• 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 Three:
Good Teaching Scholarship is Hard

These two step--connecting with others working in related fields and making teaching more public--are relatively easy. But actually developing a serious, sophisticated, and full-blown scholarship of teaching will be much more difficult. And those who advocate it, it seems to me, have an obligation to make that difficulty clear and to hold that scholarship to the same high standards to which other scholarship is (hopefully) held.

One problem is that such scholarship is likely to require methods outside one's own disciplinary training. Take the (seemingly) simple question that Randy Bass's essay raises "what do students bring with them into the classroom? That question has long interested m--particularly a slightly broader variant for my discipline: "What do Americans know and think about the past." But paradoxically, it is a question that is at the heart of the historian's inquiry (the past), but it needs to be investigated at a moment in time (the present) that historians generally leave to sociologists, anthropologists, and political scientists. My own faltering efforts to try to answer it have, therefore, required me to learn something about a methodology--survey research--not generally taught in history graduate school (Rosenzweig and Thelen).

Sam Wineburg, whom I mentioned earlier, has been investigating this question with something closer to ethnographic methods. He has been following nine high school students through the study of history. Quite properly, he has argued that this must be done in context and so not only has he interviewed them in depth, observed them in their classrooms, and read their assignments, but he has also interviewed their teachers and parents. The results seem to be yielding some fascinating insights into what and how young people learn about the past. Yet, the road to those insights is long and tortured and must proceed through assembling and closely analyzing hundreds of hours of audio and videotape (Wineburg, forthcoming).

There should be nothing very surprising about that. Historians--and other scholars--routinely spend hundreds or thousands of hours of research and reflection to produce a great book or article. We should not expect that great work in the scholarship of teaching to take any less. When I teach about the history of the recent past, I tell my students that one of the greatest dangers is that they think that they already know what happened and why. Similarly, in approaching the scholarship of teaching, we have to rid ourselves from the preconception that we already know the answers about teaching because we have done so much of it. If we can pursue the scholarship of teaching with the same rigor as the best scholarship of history, then that the scholarship of teaching--and hopefully the practice of teaching--will gain some of the respect that it so richly deserves.

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