© 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. inventio is a publication of the Department of Instructional Improvement and Instructional Technologies (DoIIIT) at George Mason University, Fairfax VA.

George Bernard Shaw's famous maxim--"He who can, does. He who cannot, teaches."--encapsulates the low esteem in which teaching is often held. For college faculty, there are plenty of other reminders. No other activity takes as much of our time and yet is as ill rewarded within institutions and professional disciplines. Allowing for various exceptions, few people receive tenure or raises based on their teaching. Even fewer are hired away to other jobs because of their teaching. Ask academics to name the best scholars in their discipline and you will get a long list. Ask them to name the best teachers outside their own university (as I have done) and they inevitably draw a blank.

Yet if teaching is not institutionally or professionally rewarded, there is plenty of evidence that--perhaps paradoxically--faculty care quite passionately about it. About five years ago, for example, the Journal of American History, the leading scholarly journal for professional historians of the United States, surveyed their readers about the practice of American history. Although the survey did not ask specifically about teaching, the importance that historians put on teaching ran through the survey--even though one would expect that readers of a scholarly journal would be biased toward scholarship. Thus, when asked  "What value or worth do you experience in doing history," about one-third mentioned teaching--more than any other activity in which historians engage. And many of the other highly regarded activities were ones that overlap with teaching (e.g., "communicating with the public"). "I am bold enough to say," wrote one of the survey's one thousand respondents, "that I believe in the importance of history and because I do I am convinced that what I do as a teacher is invaluable" (Sherry 1051).

"Teaching," offered another, "is just simply the greatest job in the world." The view of the historians parallels that of college faculty, in general, that teaching is both important and unrewarded. About ten years ago, a study by the UCLA Higher Education Research Institute found that more than nine out of ten faculty thought that it was personally "essential or very important" for them to "be a good teacher." But less than one of ten reported that their institutions rewarded people for good teaching (Thelen 945).

Such responses make in themselves the case for a "scholarship of teaching." For surely if we think teaching is so important, then it is worth paying more attention to how it is done, how it works, and what good teaching looks lik--which is what I assume the scholarship of teaching is, in part, about. In addition, since reward structures are so firmly entrenched around what we call scholarship, then a "scholarship of teaching" would make it at least more likely that teaching was rewarded--whether in better pay or better job mobility.

If we can agree that a scholarship of teaching is worth pursuing or at least trying, then how do we begin? I would like in this very brief comment to offer two simple propositions and one caution about how we might proceed with the scholarship of teaching--at least in history, the discipline with which I am personally familiar. This is, of course, an enormous topic with much to be said (and by those better qualified than I am) but I offer these preliminary observations to contribute to the larger conversation.

Don't Reinvent the Wheel: Connect with Others

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, Wineburg'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.

Make Teaching Public

As Lee Shulman has rightly observed, one of the key characteristics of scholarship is that it must be "public" and hence susceptible to critical review by others within a scholarly community. A few years ago, a friend at another university who had just completed a semester of co-teaching with one of her colleagues remarked that "now that we know what goes on in the bedroom" (and this was before we knew quite as much as we know now) the "last frontier of privacy is the classroom." She suggested that we know remarkably little about what our colleagues (particularly our senior colleagues) do in the classroom, and we would be shocked in some cases to find out. Thus, I would argue that one of the simplest and most important first steps we can take toward creating a scholarship of teaching (and improving teaching) is to make our teaching more public.

Fortuitously, the arrival of the Internet and the World Wide Web has made that much simpler than it once was. Two summers ago, I helped run a workshop on teaching with technology. We started with an exercise in which people examined on-line syllabi for the U.S. History survey course. The point of the exercise was to raise questions and offer ideas about the use of on-line technology; yet, most people wanted to talk about the content of the syllabi—why was this person organizing his course in this or that boneheaded way. Although this wasn’t my goal, it did strike me the sudden appearance of thousands of syllabi online had opened up at least a window into classrooms around the country and the world.

Once that syllabus infrastructure is in place, we can move to a second and slightly more ambitious (and more valuable) stage--asking people to explain, justify, and reflect upon their pedagogic and curricular decisions. That is what we have done (borrowing an idea from Randy Bass's Crossroads project) on the Web Site that we have organized for teachers of the U.S. History Survey course: "History Matters" at  http://historymatters.gmu.edu.

We have begun to ask faculty from around the country (and soon the world) to post their course syllabi and then annotate them with comments on why they structure things in particular ways, give particular assignments, or how their approaches have been received. Indeed, in general, one key goal of the site has been to making teaching public, from posting successful course assignments to publishing interviews with "great history teachers."

Such publicity offers a possible answer to a question that I get repeatedly asked when I attend meetings on academic technology--"what is the reward for faculty who experiment with new technology?" It seems to me that the problem--implicit in the question's suggestion that there isn't any reward--has nothing to do with technology. The real problem is that most faculty work with technology is about teaching, and teaching is not rewarded. And, in fact, technology actually makes it more likely that teaching will be rewarded because it is teaching work that is almost intrinsically public.

Good Teaching Scholarship--Like all 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.

References

Rosenzweig, Roy and David Thelen. The Presence of the Past: Popular Uses of History in the United States.  New York: 1998.

Sherry, Michael S. "We Value Teaching despite--and because of--Its Low Status." Journal of American History 81 (December 1994): 1051.

Thelen, David.  "The Practice of American History." Journal of American History 81 (December 1994): 945.

Wineburg, Samuel.  "Making Historical Sense." The Learning of History in a National and International Context. Eds. P. Stearns, S. Wineburg, and P. Seixas.  NYU Press: forthcoming.

ROY ROSENZWEIG (rrosenzw@gmu.edu)  is CAS Distinguished Scholar in History and Director of the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University. He is the author of a number of books, including most recently The Presence of the Past: Popular Uses of History in the United States (1998).