• Introduction
• Don't Reinvent the Wheel
• Make Teaching Public
• Good Teaching Scholarship is Hard
• References
• Printable Text of Article

© Copyright 1998-99 by Roy Rosenzweig (rrosenzw@gmu.edu)   The right to make additional exact copies, including this notice, for personal and classroom use, is hereby granted. All other forms of distribution and copying require permission of the author.

Section One:
Don't Reinvent the Wheel

Recently, I attended a conference at Carnegie Mellon University sponsored by the American Historical Association and supported by the Spencer Foundation and the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching on "The Teaching, Learning, and Knowing of History." What was most striking to me about this event was my own marginality. Of about twenty-five invited participants, only four of us were academic historians teaching in university or college-based history departments--even though the conference was sponsored by a scholarly history society and held at a major university. Thus, in the view of the conference organizers, the set of people whom I associate particularly with the "teaching, learning, and knowing of history"--college history faculty--were judged to have relatively little to say about the subject.

This may or may not be the case, but the significant thing is that there were a number of others--faculty in psychology departments and schools of education, high school history teachers and administrators--who did have some very interesting and worthwhile things to say. Most of their work was unknown to me and I am sure unknown to most my colleagues despite the fact that many of these people have been researching, writing, and publishing about the teaching and learning of history for many years.

Why? For the most part, this work simply exists in a professional discourse in which academic historians do not participate. For example, Sam Wineburg, an educational psychologist at the University of Washington, has, in my view assembled an extraordinarily impressive body of research and reflection on the practice of history teaching--writing that offers profound insights into the way people learn about the past. Yet very few academic historians know his work or even his name, since they rarely pick up American Educational Research Journal, Teachers College Record, American Journal of Education, Cognitive Science, and the Phi Delta Kappan where it regularly appears. (See, for example, Wineberg's "Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts," forthcoming in Phi Delta Kappan.) So, my first simple proposition is that before academic historians (and scholars in other disciplines) arrogantly go out and invent a scholarship of teaching in their discipline, they should find out about the important work that has already done by people like Wineburg.

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