Thoughts on history,tuning and the scholarship of teaching and learning in the United States

Higher education in the United States has never quite escaped the stage of feudalism. We have had no the Age of Absolutism, no standard weights, measures, or currency—some would argue no Enlightenment. In a period of perceived crisis—such as the era in which we live—such radical decentralization can encourage the simultaneous exploration of multiple possible responses to shared problems. But it can also isolate initiatives that could greatly benefit from greater communication with one another.

In the last two decades, the discipline of history in North America has experienced an unprecedented level of concern with teaching, and a great deal of creative work has gone into reconsiderations of how students can be better introduced into historical thinking. Three major initiatives have been particularly effective at raising questions about traditional approaches to the teaching of history and at proposing alternative ways to proceed: Tuning, the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL), and the structured simulations of reacting to the past. All three have made major contributions to our ability to teach history at the college level. But these approaches developed largely in isolation from one another, and there is a great deal that could be gained through the cultivation of a dialogue amongst the proponents of each approach. Setting aside reacting to the past for the purpose of this article, I will argue that efforts to improve the quality of history teaching in the United States can be great facilitated by encouraging discussions among proponents of the other two initiatives.

Dan McInerney has provided an excellent description of the development of Tuning among historians in the United States in another article in this volume. Simultaneously, but quite independently, a group of historians were beginning to explore the possibility of bringing to questions of teaching and learning in their discipline the same kind of scholarly analysis that they employed in their academic research. These efforts were greatly accelerated by the creation of the Carnegie Academy for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (CASTL) which in 1999 brought together cohorts of historians concerned with developing new ways of understanding what was going on in their classrooms. In 2006, this group combined with like-minded historians in the UK and Australia to create the International Society for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in History (History SoTL website). A series of programmatic articles were produced, and serious research into teaching and learning in the discipline was undertaken.

In retrospect, the initial isolation of Tuning and SoTL within history seems both odd and dysfunctional. Each has much to learn from the other. Tuning in the U.S. context has done a marvelous job of focusing departments on their teaching missions, of generating discussions of teaching methods, and of getting historians to think about the need to articulate the value that their courses can add to their students’ lives and to society. Some of the historians doing this work have, however, been operating without a deeper understanding of the issues that are being examined in SoTL. They have sometimes wasted energy reinventing “wheels,” that have already been developed and tested, taken for granted issues that the SoTL literature has argued can be problematic, or failed to develop explicit strategies for assuring that students actually master the competencies that they have defined. For example, in an appendix to the Lumina Foundation’s 2010 Report on “Tuning Educational Structures” goals of the History Department at Utah State quite appropriately suggest that students in history should be able to “discuss the ways in which factors such as race, gender, class, ethnicity, region and religion influence historical narratives.” This is an essential outcome for any history department today and making it an explicit element in the mission statement of a unit is highly desirable. But helping students navigate these complex and emotionally charged topics is a very demanding task, both emotionally and intellectually. There exists a rich and extensive SoTL literature on this challenge, and it is as dysfunctional to respond to it without some knowledge of this body of work, as it would be to undertake a project of traditional historical research without considering the existing secondary literature on the topic.

By contrast, the historians operating within the context of SoTL have done some serious exploration of learning issues in the discipline and are developing effective strategies for increasing learning. But they generally operate within a “build-it-and-they-will-come” mentality, which is often oblivious to the need to actually convince more history faculty to do scholarly teaching. And they have rarely confronted fully the need to explain to a broader public the value of what happens in the history classroom.

The potential for interactions between these two initiatives is obvious, and, in sessions and in hallways at the American History Association meetings a dialogue has begun. The potential for synergy between the two is becoming visible in articles such as Beth Belanger’s piece that is included in this volume. And many of those involved in Tuning have worked to raise questions about the effectiveness of unexamined traditions of history teaching and to introduce the ideas of educational researchers, such as Sam Wineburg, and scholars of teaching and learning, like Lendol Calder, into discussions of teaching. But such exchanges need to be consciously nurtured, and more concrete projects combining Tuning with SoTL need to be developed. Therefore, I devote the reminder of this article to suggesting a specific example of how the two approaches might serve one another.

The American Historical Association’s list of core competencies and learning outcomes that students could gain from history courses was a great service to the profession. It provided a target for history instructors and departments to aim for and a basis for reevaluation of curricula. It moved attention away from an obsession with subject matter towards a focus on the specific skills that students need to master for success in our courses and in their future lives. All of this can provide an important reminder for those in SoTL of the importance of creating programmatic proposals that go beyond detailed studies of particular learning challenges and that can serve as the basis for discussions within history departments.

The AHA list, however, does beg some questions. How, exactly, does one move from the statement of a competency to actual student learning? As many in the Tuning Movement recognize, here is ample evidence that traditional teaching methods are not sufficiently effective to make ever more complex subject matter available to ever more diverse students. In itself, defining competencies does not solve this problem.

Moreover, there is good reason to suspect that many of the mental operations required for student success are so automatic to practitioners in the field that they have become invisible. Viewed from the perspective of SoTL, the definition of learning outcomes is the beginning of an intellectual process, not the end. To actually realize a competency such as “Generate an interpretation,” for example, a student must master a number of specific mental operations. If the general goal is not problematized and explored, the steps necessary to achieve the capacity may remain invisible to the instructor and unlearned by the student.

The task of making explicit the mental operations that students must master to gain a competency, such as generating interpretations, has been taken on by one of the many groups exploring the scholarship of teaching and learning—the History Learning Project. This initiative, directed by Arlene Díaz, Joan Middendorf, Leah Shopkow, and myself, uses the Decoding the Disciplines process to unpack the steps that professional historians themselves do, when they perform the core processes of history, like generate interpretations—steps that are so automatic that many of them have become invisible and, thus, remain untaught (Decoding the Disciplines website; Díaz et al., 2008; Pace and Middendorf, 2004; Pace, 2017).

When examined through the Decoding process, the seemingly simple act of generating an interpretation is revealed to be a complex process of interrelated mental operations, each of which must be mastered for students to function effectively in history. To master this competency, students must first understand that multiple interpretations are possible, that certain kinds of questions must be posed to develop a thesis, that certain propositions must be valid for the interpretation to hold, and that each of these propositions must be checked against the available evidence to see if they hold. Each of these steps can be systematically modeled for students, they can be given practice at each, and, once there is evidence that they have mastered each part of this complex historical task, they can be given opportunities to combine these mental operations in an actual work of historical reasoning. But, if the process of interpretation is not analyzed, broken down into its constituent parts, and systematically shared with students, instructors are apt to share the real doing of history only with those in the “choir” who already understand the process.

This is, of course, only one example of the way in which the intellectual rigor of the scholarship of teaching and learning of SoTL can be combined with the practical efficacy of Tuning to produce great increases in student learning. As a secondary gain, such an alliance can help bring to those involved in Tuning the same kind of intellectual excitement and sense of discovery that we experience in traditional disciplinary research. And, Tuning can help make SoTL more than an intellectual exercise by linking its work to the needs of contemporary universities and the society as a whole. Collaboration between the two has great potential for reenergizing our discipline and giving teaching the position it deserves in higher education.

If, however, this potential is to be fully realized, it may be necessary for both initiatives to ask some hard questions about the challenges we face. Mills Kelly has argued that Tuning has not gone far enough in recognizing the extent to which changes in the context of higher education—in particular, the high cost of a college education—necessitate a more radical rethinking of the role of history in students’ future (Kelly, 2015). The same criticism may be leveled at SoTL. Both groups, like generals preparing for the last war, may be reforming an educational system that is in the process of disappearing. Such factors as dual credit courses that are moving introductory college courses to the high school level and the assignment of most lower level teaching responsibilities to adjunct faculty may be changing the context of history education so fundamentally that those involved in both Tuning and the scholarship of teaching and learning need to be asking more fundamental questions.