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Defining Purpose and Process in Teaching History with Case Studies
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 January 2017
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When the History of Education Quarterly editors invited us to contribute to this forum, they asked us to reflect on how we taught histoiy with case studies. To jump-start our exchange, they suggested four possible purposes for teaching history in this way, which I have paraphrased below:
• To reflect on the antecedents of the so-called “new” educational policy topics (what is the long histoiy of standardized testing?).
• To disrupt conventional beliefs with counterexamples (why did nineteenth-century science and math classrooms include so many female students?).
• To compare and contrast educational change in particular places or regions (how did the development of schooling differ in New England, the New South, or New Mexico?).
• To call attention to the intersection of human agency and institutional structures (how did teachers, parents, and political leaders conflict or collaborate in struggles over school reform?).
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References
1 Beadie, Nancy to Dougherty, Jack, e-mail, May 20, 2015 (in Jack Dougherty's possession).Google Scholar
2 “The HBS Case Method,” Harvard Business School, http://www.hbs.edu/mba/academic-experience/Pages/the-hbs-case-method.aspx; and “Case Method in Practice,” C. Roland Christensen Center for Teaching and Learning, Harvard Business School, http://www.hbs.edu/teaching/case-method-in-practice/.Google Scholar
3 Sam Wineburg, , Martin, Daisy, and Monte-Sano, Chauncey, Reading Like a Historian: Teaching Literacy in Middle and High School History Classrooms (New York: Teachers College Press, 2011), vi. To cultivate these skills, several history educators have drawn on the “Making Sense of Evidence” section of History Matters: The U.S. Survey Course on the Web, American Social History Project/Center for Media and Learning and the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, http://historymatters.gmu.edu/browse/makesense/.Google Scholar
4 See the “Common Schools” section of the Education Reform syllabus (http://commons.trincoll.edu/edreform) that includes the slide presentation, “Thinking Like a Historian about the Common School Movement” (http://bit.ly/Thinking-Like-An-Historian-CSM), with links to annotated Google Docs of primary sources, such as Horace Mann, “Intellectual Education as a Means of Removing Poverty, and Securing Abundance” excerpt from “Annual Report to the Board of Education of Massachusetts for 1848,” in Life and Works of Horace Mann, ed. Mary Tyler Peabody Mann, vol. 3 (Boston: Walker, Fuller, 1865), 663–70, http://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/001067112; Catherine Beecher, The Evils Suffered by American Women and American Children: The Causes and the Remedy (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1846), excerpt, http://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/003456542; Hughes, John, Committee of Catholics, Address of the Roman Catholics to Their Fellow Citizens, of the City and State of New York (New-York: Hugh Cassidy, 1840), http://archive.org/details/addressofromanca00newy. See also William Holmes McGuffey and Stanley W. Lindberg, “The Little Chimney Sweep (First Reader, 1836–1857 Editions),” in The Annotated McGuffey: Selections from the McGuffey Eclectic Readers, 1836–1920 (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1976), 16–18.Google Scholar
5 For the original teaching essay, see Dougherty, Jack, “Making Sense of Multiple Interpretations,” History of Education Quarterly 44, no. 1 (2004): 105–8.Google Scholar
6 See the Curry-Cecelski exercise in the Education Reform syllabus cited above, with a link to the reading guide at http://commons.trincoll.edu/edreform/resources/curry-cecelski-reading-guide.Google Scholar
7 Dougherty, Jack, “Investigating Spatial Inequality with the Cities, Suburbs, and Schools Project,” in On the Line (Hartford, CT: Trinity College, 2015), http://epress.trincoll.edu/ontheline2015/chapter/investigating-spatial-inequality/.Google Scholar
8 See published student essays at “Trinity College Students Call Attention to Histories of Inequality,” ConnecticutHistory.org, http://connecticuthistory.org/trinity-college-students-call-attention-to-histories-of-inequality/.Google Scholar
9 For further details on the pedagogical process, see Rollins, Elaina, Ceglio, Clarissa, and Dougherty, Jack, “Writing Greater Hartford's Civil Rights Past with ConnecticutHistory.org,” Connecticut History Review 53, no. 2 (Fall 2014), 220–26, reprinted with permission in Dougherty and contributors, On the Line, http://epress.trincoll.edu/ontheline2015/chapter/connecticut-history-review/. For a video on the process and student reflections at ConnecticutHistory.org programs, see Make Life Collaborative, 2013, http://youtu.be/NuWg9Jrkrpw.Google Scholar
10 Students engaged in this brief role-play after reading most of Pillars of the Republic paying particular attention to chapter 7 on resistance to reform. Carl Kaestle, Pillars of the Republic: Common Schools and American Society, 1780–1860 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1983).Google Scholar
11 At this writing, the “Big List of Reacting Games” included over ten published games, over seventy-five working models and prototypes, and seventy more at the conceptual stage. Reacting to the Past, Barnard College, accessed August 2015, https://reacting.barnard.edu/.Google Scholar
12 Lang, James M., “Being Nehru for 2 Days,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, 21 July 2014, http://chronicle.com/article/Being-Nehru-for-2-Days/147813/.Google Scholar
13 Carnes, Mark C., Minds on Fire: How Role-Immersion Games Transform College (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014).Google Scholar
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