content, then, we
would expect them to be consciously aware of what they know about their
content in order to figure out what aspects of that content may become part of
students’ experience. But some of what novice history teachers know about
their content has not yet been put into words. Beginning teachers may not
know what they know until they have first tried to communicate content to
students.

Julia was communicating much of her content knowledge for the first time.
She was aware of this as a routine experience during that first year of teaching:

Sometimes I’m concentrating so much on "Am I saying this ri ht?" Trying
to get at so many different aspects [of a topic], where I say it '5 way and

that way and then twist it and turn it and try to say it another way. (Post-

Ob II, 6/2/99)

The more Julia talked about the Black Panthers, the more she uncovered layers

of her content knowledge. And the more she uncovered her own

179

 

 

understandings, the more she realized what she knew that helped her to
appreciate rather than reject the militant views of northern blacks during the
Civil Rights Movement. As she taught her lessons, there was a sense in which
she was actually teaching herself.

Julia’s tacit content knowledge was also triggered by students’ comments. It
was when students surprised her with their reactions to the Black Power / White
Power distinction that Julia realized she had knowledge of debates over the
meaning of racism. She realized this - not in the quiet moments of planning the
unit - but in the liveliness of an unplanned discussion in which students were
having difficulty making the kinds of distinctions she could make. As she dealt
with this unexpected response, Julia was preoccupied with communicating her
knowledge of race and power for the first time. She invented the Imagine a
Politician representation with her students' experience in mind, but in the
dialogue that followed she was primarily listening to herself. She was not able to
simultaneously attend to both her developing subject matter knowledge and her
students’ conceptions of the content. She held a general sense that students were
”figuring out their own opinions” but she was so intent on the difficult task of
constructing representations to convey her knowledge that she spent no time

Ill

trying to learn more about what her students opinions” actually were.

To some extent, this may have been because the representation was
unplanned. Julia hadn't anticipated the kinds of questions that would elicit
students' descriptions of and reflections on their own experience of occupational
status and television sitcoms. At the same time, if Julia was indeed occupied with
the important task of uncovering her own knowledge of the topic, it was
understandably difficult for her to pay attention simultaneously to both newly-
conscious content and students' constructions of meaning.

Another angle on tacit content knowledge is offered by Holt-Reynolds
(1999). She studied a prospective secondary English teacher who knew her

content well, but did not see that her skills as a reader were learned:

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Her expertise was invisible to her, a tacit set of skills she could use, but did
not directly identify as belonging in the category . . . of subject-specific
pedagogical knowledge. . . . She did not give evidence of knowing how those
reading actions contributed to her expertise or how they might be useful to
less experienced or less skilled readers.” (p. 39)

Novices may not be conscious of the cognitive skills or supporting knowledge
that helps them comprehend particular topics. For example, both Julia and
David understood the topics they taught in terms of abstract notions such as the
interaction of race and power, socialization and political ideologies. This was
knowledge that had taken them years to develop, perhaps did not make sense to
them until they were adults. Julia seemed unaware of the contribution of her
own experience in shaping her knowledge. Her understanding was not simply a
consequence of having been told about social inequalities by another adult. She
had lived the effects of inequality: vicariously through her family stories and
directly as a biracial woman rejected by both black and white classmates. David
was disappointed that his students seemed unable to distinguish between
”liberal” and ”conservative” ends of the political spectrum, even after he had
provided them with definitions. But what he did not realize was that, in his
mind, there was a wide array of prior knowledge and life experience that gave
special meaning to the terms. Because he did not appreciate how had come to
acquire such knowledge, he ignored the role of prior experience in his students’
essays. He focused his evaluation of Stephen’s response, for example, on the
possibility that the student had deliberately attempted ”a snowball job.”

Even when novices are conscious of the role played by their own prior
knowledge and experiences, they may not always be able to recreate that for
their students. Julia, for example, expressed a desire to completely revise the
history curriculum in order to give students a one-semester, social action
experience, perhaps realizing the difficulty of teaching about social critique to
students with limited experience. But aside from the fact that teachers inevitably

know things they cannot teach their students, Holt-Reynolds (1999) suggests that

181

at minimum, teachers ought to at least be aware of how they came to know
what they know because ”unidenfified, unclaimed and untapped subject matter
expertise has little power. It lies dormant and useless in a classroom” (p. 45).

The task of surfacing content knowledge - knowledge of what one knows as
well as knowledge of how one acquired certain understandings - may occupy the
attention of beginning teachers. It appears that this task is closely tied to the act
of teaching, communicating content to a live audience. Teacher preparation may
provide beginning teachers with historical knowledge for teaching, but much of
that knowledge may not become conscious, accessible, and usable until they
begin to teach. In the meantime, their efforts to transform content may be
complicated by the difficulty inherent in simultaneously surfacing content
knowledge and creating opportunities to listen more closely to students’
conceptions. Yet even David, who as a third-year teacher had already taught his
units more than once, did not use his content knowledge to frame questions to
help him understand students’ ”historical positionalities.” There is yet a third
variable influencing the use of historical knowledge in beginning teaching: the
task of managing pedagogical authority.

ManagingBEdagflgicalAuthflfit)!

The earliest expert-novice studies presented a developmental model which
suggested that beginning teachers are preoccupied with classroom management
and establishing their authority in the classroom (Fuller 8: Bown, 1975;

Reynolds, 1992). Once they develop their teacher stance, this argument went,
they are ready to move on to the next stage of paying more attention to their
students. However, David and Julia’s practice suggests otherwise. These novices
were not preoccupied with classroom discipline, although this was certainly one
challenge they faced as beginning teachers. Neither were they so focused on
their content that they failed to attend to students’ learning. Rather, Julia and
David continually reasoned pedagogically about their subject matter as they

organized their units and designed representations.

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organized their units and designed representations.

In their new role as creators of a learning environment in which they are
attempting to link students and subject matter, novices may use their content
knowledge to manage that role. Although we might wish that beginning
teachers would spend much of their time listening to students in an effort to
understand students' prior knowledge, in fact, doing so increases the complexity
of teacher-student interactions.- Novices may be inclined to reduce this
complexity by "ordering" content for students, as David did when he realized
that students could not generate their own lists of American Revolution causes.
When David and Julia attempted to use students' present experience as a starting
point for instruction, things got messy. David’s students were inclined to dwell
on extreme political ideologies rather than the broad range of perspectives he
wanted them to comprehend. Julia’s students disagreed with her and, in the end,
she said the experience had been "difficult and stressful . . . . It was hard on me."
Managing authority through determining the content and flow of information in
the classroom may seem preferable because - since students reveal little of their
sense-making - it appears that there are fewer misunderstandings and
disagreements.

Perhaps it was as a means to manage pedagogical authority that David and
Julia tended to see students’ prior knowledge as a problem to be overcome
rather than a window into their historical understanding. Identifying a student
misconception was a powerful driving force in both teachers’ practice, as they
focused their lessons on filling gaps in students’ knowledge and correcting
misunderstandings. Julia assumed her students held wrong beliefs about the
Black Panther Party; David figured his students had no conception of
undemocratic features of the US. government. In both classrooms, a few
students tried to insert their knowledge of the Black Panther Party or the
electoral college, but David and Julia did not treat those occasions as

opportunities to reflect on the logic and persistence of students’ prior knowledge

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opportunities to reflect on the logic and persistence of students’ prior knowledge
or the diversity among students. There was no apparent need to investigate
students’ thoughts, prior experiences and knowledge if the assumption was that
their knowledge was deficient and misinformed.

Another way novices may use content to manage authority is to assign
students’ tasks in which the correct response is to reproduce what is in the
teachers’ mind. I never observed Julia assign written work (for a grade) that
encouraged students to draw upon previously-held knowledge or otherwise
construct a response using anything other than the information Julia presented
in class. David, on the other hand, occasionally invited students to write about
topics he had not yet discussed, such as "Is revolution good or bad?" and "Where
do you fall in terms of your beliefs along the political spectrum?" But it was
unclear what David intended with these assignments. In Stephen’s case, David
interpreted the response as a deliberate attempt to avoid answering the assigned
question, a move which essentially devalued the authority of Stephen’s personal
experience with political ideologies.

In pointing out the ways in which novices’ need to manage their
pedagogical authority may cause them to ignore or dismiss students’ sense-
making, I do not wish to imply that direct instruction is a misuse of authority or
content knowledge. David was not misguided or wrong-headed in his impulse
to present accurate, applicable and relevant historical information to students.
All teachers must continually judge what content to present directly and what to
withhold. Yet there are consequences to didactic modes of instruction, just as
there are with more student-centered approaches. And one consequence of
limiting students’ interaction with information - which may be particularly

appealing for beginning teachers - is that it reinforces teachers’ professional

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role.4

Summary

The findings of this study, consistent with the emphasis in the content
knowledge literature, underscore the need for beginning teachers’ subject matter
preparation in historical facts, alternative interpretations and historical ways of
thinking. Such knowledge may make a significant difference in novices’
teaching. The more familiar beginning teachers are with a topic they must teach,
the more likely they may be to critique content as portrayed in the textbook,
select topic-specific narratives to frame their units, illustrate those narratives with
concrete images and descriptive detail, be aware of alternative interpretations of
events, anticipate student difficulties and generate multiple representations.
Knowledge of historical details and historical ways of thinking helps novices
represent the discipline more accurately.

The study also suggests some features of a pedagogical understanding of
history which may be especially good tools for beginning teachers. Knowledge
of historical forces, narratives, and imagination - along with certain features of
historical-mindedness - may help novice history teachers create instructional
representations which mediate between subject matter and their students’
immediate experience. At the same time, there appear to be some aspects of
beginning teaching which impede novices from developing the kind of
knowledge about students which would enable them to more consistently treat
students’ prior knowledge as the starting point of instruction. When novices
generalize from their own memories as learners, when they are preoccupied

with surfacing their own content knowledge and when they use content to

 

4McNeil’s (1986) study suggests that the phenomenon of knowledge control
may not just be appealing to beginning teachers. She found that among
experienced social studies teachers, practices such as avoiding controversial
topics, reducing content to simplistic fragments, treating all students as equally
knowledgeable (or unknowledgeable) and making scant reference to students’
immediate experience persisted because the teachers believed such practices
reduced discipline problems.

185

manage their pedagogical authority, they may be less inclined to treat students’
ideas as vital resources for teaching.

As a social studies educator, my next impulse is to consider the implications
of these findings for teacher education. What kinds of professional experiences
would help prospective and beginning teachers develop their knowledge of
historical forces, narratives and imagination? Is it possible that a different kind
of preparation, support and mentoring could alleviate some of the variables in
beginning teaching that impede content transformation? And what should
teacher educators do with the awareness that subject matter beliefs - which have
their origins in early formative experiences - exert a powerful influence on
novices’ selection of content and what they are likely to learn about content from

practice? I grapple with these questions in the final chapter.

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Chapter 6
LEARNING TO TEACH HISTORY
Introduction

Teachers transform their disciplinary knowledge into forms they believe
will build upon students' present experience and lead them toward more mature
understandings. Knowledge for transformation is that knowledge which
enables teachers to perceive an interplay between a particular topic and students'
lived experience and to create a representation which mediates understanding.
The results of this study suggest that certain features of historical knowledge are
especially useful in this regard. Knowledge of historical forces, narratives, and
imagination - along with historical-mindedness - may help novice history
teachers create instructional representations which mediate between subject
matter and their students’ immediate experience.

At the same time, there appear to be features of beginning teaching which
hinder novices' efforts to transform content. They may be able to create
appropriate representations, but their ability to use them effectively hinges on
several factors. Novices necessarily rely on their own memories of learning
content, which can be both a resource and a hindrance in their teaching. When
they are teaching a topic for the first time, they may be teaching themselves,
uncovering what they know so that it is conscious and usable. Their efforts to
manage their professional roles may cause them to control content in a way that
ignores or dismisses students' sense-making. And novices may have subject
matter interests which take them away from the content they initially intended
to teach.

These findings hold implications for professional education, suggesting that
one focus for prospective and beginning history teachers involves developing a
repertoire of historical narratives and cultivating the use of historical forces,
imagination and historical-mindedness as pedagogical tools. This conception of

historical knowledge for teaching is not supported by the traditional model of

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teacher preparation, in which candidates are taught to apply generic teaching
principles to their disciplinary knowledge. Rather, content and pedagogy appear
to be dynamically interrelated as novices consider subject matter through the

eyes of their students and weigh the role of fact, interpretation and historical
habits of mind in constructing representations.1 The first section of this chapter

describes elements of a social studies methods course that attempts to fuse
historical content and pedagogy.

The second section of the chapter is based on the conclusion that, given
certain features of beginning teaching, it is unlikely that novices - on their own -
will elicit, listen to and use students’ prior knowledge as a resource. Beginning
teachers in their first few years of teaching need mentored opportunities to
interrogate their practice, if they are to overcome their reliance on subject matter
beliefs and personal memories as well as the demands of surfacing tacit
knowledge and managing pedagogical authority. Traditional models of
beginning teacher support may not address the central challenge of helping
novices attend to students’ ideas as windows into students' prior knowledge.
Thus, in the second section of the chapter, I describe possible strategies mentors
might use with beginning teachers.

Throughout this study, I have referred to the notion of transformation as an
act of pedagogical reasoning in which teachers rethink subject matter with their
students in mind. Although the focus until now has been on beginning history
teachers’ efforts to transform historical content for secondary students, the

notion of transformation may apply to professional education as well. Teacher

 

1 Strictly speaking, the historical knowledge used by historians also has
pedagogical features, in the sense that historians (like teachers) must create
representations which help readers comprehend texts (McEwan 8: Bull, 1991).
But unless history professors are explicit with their students regarding their
pedagogical reasoning, their students (prospective teachers among them) are not
likely to develop pedagogical understandin s of history in those courses. The
social studies methods course I propose in '5 chapter aims to make pedagogical
uses of historical knowledge explicit.

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educators must transform the curriculum of teacher education with the ”needs
and doings” of novice teachers in mind. Teacher educators must identify the
most pedagogically useful aspects of their curriculum and come to terms with
the force of their beliefs. They must face the possibility that they are
generalizing from personal experience, surfacing tacit knowledge and managing
pedagogical authority. And, they need to develop their knowledge of students -
the knowledge, beliefs, and lived experiences of novice teachers - in order to
create appropriate representations. Indeed, this study originated in my own
desire - as a novice history educator - to learn more about how my students
think. This chapter represents an attempt to apply what I have learned to the
curriculum and pedagogy of social studies education.

Preparing History Teachers: Curriculum and Pedagogy
in a Social Studies Methods Course

The idea that learning to teach involves learning to view the pedagogical
nature of content is not new. Dewey (1904) understood as much when he
disparaged an approach to teacher preparation that treated subject matter as
something to be ”snatched:”

Everythin should be discouraged which tends to put the student [teacher
candidatefin the attitude of snatching at the subject-matter which he is
acquiring in order to see if by some hook or crook it may be made
immediately available for a lesson in this or that grade. What is needed is
the habit of viewing the entire curriculum as a continuous growth, reflecting
the growth of mind itself. (p. 332)

Dewey believed that teacher candidates were best served if they had
opportunities to develop conceptions of subject matter as reflections of ”active
thought” rather than as fixed, static ”classifications, interpretations, explanations
and generalizations” (p. 328). Unfortunately, it seems that prospective teachers
may well leave their history courses with the impression that history is little
more than a pile of facts. Even if they have some sense of the active thought
involved in creating historical interpretations, they may assume, as Julia did, that

contemporary historians - unlike their predecessors - write unbiased accounts.

189

Wilson and Sykes (1989) describe what may be a typical undergraduate
experience for prospective history teachers:

They may listen to or read the stories of different historians, but never learn
that historians do not agree with one another about the kinds of uestions
to ask, the ways to answer those questions, or what a reasonable 'storical
explanation may be. They frequently manage to escape doing original
work of their own. Intent on marching through as much material as
possible, their instructors do not stop to reflect on the debates still raging
about whose story counts and whose may not. Too often students assume
that only one story is possible. (p. 275)

In an attempt to address this problem, some educators have recently begun
to call for changes in the content of history as well as education courses.
Grossman, Wilson and Shulman (1989), for example, propose that teacher
educators assume responsibility for helping prospective teachers develop subject
matter knowledge. Some universities hire former history teachers with Ph.D.s in
history to teach in teacher education departments. At California State
University in Long Beach, for example, student teachers are supervised by
history professors who started their careers as middle and secondary history
teachers (Schwarz, 2000). The university also regularly brings together K-16
teachers of history to discuss common concerns: how to motivate students, how
to integrate skills and content, and how to use traditional and non-traditional
means of assessment.

But such efforts to fuse content and pedagogy encounter numerous
difficulties. It is still rather unusual for history professors to show interest in
teacher preparation, much less commit time to collaborating with teacher
educators and classroom teachers. Recently, two major national reports
recommended changes in the hiring, promotion and tenure policies of academic
departments in order to facilitate reforms in teacher education. In its report
titled Iolouchheiuturflansformingtheflayleachersarelaught (1999),
the American Council of Education, a coordinating body for institutions of

higher education, challenged university presidents to take action on the principle

190

that ”good teachers need to be educated not solely by members of a single
department or school, but rather by faculty throughout the entire institution (p.
25). Recommendations from the National Council of History Education’s
Edueafionand Certificationof HistorerachererrendsBroblemsrand
Recommendations (1998) included requiring history professors to ”model the
use of primary sources and student inquiry in their own courses” and creating
history education courses taught by ”teams of subject scholars and experienced
teachers in the field.”

One example of team-teaching in an effort to fuse historical content and
pedagogy is offered by McDiarmid and Vinten-Johansen (1998). McDiarmid, an
education professor and former history teacher and historian Vinten-Johansen,
co-taught a social studies methods course in which they sought to:

reverse the conventional approach in ”teaching-methods” courses: begin
with specific historical events and themes rather than various methods
(lecture, discussions, group and individual projects, etc.) they [prospective
teachers] might use in the classroom. We believed that [prospective
teachers] must thoroughly practice what it means to ”know history” and
the social sciences before they could set proper learning goals for their
pupils and design means to achieve those goals. In particular, we
emphasized the critical role that analytical reading and writing play in
coming to understand history (p. 4-5).

However, the two instructors found that their students disliked the placement of
subject matter at the center of a ”methods” course because ”they wanted
practical answers. Scholarly debates didn’t seem relevant to their overriding
concern: ’What do I do on Monday?” (p. 5). The instructors then revamped the
course to put a curriculum unit plan at the center, but with an alternative
conceptualization of the teaching process, selecting topics for indepth study in
order to generate ”scholarly-informed” goals for student learning. A similar
kind of course has been proposed by Wilson and Sykes (1989). Understanding
that prospective teachers experience a felt need to develop practical tools of the
trade, Wilson and Sykes envision a course entitled ”Knowledge, Its

Representations, Its Transformations” that makes instructional representations a

191

 

vehicle for teaching pedagogical uses of content:

Such a course might require that teachers reflect, first, on their own mental
representations of the subject matter, second on representations generated
by scholars and finally on instructional representations of knowledge they

want to present to their students. (p. 278)

As part of my data collection, I used David’s and Julia’s instructional
representations as windows into their knowledge and beliefs about content and
students. This same feature of representations may make them useful as
pedagogical tools in the curriculum of teacher education. Representations are at
once practical strategies, analogies and examples that teacher candidates can add
to their repertoire as well as windows through which prospective teachers may
view pedagogical features of subject matter. Indeed, during the interviews in
which I asked Julia and David to analyze their own representations, the task
consistently elicited reflections on content in relation to young learners.

Another consideration related to placing the analysis of representations at
the heart of a social studies methods course is that the various types of historical
knowledge for teaching I have identified - knowledge of historical forces,
narrative, and imagination - are not discrete entities. Rather, this knowledge
manifests itself as knowing-in—action. As the researcher, I teased out categories
by analyzing instructional activities: David’s Social Pyramid and Julia’s Imagine a
Politician representations, for example. Thus, it may not make sense to teach
prospective teachers about historical forces, narrative and imagination and then
show them how to apply that knowledge to create representations. It may
actually work better the other way: analyze representations as the embodiment
of various kinds of historical knowledge and beliefs.

A third rationale for focusing on instructional representations has to do with
the finding that an important aspect of historical knowledge for teaching is its
topic-specificity. General historical knowledge - about social forces, historical
generalizations and historiographic tensions - is necessary, but it is no substitute

for topic-specific knowledge. It was when David and Julia were more familiar

192

 

with a particular topic that they were able to critique the textbook account,
support narratives with descriptive detail, provide an alternative to the ”history
as progress” narrative, anticipate student difficulties and generate multiple
representations. In analyzing instructional representations designed to convey
messages about historical topics such as the Progressive Era or the Communist
Revolution, prospective teachers may develop their topic-specific knowledge.

As a tool for data collection, I developed four vignettes of history teaching
(see Appendix F). Vignettes such as these could be extended, to include much
more detail about specific representations used by each teacher, the teacher’s
reasoning about subject matter and students, and specific examples of students’
responses. Prospective teachers could engage in case study analysis around each
vignette, debating the following set of questions:

0 What is the role of historical knowledge and beliefs in this teacher’s
reasoning?

0 What is the role of knowledge and beliefs about students in this teacher’s
reasoning?

0 What are the strengths and limitations of each representation?

With practice, grappling with such questions could become a kind of habit of
mind, an analytic approach teacher candidates could apply not only to
hypothetical cases but to their field experiences and ”ready-made”
representations as well. By ready-made representations, I am referring to the
range of curricular materials currently available on the market for teaching
history: textbooks, simulations, computer software, collections of historical
documents and videos.

In the process of applying these three questions to curricular materials and
vignettes, several things could happen. Discussions about historical knowledge
and beliefs could provide opportunities to focus on facts, alternative
interpretations, historical forces and narratives. Some students may be able to

identify problems with representations associated with the nature of the

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discipline, providing an opening for teaching about the Great Man theory
(Gustavson, 1955), determinism, presentism, and historical-mindedness.
Discussions about young learners’ experiences with historical representations
may prompt inquiry into the notion of ”the inside of events.” Prospective
teachers may begin to cultivate a talent for entering into the thoughts of the past
in order to look for continuities with students’ present experience.

Another learning opportunity may present itself as a consequence of
identifying multiple and sometimes conflicting narratives for the same topic.
Westward expansion, for example, can be viewed through the lens of global
economic changes or from a social change perspective. The narrative can be told
as a story about manifest destiny, a story about imperialistic subjugation, or a
story about the consequences of cross-cultural confrontation and cooperation. In
discussions about which stories should or should not be told and why,
prospective teachers’ subject matter beliefs are bound to emerge. As we saw in
this study, subject matter beliefs and disciplinary perspectives play a significant
role in shaping the content novices select to teach and the content they are likely
to learn from practice. The goal of teacher preparation in this regard should be
not so much to change novices’ beliefs (because beliefs may be profoundly tied
to personal past experiences) but to help novices recognize the role of subject
matter beliefs in shaping their curricular choices. In a social studies methods
course, novices could be encouraged to revisit experiences that helped them
develop their preferred historical narratives and disciplinary perspectives. Their
life stories may reinforce the notion that subject matter understanding is indeed
a process that begins at an early age.

To some extent, this goal relates to the claim made by Holt-Reynolds (1999).
Conceptions of what it means to know a subject for the purposes of teaching it
should include knowledge of how one personally came to know. Teachers who
are self-aware of their own learning process may be better able to provide

experiences which help their students develop subject matter understandings:

194

Our work as teacher educators would then include helping [prospective
teachers] recognize and claim as learned expertise the skills and abilities that
they take for granted as unlearned. A definition of subject matter expertise
needs to include awareness of that expertise as learned, earned, or
developed. (Holt-Reynolds, 1999, p. 43)

A final component of a social studies methods course could involve reading
and discussing articles such as those published by Holt (1990) and Kobrin (1996).
These writings provide descriptions of history teaching that involve melding
historical content and inquiry. Holt’s article describes representations involving
students in reading post-Civil War letters to outline the conflict between
aspirations of former slaves, white plantation owners and the federal
government. Kobrin’s book describes his work with high school students,
teaching them to act as historians and construct their own conclusions about the
past. One purpose in exposing prospective teachers to these writings is to
provide them with images of practice that are probably quite different from their
experiences learning history. But it is possible - given the findings of both this
study and one conducted by McDiarmid and Vinten-Johansen (1993) - that even
when novices enjoyed opportunities to practice historical inquiry as college
students, they may reason that it is inappropriate for young learners. Puklin
(2000) suggests another purpose for having prospective teachers explore the
process of historical inquiry. Even if novices choose not to have young learners
act as historians, it may be that teachers’ knowledge of historical ways of
thinking helps them create better representations. Puklin makes this conjecture
based on her personal experience as a secondary history teacher with no
pedagogical training:

I found that knowing how to do history easily led to determining what
content knowledge I needed and then to mastering it sufficiently. It also
helped meet the challenges of the classroom. Whether engaging
heterogeneously-grouped students, guiding students to replace opinion
with relevant evidence, pulling student understanding up from events to
ideas - knowing how to do histo gave me both the direction and the
instructional guidance to frame lt'he necessary lessons that kept students on
task. (p. 8)

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Sitting in a social studies methods course, no matter how well taught, is no
substitute for interaction with students around subject matter. There is little
doubt that teacher candidates need interactions with students to develop their
pedagogical understandings of content. But it is precisely in those classroom
settings that novices must cope with variables that make it difficult to develop
their knowledge of students: generalizing from personal memories, surfacing
tacit knowledge and managing pedagogical authority. Coping with all of this is
probably, to some extent, an inevitable part of beginning teaching. Yet failure to
elicit, listen to and use students’ prior knowledge as a resource may not be an
inevitable consequence.

Mentoring Beginning Teachers

Learning to teach is an ongoing process. Just as professional education at
the preservice stage requires careful consideration of teacher candidates’ ”needs
and doings,” professional education at the induction stage cannot ignore aspects
of beginning practice which impinge on how novices use their content
knowledge and work with students. One feature of beginning practice, for
example, is that when novices are teaching a topic for the first time, they are
occupied with surfacing content knowledge, an important step in figuring out
what a unit of instruction is really about. Because surfacing content knowledge
occupies a major part of the time novices spend implementing their lesson plans,
it may be unreasonable to expect them to simultaneously attend to students’
ideas. However, there is another option. What novices can do to develop their
knowledge of students is to use ”strategic documentation of practice:”

Although the bustle of immediacy lends authenticity, it also interferes with
opportunities to learn. Being situated in a classroom restricts attention to
the sort of teaching underway in that particular class. Further, being so
situated confines learning to the rush of minute-to-minute practice. Better
opportunities can be created by using strategic documentation of practice.
Copies of students’ work, videotapes of classroom lessons, curriculum
materials, and teachers’ notes all would be candidates. (Ball 8: Cohen, 1999,

p. 14)

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As part of my data collection, I used ”strategic documentation of practice” in
order to elicit David and Julia’s pedagogical reasoning, their ”reflection-on-
action.” I asked them to listen to audiotapes of their teaching and read short
transcripts. I also asked them to examine students’ work. In the process - which
took place before and after school, away from the distractions of more
immediate tasks - both teachers noticed things they could not see while teaching.
They interpreted students’ comments, they evaluated their representations, they
identified what was difficult, confusing, and surprising about their
transformations of content. Thus, it would seem that such tools of data collection
may also serve pedagogical purposes in professional education.

One important feature of Julia’s and David’s interaction with audiotapes,
transcripts and student work was the fact that I selected particular episodes and
representations which I thought held potential and asking questions to probe
their thinking. A mentor could play a similar kind of role and assume an even
more pedagogical role than a researcher’s. Ball and Cohen (1999) suggest that
because knowledge for teaching is so complex - characterized by the interaction
of content, students, curriculum, pedagogy and context - professional
development requires social interaction with other professionals: talking about
practice, observing and being observed, collaboratively planning lessons, telling
others about what one has learned.

Mentors may select classroom dialogue and student work that helps novices
focus their attention on aspects of students they might otherwise overlook.
From the perspective of helping novices cope with the tendency to generalize
from personal memories and use content to manage authority, transcripts and
assignments that highlight differences between students and challenge the
notion that students’ prior knowledge is deficient may be especially crucial.
Mentors may conceptualize the curriculum of learning to teach at this stage as
”mind answering to mind:”

What the [novice] needs most at this stage of growth is ability to see what is

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going on in the minds of a group of persons who are in intellectual contact
with one another. He needs to learn to observe psychologically - a very
different thing from simply observing how a teacher gets ”good results” in
presenting any particular subject. (Dewey, 1904, p. 324-325)

When beginning teachers generalize from personal memories and use
content to manage authority, they are possibly most familiar with traditional
forms of history instruction, in which teachers do not differentiate between
students’ diverse backgrounds and perspectives and the flow of information is
decidedly from teacher to student. To some extent, messages about deficiencies
in students’ prior knowledge may also be reinforced by the recent emphasis on
conceptual change theory in some teacher preparation programs. Based on
research conducted in the field of science education, the idea that young learners
hold misconceptions about subject matter that must be corrected has gained
considerable attention in some circles (Posner, Strike, Hewson 8t Gertzog, 1982).
However, it may be more useful to help beginning history teachers
conceptualize their students’ prior knowledge differently. Torney-Purta (1994),
for example, argues that ”conceptual change in history can be thought of as
involving the addition of layers or the recognition of alternative ontological
aspects of issues and problems in history” (p. 113). In other words, learning
history may not be a matter of exchanging one set of ideas for another so much
as building upon prior understandings. Whereas less mature minds might
assume ”great men” control history, more mature minds understand that both
individuals and impersonal forces shape events. Younger learners may think in
terms of single causes; more advanced learners understand the concept of
multiple causation.

This conception of prior knowledge calls for a shift in the way novices may
typically interpret students’ ideas. It has implications for conceptions of

pedagogical authority as well, suggesting that teachers must use content
knowledge - not merely to identify what is wrong in their students’ historical
thinking - but also to identify where students are along a continuum of

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understanding. To accomplish the latter, novices may find they need to speak
less and listen more closely. It is hard to imagine beginning teachers making
such a shift in their reasoning and practice without considerable mentoring of the
kind described here.

Further Questions

I undertook this study to understand features of historical knowledge for
teaching and gain insight into what makes it complicated for novices to develop
and use such knowledge in their teaching. As I conclude this study, I am filled
with a sense I have barely scratched the surface. A former graduate professor
once told me that a good dissertation raises more questions than it answers, sol
suppose I have accomplished at least that much.

Although I chose the concept of ”transformation” as a tool for analyzing
Julia and David’s knowledge and beliefs, I cannot say with confidence that I have
made much progress toward defining what exactly it is and what it looks like in
practice. One reason for this is that, although I interpreted each of the novice’s
representations as attempts at content transformation, I did not see enough
examples of truly outstanding, interesting, or exciting representations to inform
a conception of what is possible. Perhaps this merely suggests that beginning
teachers tend not to create extraordinary representations, and in this study I
speculated about why that might be the case. However, it would be a mistake to
generalize across all beginning teachers about this point. It seems that the best
way to develop our conceptions of the nature of transformation in history
teaching would be to study outstanding examples, as Wineburg and Wilson
(1991) did in their case studies of Mr. Price and Ms. Jensen. This is one possible
focus for future research.

I also have more questions about historical knowledge for teaching. I
argued in this study that, while historians and history teachers share some
knowledge - knowledge of historical forces, narrative, imagination and

historical-mindedness - there may be something uniquely pedagogical about the

199

way history teachers hold that knowledge. I am not sure this is true. 1 also do
not know enough yet about the ways in which historians’ and history teachers’
knowledge differs from the historical knowledge of ”Mr. Everyman,” Carl
Becker’s metaphor for the notion that everyone creates historical meaning as
part of daily existence. Thankfully, a growing number of scholars are exploring
these issues, enabling me to add to the list of books and articles I plan to
eventually read. Another method for continuing to analyze historical
knowledge involves my ongoing work with prospective and experienced history
teachers. The dissertation provided me with a framework for listening to history
teachers and viewing their practice. In future years, I hope to test my
conjectures about subject matter beliefs and the role of historical forces,
narratives, imagination and historical-mindedness by interacting with a wider
range of history teachers.

I am also curious about what novices may learn over time when they are
analyzing representations (their own or other people’s), transcripts and student
work in the company of other professionals. How do beginning teachers use
what they’re learning about students to adapt subject matter? What do they
learn about their students over time, given particular conceptions of what it
means to learn history? What impressions do they form of different groups of
students? How does knowledge of student diversity shape the way teachers
modify historical content? What kinds of knowledge and beliefs seem most
pivotal in learning to meld historical content with inquiry? I think it would be
informative to track novices’ learning to teach over time. If historical
understanding begins early in life, then what are the different life journeys that
lead to different conceptions of teaching and learning history throughout
teachers’ professional careers?

Finally, there is the matter of school context. An underlying assumption
throughout my study was that knowledge for teaching is practical and situated;

it is responsive to the unique interactions taking place between a certain teacher

200

and her particular students within a specific setting. Yet in my attempt to bring
order to my data, I treated school context as if it was less important than each
teacher’s set of knowledge and beliefs. This was a serious omission. Most of the
recent reform proposals in history education call for changes in the contexts in
which history teachers work, including:

lower student/ teacher ratios, fewer extracurricular duties, less
administrative paperwork, more flexible schoolday schedules - to allow for
seminars, debates, and extended discussions - and greater teacher authority
across the board, from curriculum making to textbook choice. (Bradley
Commission, 1988, p. 256)

In fact, school contexts may have such an important influence on teachers’
practice that simply reforming professional education in the manner I suggested
earlier may not be sufficient. For example, an important component of
mentoring beginning teachers involves creating opportunities for novices to talk
about practice with other professionals. And yet, for both David and Julia,
professional conversations with colleagues were encumbered by a complex
array of factors. Both felt that colleagues particularly valued the time spent on
extracurricular duties and worried about how other uses of their time might be
perceived. Both appreciated the autonomy that allowed them to teach by their
own convictions rather than conform to a departmental norm. When
conversations with colleagues did take place, they tended to be superficial:
”What chapter are you on?” ”Here’s a worksheet you can use.”

Future research on the topic of how beginning teachers use their content
knowledge in practice should not neglect the influence of school context. How
do personal notions of subject matter knowledge interact with structural
treatments of school knowledge? How is developing knowledge of students
influenced by the way student diversity and student’s ideas are treated
throughout the school? What kinds of support enable some teachers to develop
more exciting representations of content, in spite of a school culture which

isolates teachers from one another and treats learning to teach as a matter of

201

survival?

In fact, it may be useful to think in terms of multiple, overlapping contexts
within which learning to teach history occurs. One context is defined by national
debates over goals and methods for teaching history. Another context is more
local, reflected in institutional norms that may promote or work against novice
history teachers’ learning to teach. Yet a third context concerns the knowledge
and beliefs individual teachers bring to their practice. Research that provides
models and stories about professional learning within these nested contexts may
help teachers and teacher educators examine and articulate ideas that are central
to teaching practice: ideas about the nature of history, historical understanding
and historical knowledge for teaching.

202

 

APPENDICES

203

APPENDLX A
A UTOBIOGRAPHICAL INTERVIEW

SAX: Thank you for participating in this interview. I will be asking you a series of
questions about your educational and professional background, particularly your
experiences with learning history. Do you have any questions?

QQ.’ WA] T FOR AND ANSWER QUESTIONS

SAL“ What do you remember about your past experiences learning about history. before
you entered college?

PROMPT S: In school, out of school; describe the schools you attended
SAL: Can you tell me anything you remember about your college classes in history?

* What was your major?

* Can you tell me about a couple of your history courses (undergraduate and
graduate) that were significant for one reason or another?

*Why were they significant for you?
*How did they influence your understanding of Iristory as a

discipline?

*Tell me about some of the history papers you wrote.

*What do you think it means for someone to know history? If
someone is a self -proclaimed expert in history. what would you
expect them to know?

*Anything else you wish to add?

SAY; What influenced you to become a social studies teacher? (Probe for answers
pertaining to reasons for becoming a teacher and reasons for choosing social studies)

SAL Can you tell me a bit about your professional development so far in your career?
* How long have. you been teaching?
* What are you certified to teach?
* What courses have you taught in the past and currently?

*What is your favorite and least favorite course to teach?

*Is there any particular reason you feel this way?

*Are there some courses or topics you feel more confident and less
confident about teaching?

* Can you describe your teacher preparation program?

*What aspects of the program were significant for you?

*Why were they significant?

*How did the program influence the way you think about teaching
history?

*What do you see as the purpose of learning about history in

204

school?

*What makes it useful or distinct from other subjects?
*Besi des the required experiences in your teacher preparation program what other
opportunities have you had to develop yourself professionally?

SAL: Do you still have copies of your college transcript and cornse papers you wrote that
would help me understand some of the details of your educational background, particularly
as it relates to your experiences with learning history?

SAL‘ Is there anything else you would like to add at this point?

SAL' That’s the end of the interview. Thank you for your time.

205

APPENDIX B
CONTENT KNOWLEDGE INTERVIEWS

ROUND ONE

SAY: Thank you for participating in this interview. I will be asking you a series of
questions regarding your ideas about the Progressive Era/Age of Revolutions. Do you have
any questions?

DO: WAIT FOR AND ANSWER QUESTIONS

SAY: For this interview, I want to focus on the gowlgdge you have about this topic that
you have in your head apart from your decisions about teaching the topic. I know that your
knowledge and your decisions overlap. For example, you probably have knowledge eabout
what rs most significant related to this topic, and because it is significant, that rs what you
will most likely decide to teach your students. But you probably won I teach evenflrn g
you know about this topic to your students. I’m interested 1n trying to get a sense of
evegm'ng you know, regardless of whether you intend to teach it or not. This will help me
to determine how your knowledge is developing while you’re teaching the unit on this topic.

 

DO: WAIT FOR AND ANSWER QUESTIONS

SAY: * Let me start by asking you to break the topic--Progressive Era/Age
of Revolutions--into subcategories. On a piece of paper, list the
subcategories that come to your mind when you think of this topic.

SAY: * Next, I’d like you to do a “mind dump” for each subcategory. Just
start talking about the first one, then go on to the next one, etc. Use
the textbook to prompt your thinking as needed. Please keep in
mind that I am not looking for any particular bits and pieces of
inforrnation--this is not a “test” in that sense. However, I will
interject questions for clarification as you go along.

Q9; WAIT FOR AND ANSWER QUESTIONS

When the “mind dump” is going on, PROBE FOR:

* How are these (people, events, ideas, contexts, subcategories etc.) related
to one another?

* How is this period related to others in (US/World History)--periods that
came before and after?

* Are you familiar with alternative or conflicting interpretations any historians
may have suggested about this period?

When the “mind dump” is over, SAY:

* There are a few items mentioned in the textbook which you did not talk
about. Would you comment on them now?

* Do you recall where you acquired your understanding of this period?
206

SAY: That’s the end of the interview. Thank you very much.

ROUND TWO

Say: Go through the textbook chapters related to the topic you are about to teach and do a
"mind dump" related to each heading or sub-section in the chapter. Talk to me as if you
were teaching me everything you know, including anything you think is important about this
topic that L811; in the textbook. Also, it would be helpful if you could point out to me sub-
topics that you feel more and less confident about.

I_)_9_:_ Allow each teacher to talk with minimal interruption, asking questions only to clarify
meaning. After they have commented on each sub—section, ask the following questions:

-Is there anything else you think is important about this topic that isn’t in the
textbook?

015 there anything else you’d like to add about which aspects of this topic you feel
more and less confident about?

°As you flip back through this chapter, do you remember anything about where you
learned about this topic--high school, college, outside of school altogether?

207

APPENDIX C
FACT LISTS

French Revolution and Industrial Revolution from DC. Heath, World History

French monarchy faced a crisis
--Old Regime had 3 estates
--Louis 16th was a weak ruler
-—National Assembly took power
--3rd estate met separately with Abbe Sieyes addressing crowd, changed name to
National Assembly
--Parisians stormed the Bastille
--Great Fear swept France

Revolution brought reform and terror
--The Assembly adopted reforms
--Rights of Man
«Limited monarchy (new constitution)
--Departments
--State-controlled church
Side bar--the rights of women
--France was split by factions (left, right, centrists in Legislative Assembly)
--France went to war with Austria
--The radicals executed Louis 16th (France a republic, new constitution)
--France created a citizen army
--Robespierre began the Terror
--Robespierre fell from power
--Moderates ruled in the Directory (new constitution)

Napoleon conquered much of Europe
--Napoleon rose through the army
«Napoleon seized power
-—A Second Coalition attacked France (Britain, Austria, Russia)
--Napoleon became emperor
--Napoleon restored order
--economic, social, religious, legal
--Napoleon extended France’s power
--battle of Ulrn, Austerlitz, Jena, Friedland, Trafalgar
--Napoleon dominated Europe

Napoleon’s empire collapsed

«Set up Continental system (cut off trade with Britain)

--Spanish guerrillas fought the French in Spain

--Napoleon invaded Russia

--A coalition defeated Napoleon

«Napoleon returned briefly, after escaping from prison in Elba, but lost battle with
Britain,

208

Many factors aided in industrial growth
«changes in farming
«enclosure movement
«crop rotation
«improved livestock
«effects on population

«a rise in population helped industry
«Great Britain had many advantages
«abundant natural resources
«favorable geography
«favorable climate for new ideas
«good banking system
«political stability

Britain led in the rise of industry
«inventions revolutionized the textile industry
«one invention led to another
«Watt improved the steam engine

Industry grew and spread to new lands
«engineers built roads and canals
«The railway age began (financial support and incentive for invention of engine)
«Railroads spread across England
«railroads had far-reaching effects
«industrialization spread to other countries
«US.
«Europe
«side bar--Lowell mill workers
«Britian led the world in industry

Industry changed ways of life
«more people lived in cities
«problems arose as cities grew
«The industrial revolution changed working conditions
«Children suffered in mills and rrrines
«The middle class expanded
«Class tensions arose
«Laissex-faire government
«beginning of unions
«continuing tensions

209

Chapter 17: Progressive Reform from Houghton Mifflin, A More Perfect Union

Upton Sinclair

Meat Inspection Act of 1906
Theodore Roosevelt

Square Deal

Samuel Hopkins Adams

Pure Food and Drug Act
Northern Securities Company
conservation

Robert M. LaFollette
Direct primary elections
Civil Service reform
Secret ballots

Initiative

Referendum

Recall

Sixteenth Amendment
Seventeen Amendment
William Howard Taft
Bull Moose Party
Election of 1912

Woodrow Wilson

New Freedom

Underwood Tariff

Federal Reserve Act
Clayton Antitrust Act
Federal Trade Commission

Prohibition
Anti-Saloon League
Carry Nation
Eighteenth Amendment
Child Labor

Florence Kelley

Hull House

Children’s Bureau

Eugene V. Debs
Socialist Party of America
Anarchists

Emma Goldman
Industrial Workers of the World

Carry Chapman Catt
Alice Paul

Ida B. Wells
NAACP

W.E.B. Dubois

210

 

 

APPENDIX D
REFLECTION ON ACTION INTERVIEWS
ROUND ONE

1. Tax recogding. I’m interested in what you might have been thinking while you were
teaching this unit. Listen to the tape recording from 12-9-98. Stop whenever something
happened that you hadn’t anticipated, or when you say something that you hadn’t
necessarily planned to say.

SAY: I’m also interested in whether you learned anything about the Progressive
Era, for teaching purposes. Would you “tell the story” differently next
time?

2. Choose representations to evaluate in retrospect.

(representations are analogies, illustrations, examples, explanations and demonstrations
which convey something about the nature and substance of the subject matter to students)

SAY: * What did they convey to students about the subject matter?
* Would you use them again?
ROUND TWO

SEQ

Gather together the materials you used to put together this unit. Re-create what was going
through your head as you made your decisions about learning goals, what knowledge and
skills to teach, what activities to include, what kinds of assessments to give. Talk about your
reasons as much as you can. Talk about what you're purposely leaving out. If this
interview takes place after the unit begins, talk about any mid-stream adjustments you've
made or plan to make.

D2; Allow each teacher to talk with minimal interruption, asking questions only to clarify
meaning. Toward the end of the interview, ask the following questions:

0 Do you have anything else to add about what you want students to learn in this unit?

- Do you have anything else to add about your reasons for selecting these particular
activities and assessments?

0Do you have anything else to add about your reasons for leaving some aspects of the
content out of this unit?

°Did you consult any kind of external curriculum standards document? If so, which
one(s) and how did you use them?

211

APPENDIX E
POST-OBSERVATION INTERVIEWS

ROUND ONE

Comment on the outline from your subject matter interview.

SAY: * How would you edit this outline in preparation for the next time you
teach the Age of Revolutions?
* Would you tell the story any differently next time?
ROUND TWO

53y; Imagine you are getting ready to teach this unit all over again.

oWhat would you change? Keep the same? Why?
OHow does what the students said and did affect your planning for next time?
~What is one alternative way of teaching this unit that you can think of?

Say: Here are some examples of student work from this unit.

OHow satisfied are you with these as depictions of their learning?
OWhat was it you wanted them to learn?
OWhat evaluative comments would you write to them about this work?

Say: Here are four vignettes that describe various approaches to history teaching. Please
read each one and react.

OWhich of these do you think your teaching is most like?
0Which of these do you think your teaching will be most like in the future?

512; When you think about the next couple of years, in what aspects of teaching do you
imagine yourself growing the most?

'How will you go about doing that?
°What resources will you need?
0Do you ever think of particular curriculum units that you might develop? How
would you go about doing this?

212

APPENDIX F
VIGNETT ES OF SECONDARY HISTORY TEACHING

Ms. Jones

Ms. Jones likes to focus on non-Westem and minority history in her history classes. She
counters the traditional, white male perspective which she believes dominates most history
textbooks by presenting the “untold story” of how non-Westem civilizations lived before
and after European imperialism and how racial slavery affected and still affects U.S.
domestic institutions and foreign policy.

Ms. Smith

On a typical day in Ms. Smith’s classroom, she is conducting a lively lecture, full of
intriguing descriptions of characters and events in history. Her stories are interlaced with
questions directed to her students, based on a reading they had been assigned or a video
they had watched. If students can’t answer, she provides the answer herself. She expects
her students to recall factual information on her tests, as well as interpret charts and graphs.
(from Evans)

Ms. Carl le

Ms. Carlyle teaches her history students to write historical narratives. She gives them actual
documents: letters, diaries, photographs, maps, demographic statistics, etc.and teaches them
to ask the questions historians ask of such materials: Was this produced by a participant or
a commentator after the fact? What is the point of view expressed here? How and why was
this document produced and how does that affects its trustworthiness? Students then use the
documents to construct a narrative about the particular event under investigation. (from
Holt)

W

Ms Franklin teaches her students about big patterns in history: economic systems, religious
ideas, political beliefs, etc. She tells her students that this is why the past is so connected to
the present; “it’s all connected, humans have thought about the same things for centuries.”
She uses contemporary events and culture to help students relate to the past. For example,
she showed them the film footloose about students who rebelled against their small town’s
restrictions on dancing in the US in the 19808, and then asked “what were the similarities
of the issues represented in this film to the issues that led to the Protestant Reformation?”
(from Evans)

213

APPENDIX G
CONSENT FORMS AND LETTERS

TEACHER LETTER

Dear

 

You are invited to participate in a study designed to gain better understandings of how
beginning social studies teachers' develop their subject matter knowledge in the process of
planning and teaching. This has been an under-studied area of inquiry and new insights will
be especially helpful to those who are preparing new teachers, designing and implementing
induction programs or writing beginning teacher standards and assessments.

As data for this study, I would like to audio-tape private interviews with you several
times throughout the school year. One set of interviews will be designed to learn about
your personal and educational background and your content knowledge related to two of the
topics you teach as part of your curriculum. Another set of interviews will be conducted
around two units you teach, one in the fall and one in the spring. These interviews will be
held pm: to each unit and at various points during and afl' each unit. The purpose of
these interviews is to learn about your pedagogical reasoning.

In addition, I would like to observe your classroom during the fall and spring units and
record the activities via audiotape and occasionally videotape. I would like to collect all
documents that are produced as part of the two teaching episodes such as lesson plans,
handouts, worksheets, tests, quizzes, seating charts, and copies of student work. Finally,
with your permission, obtaining copies of your college transcripts, student teaching
evaluations and papers you wrote as part of your disciplinary and professional coursework
will help me document your background and preparation for teaching.

The total amount of time required from you for this study is substantial, although I will
do everything I can to limit the demands on your time. There will be seven to twelve
interviews lasting from approximately one to two hours each. I would not expect you to
meet with me every time I visit the classroom, but I will need about five nrinutes of class
time near the beginning of the study to talk with your students about obtaining their
consent.

There is no funding for this study. Participation is strictly voluntary. You have the
right to consent or decline without penalty; you may choose not to participate at all. You
have the right to withdraw consent at any time without penalty. You may also withhold
consent from allowing certain materials to be used or refuse to answer certain questions.
Your decision will not affect your relationship with [Name of University] or result in the
loss of benefits to which you are otherwise entitled.

Your identity will be kept strictly confidential. You will be assigned a pseudonym and
will be identifiable by gender and subject taught only. Your name, age, physical
characteristics, the name and location of your school and all other distinguishing features
will be omitted from all reports, presentations and papers for publication. The only existing
copies of the documents and tapes will be in my possession and will be kept inaccessible to
anyone besides me. With your permission, I may use the audiotapes, videotapes and
written work for other research and educational purposes. The data might be used in
reports, published articles, presentations at conferences, research groups or teacher
education classes. In no case will you or your students' names be identified to these
audiences. However, there is some risk that your voice or image could be recognized by

214

someone who knows you.

Please indicate "yes" or "no" to each statement on the attached form. Your signature at
the bottom of this form indicates that have read this letter and understand the nature of your
involvement in this project.

Sincerely, Cindy Hartzler-Miller

TEACHER CONSENT FORM

1 agree to participate in the activities I have indicated below:

1.

2
3
4.
5
6

9°

Signature:

Private interviews

. These interviews may be audiotaped.

. Classroom observations

These observations may be audiotaped.

. These observations may be videotaped.

. Teaching documents. (lesson plans,

handouts, worksheets, tests, quizzes,
seating charts, copies of student work, etc.)

College transcripts, student teaching
evaluations, course papers

Audiotapes, videotapes and written
materials may be used for
research and educational purposes
such as in reports, published articles,
presentations at conferences, research groups
or teacher education classes--as long as I am
not identified by name.

 

 

 

yes no
yes no
yes no
yes no
yes no
yes no
yes no
yes no

Date:

 

RETURN FORM and DIRECT QUESTIONS TO
CINDY HARTZLER-MILLER, 1224 E. Hazel St., Lansing, MI 48912

(517)482-097

215

PRINCIPAL AND SCHOOL DISTRICT LETTER

Dear

 

I am a doctoral student at Michigan State University, working toward my Ph.D in
teacher learning and social studies education. For my dissertation research, I plan to
conduct a study designed to gain better understandings of how beginning social studies
teachers' develop their subject matter knowledge in the process of planning and teaching.

a teacher at has agreed to participate. This letter explains the purposes
and design of the study and requests your consent to permit me to conduct the study in
your school/district. District participation in this project is voluntary. At any time during
the study, the district may withdraw consent without penalty.

Through this study, I hope to describe in concrete and practical terms the knowledge
that strong beginning teachers have and use. This has been an under-studied area of inquiry
and new insights will be especially helpful to those who are preparing new teachers,
designing and implementing induction programs or writing beginning teacher standards and
assessments.

 

There are several kinds of data I wish to gather for this study. About seven to twelve
times throughout the year, I would like to audio-tape private interviews with each teacher.
These interviews will be designed to learn about the teacher’s personal and educational
background, content knowledge and pedagogical reasoning at various points in the teaching
process. In addition, I would like to observe the teacher’s classroom during two
instructional units--one in the fall and one in the spring--and record the activities via
audiotape and occasionally videotape. I would like to collect all documents that are
produced as part of the two teaching episodes such as lesson plans, handouts, worksheets,
tests, quizzes, seating charts, and copies of student work. Finally, I would like to obtain
copies of his or her college transcripts, student teaching evaluations papers written as part of
his or her disciplinary and professional coursework to help me document educational
background and preparation for teaching.

The total amount of time required from the teacher for this study is substantial,
although I will do everything I can to limit the demands on his or her time. This study will
not disrupt the teacher’s plans for the day nor any school functions.

The identities of the teacher, students, school and district will be kept strictly
confidential. Pseudonyms will be used at all times when speaking or writing about the
research. The only existing copies of the documents and tapes will be in my possession
and will be kept inaccessible to anyone besides me. In some instances, excerpts of the data
may be shown to selected audiences for other research and educational purposes. The data
might be used in reports, published articles, presentations at conferences, research groups or
teacher education classes. In no case will teachers’, students', school or district names be
identified to these audiences.

 

I have enclosed a copy of the teacher and student/parent consent forms so you can be
informed of the consent procedures. If you are willing to grant me permission to conduct
this study, please sign one copy of this letter and return it to me in the attached envelope. If
you have any questions, please contact me at (517) 482-0974 or my advisor, Dr. Suzanne
Wilson, at 353-9150.

III III * II! * * 1k 1k * *
I have read this letter and understand the nature of the district’s involvement in the study.

Signature: Date:
PARENT /GUARDIAN LETTER

 

216

October 30, 1998

Dear Parent/Guardian:

I am a doctoral student at Michigan State University, working toward my Ph.D in
teacher learning and social studies education. For my dissertation research, I plan to
conduct a study of beginning social studies teachers' content knowledge and teaching
practices. Your son’s or daughter’s history teacher, , is participating in this study.
This letter explains the purposes of the study and requests your consent to allow me to
audiotape and occasionally videotape classroom activities in which your son or daughter is

participating.

Through this study, I hope to describe in concrete and practical terms the knowledge
that strong beginning teachers have and use. This has been an under-studied area of inquiry
and new insights will be especially helpful to those who are preparing new teachers,
designing and implementing beginning teacher programs or writing beginning teacher
standards and assessments.

 

 

There are several kinds of data I wish to gather for this study. In order to get an
accurate record of the teacher’s practices in the classroom, I will need to audiotape and
occasionally videotape classroom activities several times throughout the year. Although the
focus of my study is on the teacher, not your son or daughter, it would be helpful to look at
samples of students’ written work (worksheets, tests and quizzes) in order to document the
curriculum of the classroom. Please understand that my purpose is to observe the teacher’s
normal practices in the classroom; therefore, my presence will not disrupt or interfere with
the teacher’s plans or your son’s or daughter’s learning opportunities.

In addition to requesting your permission, I am also interested in making sure that
your son or daughter is willing to be involved with this study. Because this involvement
should be completely voluntary, you and your son or daughter can decide that he or she will
not be a part of the study at all, or withdraw from the study at any time without penalty.
Choosing not to participate in this study will have no impact on your son’s or daughter’s
right to be a full member of the class. If you and your son or daughter choose not to be
involved with the study, I will do everything I can to make sure that his or her voice and
image are not recorded and that I do not look at his or her written work. If I should
inadvertently tape your son or daughter, I will not use any segments of the tapes in which he
or she is present.

All of the data I collect will be treated with strict confidence. Your son’s or daughter’s
name will not be used in any reports about this project and any of his or her identifying
characteristics will be disguised. With your permission, excerpts of the data may be shown
to selected audiences for other research and educational purposes. For example, the data
might be used in reports, published articles, presentations at conferences, research groups or
teacher education classes. In no case will the teacher’s, students', school or district names
be identified to these audiences. However, there is a slight chance that your son’s or
daughter’s image or voice might be recognized by someone who knows them.

Please indicate "yes" or "no" to each statement on the attached form. Your signature at
the bottom of this form indicates that have read this letter and understand the nature of your
involvement in this project.

Sincerely,

217

Cindy Hartzler-Miller

STUDENT AND PARENT/GUARDIAN CONSENT FORM
(Please keep one copy for your records)

I give permission for my son or daughter to participate in the activities I have indicated
below:

 

 

1. Classroom observations yes no
2. These observations may be audiotaped. __yes __no
3. These observations may be videotaped. yes __no
4. Written work (worksheets, tests, yes no
quizzes, assignments)
5. Audiotapes, videotapes and written yes no
materials may be used for
research and educational purposes
such as in reports, published articles,
presentations at conferences, research groups
or teacher education classes--as long as my
son or daughter is not identified by name.
Student Signature: Date:

 

 

 

 

 

Parent/Guardian Signature:
Date:

 

 

RETURN FORM and DIRECT QUESTIONS TO
CINDY HARTZLER-MILLER, 1224 E. Hazel St., Lansing, MI 48912
(517)482-0974

218

BIBLIOGRAPHY

219

BIBILOGRAPHY

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Membemarejanght. Washington, DC: Author.

Bain, R. B. (1995 February 22). The world history standards: A teacher' 3
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Ball, D. L 8: Cohen, D. K. (1999). Developing practice, developing practitioners.
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Hammond & G. Sykes (Eds. ),

Ieachingasjheleamingprofession:
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Ball, D. L., 8: Feirnan-Nemser, S. (1988). Using textbooks and teachers' guides: A

dilemma for beginning teachers and teacher educators. Curn'mlumlnqniqz,
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Ball, D. L., & McDiarmid, G. W. (1990). The subject-matter preparation of
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Banks, I. A. (1991). Social science knowledge and citizenship education. In M. M.

Kennedy (Ed.), IeachingAcademicSubiectstQDiverseleamers (pp. 117-
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Becker, C. L. (1968). Everyman his own historian. In R. W. Winks (Ed), The
HistorianasDetectiiLe (pp. 3-23). New York: Harper and Row.

Berliner, D. C. (1988). Ihadevelopmentoiexpertisempedagogy. Paper

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Charles W. Hunt Memorial Lecture.

Blum, L. (1999). What is 'racism' in antiracist education? IeachersLoIlegeRecord,
100(4) 860-880.

Bradley Commission on History in Schools (1988).

WWW. Westlake, OH: National
Council for History Education, Inc.

Brinton, C. (1938). Ihaanammyofrevohrtion. New York: Prentice-Hall, Inc..

Britzman, D. P. (1986). Cultural myths 1n the making of a teacher: Biography and
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