Learning history by rewriting it. In Historical Thinking, Sam Wineburg describes a commitment to teaching history as active learning:

It is not enough to expose students to alternate visions of the past, already digested and interpreted by others. The only way we can come to understand the past's multiplicity is by the direct experience of having to tell it, or having to sort through the welter of the past's conflicting visions and produce a story written by our own hand. We have in mind here a vision of history classrooms where students learn the subject by writing it. Students come to develop a sensitivity to multiple stories because they have wrestled with them, not as arbiters of others' accounts but as authors of their own. This vision of history instruction transforms a school subject from a fixed story, with questions of significance and importance sewn up, to an array of stories that invites students to consider the fullness of human experience. By questioning the past, students illuminate their present.

This passage relates the back-and-forth I've quoted from in the last few days over at Gardner's blog. Do we have the nerve to work with high school students or undergraduates as if they could be writers and researchers? Can't young people be involved in the meaning-making of their community and the country? Or must they put off for several more years the rights and practices of full citizenship?

Wineburg's bio page at Stanford includes a brief pedagogical position statement and links to several short pieces that introduce other aspects of his clear, lively work. Also related to this week's discussion:

In "Questioning minds make study of past alive for the present," a Seattle Post-Intelligencer story, he addresses a reporter who doubts students can accomplish as much as he asks them to do: "We underestimate kids' abilities to think. Or we believe their self-esteem depends on having tasks they easily do. But we feel good about ourselves by doing things we thought we couldn't do, with capable people around to pick us up after a tumble and show us our reach can exceed our grasp."

By now I hope the promise of blogging has crossed everyone's mind, even though he's not mentioned the word.

Some other highlights from his linked pages point to practices that work: "In history, only questions — never conventional wisdom or slogans — pry open the door to critical thinking," he writes in a column for the LA Times.

And there is a good overview of his philosophy at the end of "Reading and Rewriting History, an ASCD piece on literacy co-written with Daisy Martin:

We need an approach to teaching history where the criteria for success have less to do with intoning loyalty oaths (to either side of the political aisle) than with students' ability to participate in the literate activities that our society demands. This means teaching students to be informed readers, writers, and thinkers about the past as well as the present—a goal all parties should be able to embrace. Our democracy's vitality depends on it.

(Opening quotation from "Picturing the Past," Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts, 2001, 131-132. According to the endnote, this chapter of Wineburg's book is based on an article he wrote with Janice E. Fournier for volume 105 of the American Journal of Education.) [0 & P]