Northwest Education: Discoveries in Learning
Summer 2003
A "literary expedition" is how President Thomas Jefferson envisioned Meriwether Lewis and William Clark's mission, writes James P. Ronda in his classic Lewis & Clark Among the Indians.
"Lewis and Clark were to gather material for... the empire of the mind, the kingdom of knowledge," he writes. "Jefferson wanted the expedition to make a lasting contribution toward the scientific understanding of North America."
Guided by President Jefferson's list of questions about all manner of phenomena they would likely encounter, the captains prepared to investigate the indigenous people, plants, wildlife, and weather of the regions they would be passing through.
They charted their own ethnographic and scientific course, gathering data and interviewing primary sources of information: Indians, trappers, and traders. They used the most advanced technology of the day. They consulted scientific literature—lugging a small but precious library with them every step of the trek. And through it all, they wrote and wrote.
To read the journals and jottings of the diarists in the Corps of Discovery is to be pulled into the gale of time, to the rivers and their banks of 200 years ago. Their writing is descriptive, immediate, often humorous, and alive with human feeling.
The journals of Lewis, Clark, and Corps members Charles Floyd, Patrick Gass, John Ordway, and Joseph Whitehouse invite students of history to "discover" the past by doing historical inquiry as historians do.
Across the country, teachers and students are taking the opportunity of the bicentennial of the Lewis and Clark expedition, 2003-2006, to rediscover their nation's early history and the changes that have occurred during the past 200 years. Through historical inquiry they are learning about the events of the Lewis and Clark expedition and the consequences of it for Native people, the environment, and westward expansion of the new nation.
The diverse stories surrounding the history of the Lewis and Clark expedition, and the ever-increasing availability of primary source documents on the Internet, create an exciting catalyst for change in the way history is taught, some say. And none too soon.
Historian Ira Berlin states bluntly in an essay for the Organization of American Historians (www.oah.org/pubs/nl/2002aug/berlin.html) that the nation is experiencing "a deep crisis in history education."
Student performance on the U.S. history portion of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) in 1988, 1994, and 2001 has been consistently poor. On the latest NAEP, more than a third of fourth- and eighth-graders, and nearly 60 percent of 12th-graders, didn't even achieve Basic, the lowest level ranked.
The NAEP results come after at least a decade of vigorous debate and research about how history should be taught in the schools and what content should be included in the curriculum. In 1987, the Bradley Commission on History in the Schools spurred a reform movement in history education. At the same time, an increasing number of researchers in diverse fields—history, education, psychology—were beginning to study the teaching and learning of history. In 1992, the National Council for History Standards was established, and after rancorous dispute about how best to represent the nation's history, voluntary national history standards were released.
Yet, none of these developments has addressed a persistent problem: a great number of teachers teaching history when they haven't formally studied history themselves. Too many are struggling to cover simply what's in the textbook and are unable to "bring history alive" for students.
Indeed, students by and large think history involves memorizing a textbook's facts about people and events that have no relevance to their lives. Yet, historical inquiry, as it's practiced in the profession, is anything but that. It is rather "an act that engages the heart," says researcher Sam Wineberg in "Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts" (Phi Delta Kappan, March 1999).
To teach history well—to help kids see the "fun" and the meaningfulness in it—you have to know history well, says Diane Ravitch, former U.S. assistant secretary of education who was a key player in the development of the national history standards.
"It seems a truism that students will not learn much history unless their teachers know it," Ravitch writes in Who Prepares Our History Teachers? Who Should Prepare Our History Teachers?, a 1997 paper published by the National Council for History Education (http://63.70.163.70/nche/RavitchSpeech.html). "It should be self-evident that those who teach history should themselves have studied history."
But Ravitch points to a 1996 report by the National Center for Education Statistics that showed "over half of all public school students enrolled in history or world civilization classes in grades 7-12... were taught by teachers who did not have at least a minor in history."
With so many teachers teaching history without even a minor in the subject, it's no wonder, says Ravitch, they tend to lean heavily on the textbook and are "unlikely to raise questions or pose issues or develop activities that give the spark of life to the words in the textbook."
As far back as the Bradley Commission, historians and history educators have been saying that "students should enter 'into a world of drama—suspending [their] knowledge of the ending in order to gain a sense of another era—a sense of empathy that allows the student to see through the eyes of the people who were there,'" says Wineberg.
Wineberg has worked with Suzanne M. Wilson to study the link between teachers' content knowledge of history and students' achievement in history. Their findings agree with the results of other studies that indicate that teachers with greater historical knowledge are better teachers of history. Yet, Wilson cautions in "Research on History Teaching," a chapter in Handbook of Research on Teaching (2001), that the link between "good" teaching and student achievement is yet to be firmly established.
If Ravitch, Wilson, and Wineberg are right, however, as teachers' knowledge of history grows, their overreliance on textbooks should diminish.
"They are peculiar things, textbooks," says Janet Bixby, assistant professor in the Graduate School of Education at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon. She and others from the college are organizing a series of institutes and many other professional development opportunities for teachers on teaching the history of the Lewis and Clark expedition.
"Historians don't read textbooks. Most of us read primary historical accounts and weigh and analyze them ourselves." Students should have plenty of opportunities to study history in the same way, she says, because "textbooks don't invite the student to create questions."
Textbooks effectively shut down historical inquiry, says Wineberg. While historians cite documentary evidence relevant to their findings; disclose opposing views; and reveal their own judgment, emphases, and uncertainties, textbooks do none of this, he says. Rather, they present history as a singular and incontrovertible story. And this discourages students from questioning and challenging the content, posing and testing their own theories, and extending their learning beyond the textbook.
Questions "are the tools of creation," he says. Questions "dwell in the gap between [one's] present knowledge and the circumstances of the past." Wineberg uses a wonderful phrase to describe those who are adept at historical inquiry; they are "expert at cultivating puzzlement," he says.
But there's another obstacle to creating "puzzlement" in the classroom, says Bixby. "Teachers are under terrible pressure to cover a broad range of topics. But coverage is antithetical to deep historical inquiry in which you ask your own questions and come up with theories to pursue."
Researchers Virginia Causey and Beverly Armento say, "A more indepth approach would allow for more interdisciplinary content and encourage the development of more critical thinking skills as students grow to understand the complex causes of events."
In their chapter "Strategies for Increasing Achievement in History" in the 2001 book More Strategies for Educating Everybody's Children, they write: "An indepth approach would also facilitate the use of primary source documents and the exploration of social, political, economic, and cultural aspects of events and issues."
Lewis & Clark College has moved to the forefront of scholarship about the Lewis and Clark expedition with the acquisition of several major collections of primary documents related to the Corps of Discovery, the release of an important new book for scholars, and the marshaling of resources and professional development opportunities for K-12 teachers (www.thejourneycontinues.org/).
The college has partnered with the Oregon Council for the Humanities to provide a series of annual institutes and other activities for teachers during the Lewis and Clark bicentennial. Teachers will be engaged in the kind of historical inquiry that historians do: reading primary sources, interviewing people with specialized knowledge, doing fieldwork, evaluating the context of historical documents, consulting multiple sources to gain deeper understanding of historical events and people, communicating their findings to colleagues, and fostering a professional community.
Planners hope that these experiences will inspire teachers and better equip them to engage their own students in such historical inquiry. It would mark a big shift in the way students usually learn history, but Jane Hunter, chair of the college's History Department, believes even young students are capable of historical inquiry.
"History lends itself to hands-on experimental and experiential investigations," she says. "Students can be encouraged to pose the questions, encouraged to hazard a guess, and then sent off to available sources to attempt to confirm or correct their hypotheses."
The Lewis and Clark journals offer particularly rich opportunities for such historical investigations, she says. "An interesting topic is to get students to figure out what we learn about Sacagawea from the journals themselves and to compare it with some of the popularizations of that story," she says. It's a project that her first-year college students have done to good effect.
"The modern version of the Sacagawea story actually dates from the Lewis & Clark Exposition in Portland in the early 20th century when supporters of women's suffrage saw in her a figure they could use to help celebrate women in the Lewis and Clark story," she says.
And the historic places along the Lewis and Clark trail also create wonderful opportunities for experiential learning. Causey and Armento urge teachers to use the community as an historical resource, saying, "The local community provides opportunities for field experiences that use historic places to bring history alive."
"Places have powerful stories to tell," writes Marilyn Harper in her paper, Including Historic Places in the Social Studies Curriculum, for the ERIC Clearinghouse on Social Studies/Social Sciences, October 1997 (www.ericfacility.net/databases/ERIC_Digests/ed415178.html). Harper is an historian at the National Register of Historic Places of the National Park Service.
"These places provide physical evidence of how broad currents of history affect even small communities. Supplemented with primary or secondary written and visual materials, they also teach such skills as observation, working with maps, interpreting visual evidence, evaluating bias, analysis, comparison and contrast, and problem solving."
"At a certain level writing is an act of rescue," says Ronda. "Historians rescue and restore lost voices. The Lewis and Clark journals make that kind of rescue and restoration possible." But he cautions: "What has so often been recounted in terms of high adventure, national triumph, and male courage needs to be told again as a complex human story."
While the story of Sacagawea has been romanticized to mythic proportions, much else about Native people's contributions to the Lewis and Clark expedition as well as their history, culture, and influence in human development on this continent has been obscured.
It is here that primary historical sources can open more accurate portals to the past.
"Again and again Corps of Discovery journal keepers recorded what Native people told them about everything from plants and animals to geography and relations with tribal neighbors.... It is those voices that give depth and richness to the Lewis and Clark story," says Ronda. "Most who write about the expedition now acknowledge that Native people were at the heart of the enterprise. Without those Indian voices and views the story is at best only half told."
Historian Stephen Dow Beckham wrote the essays for and edited The Literature of the Lewis & Clark Expedition: A Bibliography and Essays, a beautifully bound book about the library's special collection at Lewis & Clark College. He believes that students need to learn about all the important stories of history, not just the glorified version of the making of the nation.
"Euro-American settlement of the American West is usually presented as a great success story" of transforming the "wilderness," he says. "While it is true that these activities contributed to the building of a national economy and have afforded prosperity, they were achieved with costs. Students need to weigh the costs with the benefits. The responsibilities of teachers today are to try to have students see the larger context and the consequences of what has happened, not just the successful outcomes. Knowing the 'underside' of history may help the succeeding generation to cope better with the challenges and problems that confront society."
Indeed, Bobbie Connor, co-chair of the Circle of Tribal Advisors for the National Council for the Lewis & Clark Bicentennial and director of the Tamástslikt Cultural Institute in Pendleton, Oregon, says flatly, "There is little that is celebratory about the expedition from Native perspectives."
Speaking to a group of teachers assembled by videoconference for the first Lewis & Clark Weekly Showcase for Teachers presented by the Oregon Public Education Network and partners, including the Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory (www.open.k12.or.us/oregon/lcb/lcb03d.html), Connor continues: "It is in fact the case that the Lewis and Clark expedition is the harbinger of all adverse change that will come subsequent to the mapping and charting of our homelands."
She urges teachers to find alternative sources of information, apart from textbooks and popular narratives, to learn more about "the indigenous people who inhabited these homelands as homes rather than as the uncharted wilderness of Thomas Jefferson's imagination."
A good place to start, she says, is by exploring Native peoples' "first-contact stories." Native oral histories include stories of ancestors' first encounters with white people in general, not just Lewis and Clark. "It's important to start there," says Connor, "because we didn't all meet our first white person at the same time. We weren't standing on the banks of the river waiting for the explorers to arrive so that we could be 'discovered.'"
In fact, Ronda says, "Just as Lewis and Clark explored the lives and cultures of Native people, so too did Indians explore Jefferson's travelers and the things they carried with them.... What happened from the Missouri to the Columbia was mutual discovery, shared moments of exploration encounter."
Ira Berlin and other historians and history educators see cause for optimism in a major initiative ushered into the national spotlight by senior Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia: the Teaching American History Grants Program.
The "Byrd grants," writes Berlin are "the single largest public investment in history education," which may very well help to revolutionize the way history is taught in the schools. In just two years, the program has infused $250 million into projects aimed at building teachers' historical knowledge and teaching skill.
In 2001, Byrd's Teaching American History Grants Program was launched as part of President George W. Bush's No Child Left Behind (NCLB) education agenda. The NCLB law requires states to establish history standards and tests for all three levels of schooling—elementary, middle, and high school—and ensure that teachers who teach history be credentialed in the subject by the end of the 2005-2006 school year. It also places great emphasis on evidence-based practices and accountability.
These principles are also pillars of Byrd's new program, but at its core is Byrd's abiding belief that history should be taught as its own subject, apart from social studies.
"By helping teachers to develop a deeper understanding and appreciation of American history as a separate subject matter within the core curriculum, these programs will improve instruction and raise student achievement," a request for proposals states.
With some eloquence, it goes on: "Students who know and appreciate the great ideas of American history are more likely to understand and exercise their civic rights and responsibilities. Their understanding of traditional American history will be enhanced if teachers make the study of history more exciting, interesting, and engaging" (emphasis added).
The clear message is that history teaching should not only challenge students to learn traditional content about their country's great events and people, but make the learning of it untraditionally engaging, alive, and meaningful—in a word: fun.
In this issue of Northwest Education, you'll read about teachers and students who are engaged in just such history learning. Whether designing model keelboats like those used by the Corps of Discovery on the Missouri River or using ground-penetrating radar to find unmarked graves in an old pioneer cemetery, students and their teachers are rediscovering their communities' and nation's history by thinking and pursuing the adventure of learning like historians.
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