DOCUMENT RESUME

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AUTHOR McDiarmid, G. Williamson; Vinten-Johansen, PeterTITLE The Teaching and Learning of History- -From the Inside

Out. NCRTL Special Report.INSTITUTION National Center for Research on Teacher Learning,

East Lansing, MI.SPONS AGENCY Office of Educational Research and Improvement (ED),

Washington, DC.REPORT NO ISSN-1054-7673PUB DATE Nov 93NOTE 46p.

AVAILABLE FROM Michigan State University, National Center forResearch on Teacher Learning, College of Education,116 Erickson Hall, East Lansing, MI 48824-1034(S8.10).

PUB TYPE Reports Research/Technical (143)

EDRS PRICE MF01/PCO2 Plus Postage.DESCRIPTORS Higher Education; *Historiography; *History; *History

Instruction; *Learning Strategies; *Teacher,Education; Teaching Methods

ABSTRACT

This document comprising of two essays, "ChallengingProspective Teachers' Understandings of History" (G. WilliamsonMcDiarmid) and "Reflections of a Journeyman Historian" (PeterVinten-Johansen), provides a uniquely detailed account of whatstudents study and learn in a historiography course. The coursedescribed is unusual in its attention to the epistemological issuesstressed in emerging curriculum standards. These papers give vividimpressions of what this course meant to both students and professor.These impressions, combined with the evidence about what studentslearned, begin to suggest how one might understand the substance andsources of subject matter knowledge of teachers in several fields.The papers do not suggest an easy solution, but cio provoke reflectionon what the current reforms ask of teachers, and what is reasonableto expect those teachers to know. The first paper describes the studyof an undergraduate historiography course, the historiography seminaron the Spanish Armada, and a rationale for the workshop approach tohistory. It includes dialogue from students and a table of componentsof the history workshop and corresponding understandings of historythat the experiences are designed to develop. Students' thinkingabout history is discussed. The second article by Vinten-Johansengains added interest by describing not only the instructor'sperspective on the course, but also his account of how he came toteach a course with this focus. The first article contains 42references. (DK)

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The Teaching and Learning of History -- From the Inside Out

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NCNational Center for Research on Teacher Learning November 1993

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NCRTL Special Report

The Teaching and Learning ofIlLtoryFroin the Inside Out

by G. Williamson McDiarmid and Peter Vinten-Johansen

G. Williamson McDiarmid, co-director ofthe National Center for Research on TeacherLearning and associate professor of TeacherEducation at Michigan State University,taught history and social studies for nineyearsand has been trying to figure outwhere he went wrong ever since. His otherresearch focuses on prospective Englishteachers' understanding of literature andteaching literature to diverse learners.

Peter V inten-Johansen is an associateprofessor in history and the Center for Ethicsand Humanities in the Life Sciences atMichigan State University. He has been theDirector for Interdisciplinary Programs inHealth and Humanities in the College ofArts and Letters at MSU since 1989. Hismajor teaching responsibilities lie in modernEuropean history, particularly intellectualhistory; and the history of health care in theUnited States and western Europe. He hasan interest in ethnohistory and, of course,in the interaction of history and pedagogyas subject matters and practice.

IntroductionOne of the most striking findings ofthe TeacherEducation and Learning to Teach study wasthat majoring in a subject such as mathematicsor English did not always provide the subjectmatter understanding needed for teaching.Graduates might have the knowledge neededfor success on course examinations, yet not beable to explain a basic concept or to makeconnections outside those courses. Graduatesalso often viewed disciplinary knowledge asgiven and absolute, contrary to the historicalrecord and to contemporary philosophical com-mentaries.

These findings remind us that to understandteacher learning we must look beyond thetypical research siteseducation courses andfield experience. Because college courses inthe arts and sciences offer prospective teach-ers a major opportunity to learn about thesubjects they will teach, insight into the sourcesof teachers' subject matter knowledge requiresexamination of these courses.

Although research has been done on theeffects of college, studies of how collegestudents learn and how they are taught areprincipally general accounts of the college

Michigan State University, East Lansing, Michigan 48824-1034SR 1 1 /93 Page 1

experience or anecdotal reports of collegeinstruction. Our understanding of what col-lege graduates know is also limitedbasedon test data on selected groups (e.g., GREexaminees) and interview studies of sci-ence and mathematics students, which typi-cally highlight the gap between test scoresand understanding. Thus, little is knownabout how college does or does not provideteachers with the deep subject matter un-derstanding that seems required for increas-ingly challenging achievement standards.

In the two essays that comprise this specialreport, G. Williamson McDiarmid and PeterVinton-Johansen provide a uniquely detailedaccount of what students study and learn in ahistoriography coursea history course aboutthe doing of history. The course describedhere is unusual in its attention to the epistemo-logical issues stressed in emerging curriculumstandards. Vinton-Johansen' s paper thus gainsadded interest by describing not only theinstructor's perspective on the course, butalso his account of how he came to teach acourse with this focus.

These papers give vivid impressions of whatthis course means to both students and profes-sor. These impressions, combined with theevidence about what students learned, beginto suggest how we might understand the sub-stance and sources of subject matter knowl-edge of teachers in several fields. The papersdo not suggest a quick fix; they do provokereflection on what the current reforms ask ofteachers and what is reasonable to expectthose teachers to know. By extending the workreported here over time and to other subjects,McDiarmid, Vinten-Johansen, and their col-leagues are helping to strengthen our under-standing of how teachers learn what they haveto teach.

Robert E. Floden

Co-Director

National Center for Research on Teacher Learning

SR 11/ 93 Page 2 0 1993 by the National Center for Research on Teacher Learning

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...:iii.4210418111111111111111111111181M111.1111111111NMINIIr

Challenging Prospective Teachers'Understandings of History

G. Williamson McDiarmid

United States reform initiatives in teachereducation call for teachers to develop subjectmatter knowledge that is broader, deeper, andmore connected than is currently the case(Holmes Group, 1986). Policymakers, eagerto ensure that prospective teachers learn asmuch subject matter knowledge as possible,have, in a number of states, either restrictedthe number of teacher education courses thatprospective teachers may take or by-passeduniversity-based teacher education altogether.Restrictions on the number of teacher educa-tion courses expresses the policymakers' be-lief that to increase the subject matterknowledge ofprospective teachers, they shouldspend more time in arts and science courses.After all, arts and science courses, rather thanteacher education courses, have been the tra-ditional source of subject matter knowledge.

The assumption that prospective teachers willlearn more of the subject matter knowledgethey will need for teaching by taking more artsand science courses is, however, largelyunexamined. Although researchers have stud-ied, from a variety of angles, the effects .ofuniversity education on students (for a com-prehensive review, see (Pascarella & Terenzini,1991), the teaching and learning of specificsubject matterparticularly historyat uni-versity remains largely unexamined. We actu-ally know little about the effects of arts andscience courses on how students think aboutsubject matterwhat they believe the subjectmatter to be, how new knowledge in the fieldis generated and evaluated, what the majorcontroversies in the field are and why, and soon. Certainly, like teachers at other levels,university faculty collect and analyze, usuallyinformally, data on their students' learning.

But much of what these faculty have learnedremains tacit and uncommunicated (for ex-amples to the contrary, see Booth, 1988, andSmith, 1990).

In this paper, I examine a required under-graduate history course and the thinking ofstudents in the course as a way to beginaddressing the gap in our collective under-standing of teaching and learning in artsand science courses. In describing thecourse, I identify the purposes the organi-zation and structure of the course appear toserve, as well as the views of history thatpermeate these purposes. I then discuss thekinds of understandings students seemed todevelop during and after the course andspeculate on the role that the exnPrience ofthe course may have had on these under-standings. Finally, I compare these kinds ofunderstandings with the recommendationsof reformers.

Description of the StudyThe undergraduate historiography courseas the object of study

In selecting a course to study, we wereprimarily concerned to identify one thatseemed likely to bring students face to facewith critical epistemological questions inthe field such as what is historical knowl-edge and how is it produced and validated.Such understandings underlie many of thecurricular and pedagogical decisions his-tory teachers make. We were interested bothin how prospective teachers thought aboutsuch questions as well as in how historyinstructors treated them. We were also in-terested in how students thought about such

Michigan State University, East Lansing, Michigan 48824-1034 SR 11/93 Page 3

epistemological questions under prom's ingcircumstancesa "best case." Conse-quently, we wanted to choose an instructorwho had a reputation as a successful peda-gogue. Finally, we wanted a requiredcourseone considered critical for all stu-dents that is typically taken early in stu-dents' sequence of courses. This latterstipulation was important because wewanted to be able to follow the students forat least a year to see how their thinkingdeveloped subsequently. This was positedon our belief that the ideas whose develop-ment we were interested in tracking weredifficult and required some time to compre-hend.

A section of the required undergraduate histori-ography course offered by the History Depart-ment at Michigan State University and taught byProfessor Peter Vinten-Johansen met all of thesecriteria. After a brief career as a high schoolgovernment teacher and a stint in the Navy,Vinten-Johansen did graduate work in history atYale. He has taught at Michigan State Univer-sity for 15 years (For an autobiographical ac-count of Vinten-Johansen's development as ateacher, see Vinten-Johansen, in press.).

Vinten-Johansen taught the section of thecourse taken by students in the Honors Col-lege at Michigan State University. Conse-quently, some of the students were likely to behighly motivated and had achieved consider-able success in their past experiences withhistory both in high school and in college.Others in the course were not Honors Collegestudents. According to Vinten-Johansen, inall essential respects the course was similar inorganization, procedures, and pedagogy toother, non-honors courses he teaches. Thepresence of the Honors College students, forour purposes, enhanced its qualifications as a"best case" test ofthe idea that arts and sciencecourses could enable studentsincluding pro-spective teachersto develop deep and con-nected understandings of the subject matter.

Of the twenty students who started the semi-nar, 16 completed it. Of the 14 students forwhom we have baseline data, eight were third-year students, two second-year, and four first-year. The students had taken an average of twohistory courses prior to the historiographyseminar; three of the third-year students hadtaken as many as four courses. Although theyhad taken no previous college-level historycourses, two of the first-year students hadtaken Advanced Placement American Historycourses in high school. The courses studentshad previously taken were, by and large, sur-vey courses taught in large lecture formatswith weekly discussion sections taught bygraduate students. The most common surveycourse taken was the two-term sequence inAmerican History. All but three of the stu-dents were history majors. Eight of the origi-nal 14 planned to teach high school historyafter graduation.

Description of the data on teaching

We documented the opportunities that stu-dents in the course had to learn, the instructor'srationale for the purposes and opportunitieshe orchestrated, as well as students' under-standings of critical ideas over time. To docu-ment opportunities to learn, I attended andtook notes on all but 2 of 19 meetings of theseminar. I also made tape recordings of theclass (subsequently transcribed), interviewedthe instructor formally twice, tape recordedthe :nstruutor's conferences with the students,and collected course documents and copies ofthe instructor's comments on students' writ-ten work.

I conducted two formal interviews with theinstructor as well as several informal conver-sations about the course and specific students.The first structured interview focused on theinstructor's rationale for the course, the se-quence of activities, the texts, the assign-ments, and soon. The second interview focused

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on his assessment of how much progress stu-dents made toward the goals he had set forthem. In this interview, we returned to some ofthe themes of the earlier interview such as thepurpose of various activities and texts.

In taking field notes, I focused on the class-room discourse, the issues that were discussedand how these were related to prior and subse-quent issues or questions, the roles of variousparticipants in the discussion, the kinds ofquestions asked and explanations offered, andother ways in which history was represented.

Description of the data on student learning

Students' written work constitutes anothersource of data, both on the teaching of thecourse and on student understanding. Whenpossible, I collected the papers the studentswrote for the course. These papers includedProfessor Vinten-Johansen's marginal andsummary comments. Consequently, the pa-pers represent evidence of student understand-ing, opportunities the instructor created forstudents to learn, goals and purposes of theinstructor, and the instructor's ideas abouthistory and about knowing and doing history.

We conducted at least two and in some casesthree structured interviews with each of the 11students who remained in the sample over thefirst year of the study. The interviews consistof three sections. The first section focuses onstudents' past experience with learning socialstudies and history both inside and outside ofschool. In the second section, we asked stu-dents about specific historical events and is-sues: the causes and consequences of the CivilWar, as well as specific events and peopleassociated with these issues; the meaning ofReconstruction; highlights and results of thecivil rights movement, as well as, again, eventsand people from the movement; and the TonkinBay Resolution in relation to the war in Viet-nam. We chose these topics because they arecommonly found in most high school historycourses and textbooks and they are topics onwhich historians have offered a variety of

interpretations. We sought to find out not onlywhat students knew, factually and contextu-ally, about these events, but also how theythought historians construct accounts of theseevents and what historians might find prob-

atic in conducting historical inquiries. Wealso presented students with conflicting inter-pretations of a historical periodReconstruc-tionand asked them which account theypreferred and why and how historians couldproduce such a range of interpretations for thesame set of events. The third section focuseson the same historical events and issues thatappeared in the second, but the questions fo-cus on how the students would teach thesetopics to eighth and eleventh graders. We alsoasked them to critique sections from two text-books on the Civil War and the civil rightsmovement. We chose these particular text-books to represent both dull and more engag-ing texts as defined by a recent review ofhistory textbooks (Sewall, 1987).

Data analysis

I analyzed the data on teachingespeciallythe interviews with the instructor and the tran-scriptions of the course meetingsfor evi-dence on several dimensions of the instructor'sknowledge and purpose. One dimension wasthe instructor's ideas about what history is andwhat it means to know history. A second

.vas the instructor's goals and pur-poses for the historiography course. Closelyrelated is a third dimension: the way that theinstructor represented history through the or-ganization, sequencing, and discourse of theseminar, as well as through the texts, assign-ments, and activities. Finally, I analyzed thedata for evidence of the instructor's assump-tions about what his students believe abouthistory and learning and knowing history.

I entered the data from the student interviewsinto a database that allowed me to sort themalong several dimensions and to compare theirresponses to each of the items at the beginningof the course and then one year later. For thisanalysis, I examined students' responses on

7Michigan State University, East Lansing. Michigan 48824-1034 SR 11/93 Page 5

three dimensions of knowledge: the nature ofhistory, the "doing" of history, and the teach-ing and learning of history. Beginning withthe full transcripts of the interviews, I reducedthe data on each dimension for each student toa summary with illustrative quotations andthen to a summary. I then looked for patternsacross the individual summaries.

Problems with the study

Case studies of this type do not producegeneralizable findings. The study was de-signed to serve several other purposes. First,I explore the relationship between a prac-ticing historian's views of the nature ofhistory and historical inquiry and the op-portunities he orchestrates to enable under-graduates, some of whom are prospectiveteachers, to develop understandings abouthistory and historical method that are closerto those of historians. Concomitantly, I alsoexamine how students make sense out of anexperience of learning history that contrastswith those they have previously encoun-tered and what, if any, changes seem tooccur in their knowledge and thinking abouthistory over time.

Although I cannot draw conclusions aboutundergraduate history teaching and learningon the basis of these data, this is not mypurpose. Rather, I describe and analyze therelationships among the instructor's views ofhistory, the experiences he orchestrates for hisstudents, and the evolving historical under-standings of prospective teachers and otherundergraduates. Currently, few detailed de-scriptions or analyses of these phenomena andtheir relationships are available to historiansor teacher educators. Yet, just such investiga-tions are needed if we are to begin to under-stand the relationship between variousapproaches to teaching and the kinds of under-standings students develop when involved withthese approaches. I hope this paper spurs in-terest in, discussion of, and more investiga-tion of these issues.

Description of theHistoriography Seminar

The ease

The centerpiece of the historiography seminar isa puzzle: What is an apparently obscure seven-teenth century dispute over a seat in Parliamentbetween two Englishmenone named Goodwinand. the other Fortescueabout and why shouldanyone care? Although Professor Vinten-Johansen described the course as consisting ofthree "chunks" and the Goodwin-Fortescue con-troversy as the second "chunk," the other two"chunks" are, in fact, intended to aid students intheir investigations into the case. During the firstthree weeks, students analyze Garrett Mattingly's(1959) classic account of the English defeat ofthe Spanish Armada in 1588 and then compareMattingly's account with Fernandez-Armesto's(19C8) revisionist analysis of the event. In thethird chunk, students read G. R. Elton's EnglandUnder the Tudors (1974) and Joyce Youings'sThe Sixteenth Century (1984) and lead seminardiscussions on portions of these texts.

The history workshop portion of the seminarcommenced with the distribution of "thepacket"a collection of primary documentsrelating to the Goodwin-Fortescue disputeduring the eighth class meeting, or one-thirdof the way through the course. Consisting ofsome 46 single-spaced typed pages, thepacketcontains various documents that bear on thecase: court accounts of events in the case;reports of the dispute in Parliament from thejournal of the House of Commons and privatediaries kept by Mombers; various state papers;correspondence bctween James I, the recentlyinstalled and first Stuart monarch, and theHouse of Commons; letters written by Mem-bers; and correspondence among diplomats.(In our first interview, Professor Vinten-Johansen quickly acknowledged that the ideafor the packet and the packet itself are prod-ucts of Professor Jack Hexter, with whomVinten-Johansen studied as a graduate studentat Yale in the 1970s.)

8SR HI 93 Page 6 0 1993 by the National Center for Research on Teacher Learning

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The students' first task was to order the docu-ments chronologically and by source. Simple,but for the fact that, as the students discov-ered, England was, at the beginning of theseventeenth century, on a different calendar(Julian) from the Catholic states of the conti-nent (Gregorian). Immediately, then, studentsencountered a problem in accomplishing whatappears to be the most straightforward taskhistorians undertake: establishing the tempo-ral order of events.

Subsequently, Professor Vinten-Johansen di-vided the class of 20 students into two types ofgroups. The first type consisted of four or fivestudents apparently randomly assigned to eachgroup. The second type was topic-specific.During the ninth class meeting, Vinten-Johansen worked with the class to identifytopics on which they would need additionalinformation if they were to make sense of thedocuments and, ultimately, the case itself. Thetopics for research identified included: bio-graphical information on the principals in thecase; organization of the government and theelections process; legal terminology; and thesocial structure of England at the beginning ofthe seventeenth century.

In their topic-groups, students were respon-sible for collaboratively deciding what infor-mation they needed to sort out the case, findingthe information in books that Vinten-Johansenhad put on reserve in the library or othersources they found for themselves, and find-ing information about their topic that class-mates in their primary group requested. Theinformation students gathered as part of theirtopic-specific group was reported back to theirclassmates in their primary group. In thesegroups, students pooled their information andunderstandings in an effort to make sense ofthe controversy.

Out of these collaborative efforts emerged theresearch papers that each student wrote. Thefirst rl.i.aft of these papers was due after thethirteenth class meeting, some four weeksafter the packet had been introduced. After

receiving Vinten-Johansen's comments andmeeting individually with him to discuss theirdrafts, students turned in a second draft in lieuof a conventional final examination.

The Armada

Before receiving the packet on the Goodwin-Fortescue case, students reaa two accounts ofthe battle between the English flret and theSpanish Armada in 1588. Vinten-Johansenfrom the beginning focused classroom discus-sions of Mattingly on the purpose for which hewrote The Armada. During the second classmeeting, students reacted to Mattingly's char-acterization, in his preface to the 1959 edition,of the battle in the English Channel as part ofan "ideological war." Several students ob-jected that he seemed to ignore other possiblereasons for the conflict, such as economicsand burgeoning nationalism. Responding tothese suggestions, Vinten-Johansen channeledthe discussion, mid-way through the class, tothe context in which Mattingly wrote:

Mattingly is writing in a time [The Armadawas originally conceived in 1940] in whichthis ideological struggle is going on and so,therefore, in his mind even though eco-nomics may be an issue, even though na-tionalism may be an issuein his mind,this ideological . . . conflict going on in the1940s is causing him to go back and look atan earlier period of time. . . . Do you thinkthat is wrong? He is in a way imposingsomething from the present onto past. Why?What does that mean? What does that sayabout history?

After a student responds that "you can neverhave completely unbiased history," Vinten-Johansen agrees that as human beings "comefrom different backgrounds and experiences"they will write biased history. The remainderof the classand much of the subsequentdiscussion about The Armadafocused onMattingly's thesis.

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Discussions of Fernandez-Armesto's accountof the Armada similarly focused on identify-ing his thesis and the evidence on whir,h hebased this argument. From the beginning, how-ever, students used Mattingly's account as thestandard against which to judge Fernandez-Armesto' s thesis. Discussions explored dif-ferences in the types of evidence on which thetwo historians base their arguments, particu-larly Fernandez-Armesto's detailed accountof the ordnance each side had at their disposal.

Toward the end of the third class on Fernandez-Armestothe seventh class meetingdebateon his argument reached its peak. Severalstudents had contended that a critical elementof Fernandez-Armesto's argument is his con-tention that the English and Spanish weremore evenly matched than they had previ-ously been portrayed and that characterizingthe battle as the English "David" defeating theSpanish "Goliath" misrepresented what actu-ally occurred.

Kathy: I don't think [Fernandez- Armesto] says theywere equal. I think he says Spain won.

PVJ: OK, do you, do you

Gary: I think he says it right here on page 236when he says "the deficiencies of Spanishstrategy above all, as I have suggested, thefailure to provide a northern port of refugebears some responsibility for the Armada'sfailure. The English made a contribution ofsorts to their own salvation, the weather didmuch of the rest, but the Armada would stillhave been reckoned a remarkably successfulventure but for the work of the Irish siren." . . . Ithink that's such a stupid thing to say Howcan he claim successjust success that theymade it out of there? I mean, that wouldn'thave made it a successful voyage.

David: I'll take a shot. I think that he was arguingthat they could claim success because[Fernandez -] Armesto mentions early in thebook that, really, possibly, the main pur-pose behind the Armada might have been

just to end English provocation and not somuch, you know, the success and the totalinvasion. So I think that in those terms, thatargument stands up a lot more strongly.

Gary: Well, I know he says that maybe they didn'tplan to invade and maybe they just went toscare the English into doing something. But, Imean, how can you consider all the time thatthey spent as being successful and nothingreally happened to the English?

Kara: I would argue against that because I think whatI got from what he's saying ... that the Spanishwere successful because they were able tokeep most of their ships together and theEnglish weren't really able to sink them orreally harm them in any way. Most of theirproblems came from the weather and not hav-ing enough food and the English didn't ac-complish their goal of destroying the Armada.

Gary:

Dick:

Gary:

PVJ:

Sean:

But how's that successful when the Spanishwere on the offensive?

But it's not thinking like winning or losingthe Spanish were defeated, or the Englishdidn't succeed because they couldn't destroythe Armada and the Spanish succeeded be-cause the English weren't able to. It's not likewin or lose.

I think that's a cop out to say that

Jump in, Sean.

That's what I was thinking too. . . . I mean,why call it the Armada? Why not call it like a"little sailing fleet?" Just for the heck ofit, theywent out and sailed.... Ifthat's all they wantedto do, why do they go to all the trouble? ... Ifit's all just going to be some type of feint toquell England's provocation into Spanish ter-ritory or anything like that, they didn't have togo to such extremes to do that, probably. Andall they did was go up there and sail around andthen get a couple of ships lost and . . . I don'tsee it as a Spanish victory.

PVJ: You do not?

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Curt: This assumption's ridiculous because . . .

read at the beginning how [Fernandez-Armesto] said the only reason for the Armadawas possibly to get bargaining power over theEnglish. Well they certainly didn't. Imean, theEnglish think that they won. So, I mean, it'snot like the English were beaten up and said,"Well, at least we got them out of here." Imean, the English didn't get touched at all andgot them out of there. So, I mean, Spain reallyhas no bargaining power. If they came back, Imean, maybe the weather would change butEngland seemed [stronger).... [Fernandez -Armesto] is not looking at it . . from theEnglish point of view. But to me, the Englishseemed that they know that they won andthey're not going to bargain.

Diane: I have to admit that 1 agree that the Spanishlost it, but I don't think by that muchbecause . . . the Spanish only lost like four orfive ships. . . . Amer the battle, I mean, theweather took out most of the ships. And Ithink maybe [Fernandez-Armestol is suggest-ing that Philip was just testing his poweragainst the English and they got up there andthey got in a fight and they came out a lotbetter than maybe Philip thought that theywould come out and then that way it was avictory and then that way maybe if the shipswould have been able to get down backthroughthe channel and back to Spain and they couldhave improved it, gone back up, challengedthe English again and won.

Curt: What I don't understand is if he's arguing thatSpain was the victor in this battle, whydidn'tthey have the guts to come back down thechannel to go home?

PVJ: They couldn't; it was nota matter of guts, thewind was

Kathy: Why didn't Spain turn around and attack,attack the English? Why didn't, ifthey werethe victors, you know, why didn't they, whydidn't they do something to England? Theyhad to sail all the way back to Spain and th,:nsay, "Ha-ha, we won."

This exchange illustrates the kinds of conver-sations that took place around the Mattinglyand Fernandez-Armesto texts.. Nine of the 18students present took part in this particularexchange. Professor Vinten-Johansen's role

was minimalindeed, when he tried to inter-ject information into the discussion, Kathyinterrupted him to make her point. This ex-change could also be examined for evidenceof student understanding: Students evidenceda capacity not only to identify the thesis of ahistorical account but also the capacity tocritique the evidential and logical basis for thethesis. Lest the reader conclude that this typeof conversation is possible because this was aHonors section, I would add that five of thenine students involved in this exchange werenot in the Honors program.

Context for the packet

The third "chunk" of the course consists oftwo other texts: G. R. Elton's England Underthe Tudors and Joyce Youings's SixteenthCentury England. Whereas discussions ofMattingly and Fernandez-Armestohad focusedon the arguments they make and the evidentialbases of their arguments, these two texts weretreated as sources of information that wouldhelp students interpret the Goodwin-Fortescuecase. Vinten-Johansen assigned each studenta chapter from one of the books on which tomake a presentation to the seminar and lead adiscussion. The presenter was responsible foranswering questions that classmates mighthave about the topic.

Papers

Students wrote three short papers and a longerresearch paper on the Goodwin-Fortescue case.The short papers included an analytical reviewof Mattingly's The Armada, an analytical re-vim comparing Mattingly's account with thatof Fernandez-Armesto, and a revision of thelater. These written assignments were distin-guished by two features:Vinten-Johansen treatedall papers as drafts and reviewof the papers wasan occasion for him to meet with individualstudents and discuss theirprogress. For instance,Vinten-Johansen required students to turn in afirst draft of their research papers after the thir-teenth class meeting and a second draft at thetime set aside for the final examination.

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The short papers, like the classroom discus-sions, required the students to attend to his-torical arguments and the bases for these. Forinstance, in the first paper, students had toidentify Mattingly's thesis in The Armada andthe logical and evidei fial foundation for histhesis. The comparative essay required stu-dents to compare the theses and the substan-tiations of the two authors. Vinten-Johansenwrote extensive comments both in the mar-gins and on separate sheets of paper. Theexample below is typical of the commentsVinten-Johansen wrote on a first draft com-parative essay, submitted after the ninth classmeeting:

Opening pa. g. 'aph is one ofyour most clearlywritten to date, Dick. Need toflesh it out more,however, from your personal orientation toeach of the author's major theses and yourfinal integration. Also need more analysis(where I write "because.') especially con-cerning which (or both) of the arguments youconsider persuasive.

Substantiation needs reorganization. Thefirst paragraph nas far too many topics.Reduce the number of paragraphs, thendiscuss M [attingly] 's view vs. 17 fernandezi -A [rmesto] 's view and explain why you con-sider 17 lernandezPA [rmesto] 's morereasonable. You point out different per-spectives and simply choose the one youlike. Rough transition to Mattingly. In thenext long paragraph; your organizationalIngle is unclear. We 'll need to think waysto help you set this up in the revision.

Throughout, you need clearer explanation ofthe standards you employ for determining"better," etc. There's a difference between a

particular perspective on the Armada and aclearer, more persuasive explanation. Thekey to that comes in your thesis, the analyticalpart especially.

The five-page paper on which this commentappears contained an additional 15 commentsor questions.

Conferences

Another critical experience in the course wasthe required conferences that Vinten-Johansenheld with individual students about their pa-pers. Although these conferences focused onthe student's written work, they usually in-volved the themes that recurred in the class-room discussions. Students signed up forappointments on a schedule Vinten-Johansenbrought to class. As Vinten-Johansen afforded15 minutes for each conference, the discus-sions tended to be sharply focused. LimitingCOIlfe2,211C(:3 to a quarter of an hour each madethis a manageable component of the course forVinten-Johansen, who had considerable ad-ministrative responsibilities in addition toteaching and research.

Below is an excerpt from the conference thathe had after he returned Dick's paper with thecomment recorded above:

PVJ:

Dick:

PVJ:

Dick:

PV!:

Dick:

PVJ:

Dick:

So you're stacking the deck against Mattingly.

I guess so. 1 didn't think, I thought Fernandez[-Armesto] was better, that's why I guess.

Yea, okay, but, "better?" What's "better?"

A more persuasive.. .

Why?

`Cause of the way he, umm, examined theArmada itself.

Because you liked it more?

Not really. When I read it I didn't like it asmuch. l kind of felt like he was ripping off theEnglish. But then 1 thought at the end he did abetter job.

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PVJ: Okay, now what we need to do is get that word"better" out of there and come up with some-thing where we can really compare the writ-ing. In other words, we've got to compare thetwo theses. Then, unless there is a problemwith the way in which Mattingly sets up thenotion of the larger conflict . . .

Dick: The narrative?

PVJ: No. . . you say here, "In his book, Mattinglydoes not examine the Armada with its real goalin mind." You're telling the reader thatMattingly's got it screwed up. Instead of fo-cusing on the "real goal" which you've set uphere, to essentially invade England ... you'resaying that Mattingly's gone off on a tangent.He's all concerned about . . . the Armada'srole within the larger crusade. . . . There'sabsolutely no doubt in your mind that that'sthe case?

Dick: Well, when you put it that way I'm not sure,but the way he set up France and the Nether-lands, and what was happening in Spain, whatwas happening in England, I think that's, andthen he just fit the Armada in to it.

PVJ: Okay. What do you have, do you have anystandard by which you can judge which one isthe real goal, which one is closest to coming upwith the real goal? ... Other than yourself andhow you feel about it?

Dick: Yea, I think, the documents that Fernandez -Armesto used.

PVJ: What about the documents that Mattingly used?

Dick: I think they both said, kind of said the samething.

PVJ: Okay, what, how did you decide what was thereal goal? . . . You're convinced that the realgoal, the actual mission, the real goal was tomake this crossing, to assist in the crossing.What, tell me precisely, what evidence causedyou to arrive at that conclusion?

Dick: 1 can't remember that exact thing from thebook, but the way he said to meet Parma.

PVJ:

Dick:

PVJ:

Okay, but whose goal was that? Is this some-thing that Mattingly or Fernandez-Armestoinvented?

Phillip's goal.

Okay, so what .. . is imbedded in here, but notclear yet, is that you're going to evaluate thetwo authors in terms of, at least initially, howwell each one reconstructs Phillip's goal backthen, in 1587-88. And then how the rest of thisstory that they tell whether or not it seems tocarry out Phillip's goal or whether they wan-der off. What you're suggesting is, Phillip II'strue goal, actual, real goal, whatever you wantto word it, was what?

The exchange exhibits a pattern typical of theconferences we recorded: Vinten- :Jhansenrelentless in questioning students about theclaims they make in their papers and how theysubstantiate their claims.

These five elementsL packet and the at-tendant research and discussions in smallgroups, the books about the Armada and theaccompanying discussions of the authors' the-ses and substantiation, student presentationsfront the Youings and Elton texts, the shortpapers and the longer research paper, and theconferences on the papersconstitute the op-portunities that Vinten-Johansen has createdfor students to learn. But why these elements?Where do these come from? In particular,what seems to be the relationship betweenVinten-Johansen's understanding of his sub-jectincluding his ideas about the nature ofthe history, how one comes to know history,and how new knowledge and understandingsare generatedand the purposes and opportu-nities to learn they create?

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Rationale for the WorkshopApproach to History

Vinten-Johansen's pedagogy and purpose isgrounded in his understandings of what his-tory is and what it means to know and dohistory. In the data I identified six ideas thatappear central to his view of history: (1) Therecord of the past lends itself to multipleinterpretations; (2) a given event can only beunderstood in the context in which it occurred;(3) part of the historian's task is to link a givenevent to its context in a way that produces aninterpretation of the event; (4) a critical aspectof writing history consists in placing oneselfin someone else's shoes and seeing the worldas he or she saw it; (5) historical accounts andinterpretations should be judged on their ownterms according to how well the historiansubstantiates his/her thesis; and (6) history iswritten for the present generation and, hence,the past needs to be periodically re-interpreted.

These ideas are not merely idiosyncratic be-liefs; they coincide with the views expressedby other historians and philosophers of his-tory, particularly those who have been catego-rized under the label "idealist." (Walsh, 1984/1967). Idealist historians have been defined assuch to distinguish them from "positivists"who believe, in Tosh' s (1984) words, "theessence of historical explanations lies in thecorrect application of generalizations derivedfrom other disciplines supposedly based onscientific method such as economics, sociol-ogy and psychology" (p. 110). Idealist histo-rians, on the other hand, distinguish humanevents, which have an "inside"that is, at thecore of human events are human motives,beliefs, feelings, and so forth which must beapprehended if the events are to be under-stoodfrom natural events that are amenableto the inductive methods of science (for fur-ther discussion, see Ccllingwood, 1956/1946;Croce, 1921; Walsh, 1984/1967).

Moreover, as Novick's (1988) recent treat-ment reveals, the historical profession in theUnited States has moved away from earlier,unsophisticated notions about objectivity. Thatthe conceptual framework of the historian,built up through his or her experiences inparticular cultures during a particular period,shapes not merely interpretation but what heor she chooses as the object of study hasbecome a commonplace.

I draw attention to the similarities betweenVinten-Johansen's views and those of histori-ans in the idealist tradition to place him in thedebate in the field over the nature of historyand historical inquiry. I do not mean to sug-gest either that Vinten-Johansen sees himselfas an idealist nor that his views consistentlyline up with those identified with idealist his-torians. Below, I examine the ideas that Ibelieve lie at the core of both Vinten-Johansen' s views of history and his pedagogy.Table 1 presents a summary ofthe experiencesin the course and the understandings theyseemed designed to encourage. Although Ihave relied primarily on interview data indeveloping these ideas, I have also drawn onother sources such as transcripts of classes andstudent conferences as well.

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Table 1

Components of the History Workshop and Corresponding Understandings of HistoryExperiences are Designed to Develop

Component of Experience Understanding of History

The workshop: Goodwin-Fortescue case"The packet"

Establishing chronology.

Identifying topics for research.

Working with topic group to find information andprimary group to put the pieces together.

Writing first and second draft of research paper.

History as interpretation and historical inquiryas making sense out of past events.

Accurate chronology is essentialhistorians needto know what went on when.

Events must be understood in the context in whichthey occurred.

History is constructed by a community of histori-ans who rely on each other for information andideas. Doing history involves developing a sensefor background, setting, the broader contextualdevelopments.

Writing history is making sense out of an event inits context for oneself, in the first place, and tocommunicate to others the sense one has made.

The Armada

Discussing Mattingly's The Armada.

Discussing Fernandez-Armesto's account of theArmada.

Writing comparison of these two accounts.

Historians' preoccupations with the past are shapedby the presentin this sense, all history is contem-porary. Changes in political, moral, and philo-sophical sensibilities lead to revisions of history.

As doing history is a process of interpretations,historians can and do disagree about the sameevents in the past. Evaluating conflicting accountsrequires examining how well historians accountfor the facts as these are known. Personal prejudiceis poor grounds for preferring one account toanother.

Elton & Youings

Leading seminar discussion on parts of the texts. Identifying pertinent contextual information andcommunicating to others.

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The record of the past lends itself tomultiple interpretations

Underlying Vinten-Johansen's commitmentto the workshop approach that he uses in hishistoriography seminar is his view that thereis no single account of the past. Rather, thepast can be ordered and interpreted in a num-ber of ways. This is evident in the followingjustification Vinten-Johansen offered duringour interview for the essay students writecomparing the two accounts of the Armadathat they read:

History is a series of interpretations and view-points that are based in evidence but variousreadings of the very same evidence issues ofselectivity, the background of the historianwould eventuate in different outcomes... .

[The students] needed to see that history is notsimply a series of chronological recapitula-tions. That it involves a process of under-standing not just what happened but how andwhy it happened as it did. And I wanted themto see that Mattingly had looked at this, hadnot just come up with a view of the Armadabased upon . . . his own interests or proclivi-ties, but that the range of evidence that helooked at eventuated in a certain interpreta-tional point of view and one that I hoped thatsome of them would take issue with. And tokind of pique that a bit, I made sure thatFernandez-Armesto had some different pointsof view so that they could see that, you know,intelligent and reasonable people could dis-agree without turning into fisticuffs. So [thepaper served] two purposes; one, to see thatall history is a process of interpretation, andtwo, that if they're going to do history them-selves, they've got to develop interpretations.Not just simply recount what happened. It'snot just awhat's the word I wantit's notjust a chronology but chronicle.

What Vinten-Johansen says here echoes oth-ers who have attempted to define the study ofhistory. For example, Walsh (1984/1967) de-fines history as a "significant" narrative of thepast; that is, a narrative in which the historianhas labored to uncover the "intrinsic" rela-tionship among events in order to produce acoherent whole from the events he or shestudies:

[The historian's] way of doing that, I sug-gest, is to look for certain dominant con-cepts or leading ideas by which to illuminatehis facts, to trace connections between thoseideas themselves, and th-In to show how thedetailed facts become intelligible in thelight of them by constructing a "signifi-cant" narrative of the events oc the periodin question. (Walsh, 1984/196/, p. 61)

In researching the Goodwin-Fortescue case,students soon find that several interpretationsare possible for the evidence they uncover. Inparticular, they must decide whether tnis is acase of Parliamentary privilege or of Royalprerogative. That is, had Parliament, as someMembers claimed, been granted certain privi-leges by the TudorsElizabeth I, in particu-larthat empowered it to decide mattersrelated to its internal governance such as thevalidity of elections and who has the right tosit in Parliament? Or, as James I claimed, didthe monarch have the prerogative, by divineright, to over-ride any decision Parliamentmight reach? The facts do not, to the students'dismay, speak for themselves. In their re-search papers, they must argue for an interpre-tation and substantiate their argument. Thenotion that history is interpretation is no longeran abstraction; interpret the students must.

A given event can only be understoodwithin the context in which it occurred

In describing historical inquiry, Walsh (1984/1967) places at the heart of the enterprisedelineating the "intrinsic" relationship betweenone event and others. Vinten-Johansen givesexpression to this by the way he situates theGoodwin-Fortescue case within the overallorganization of the course and within history:

Students are forced, first, into a sense for abroader context, that even if they... . look ata particular event such as the Armada theyhave to recognize that the Armada cannot beviewed in isolation. . . . So the first goal ofdoing history is to have a sufficient sense forbackground, setting, the broader contextualdevelopments. To be able to know more orless where a particular event might be situ-ated.

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In fact, all the readings in the course had as aprimary purpose providing students with acontext for the case. The accounts of the Ar-mada set the stage for the transition from theTudors to Stuarts and England's emergence asa Protestant power capable of counter-balanc-ing Catholic power on the continent; the Eltonand Youings texts offered details of the politi-cal, diplomatic, and social milieu in which thecase occurred. The use of the topic-specificgroups to gather information was precisely todelineate and fill out the context of the contro-versy.

The historian's task is to link a given eventto its context in a way that produces anexplanation for the event

This is most clearly expressed in Vinten-Johansen' s purpose for the research paper thatstudents wrote on the basis of their investiga-tions and discussions of the Goodwin-Fortescue controversy. In our first interview,Vinten-Johansen explained:

Students need to recognize that particularevents are confusing to the participants at thetime. The clarity that we often impose histori-cally is an artifact. . . . They need to go backand, in a sense, become absorbed in the uncer-tainty, in contingency, the lack of perspectivein an event itself. Once they have . . . thatconfusion, then the goal is to essentially rec-ognize that the role of the historian is toimpose clarity on the past for a particularpurpose. The purpose is: first, clarity for theindividual investigating the event to try tounderstand what he or she thinks occurred.The second is clarity in terms of communica-tion to others. Why would this event in whichone has invested one's time and energy andunderstanding be of significance to otherpeople?

Vinten-Johansen's idea that historians "im-pose clarity on the past for a particularpurpose" comports well with Walsh' s (1984/1967) observation that the historian's taskis to construct a "significant" narrative ofevents and Burston's (1976) assertion thathistorians seek to "elucidate the individualevent" (p. 32). Can (1964) asserts that "[t)he

facts of history cannot be purely objective,since they become facts of history only invirtue of the significance attached to themby the historian" (p. 120). These views of"facts" and the historian's relation to themdiffers markedly from the views of those inthe positivist tradition who hold that thehistorian's beliefs and values are largelyirrelevant (see, for instance, Benson, 1972).

Just as the texts in the courseparticularlyElton and Youingsand the topic-specificgroups were the vehicles for filling out thecontext of the case, the primary groups werethe forum in which information on the contextand insights students had gathered in theirresearch were pooled to make sense out of theinformation gleaned from the documents inthe packet. Again, the process of inquiry andcollaborative "sense-making," more than ei-ther the primary documents or the secondarysources, constituted the principal opportunityfor students to develop understandings of thenature of historical knowledge and inquiry.

Writing history involves placing oneself insomeone else's shoes and seeing the worldas he or she saw it

In discussing this component of his view ofhistory, Vinten-Johansen described during ourfirst interview how he has used To Kill AMockingbird in another course he taught:

There's one point in [the novel] when [thelittle girl] stops and says, "You know, sud-denly I can step inside the shoes, and I canwalk around in them for a few minutes, and Icould understand that Boo was not that differ-ent from me where it counted," or somethinglike that. . . . I use that, and [I urge mystudents] to "use your feelings and your intui-tions not as the basis for your judgment, but asthe vehicle for getting yourself out of yourpresent, and at least making a pass [at getting]into these very strange waters of the past."

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In describing his use of literature, especiallynovels, in his history courses, Vinten-Johansenexplains why he tries to create opportunitiesfor students to experience, imaginatively,someone else's reality:

What is the context that would help explainwhy they did that? There's usually an expla-nation for what human beings do. Even aserial killer you can figure out. There's a lot ofdetective work, I suggest to [my students],even though I don't like the whole notion ofhistory as detective [work]. . . . There is thatsense of what a good detective has to do inorder to try to understand, to solve a problem,a murder or what have you, that a historianalso can make use of, and that tends to work.But because of the difficulties that studentshave with [putting themselves in someoneelse's place] ... you'll see how chock full [mycourses] are of literature. . . . And that'slargely because I have found literature is oneof the most effective ways of getting studentsinto a different world view.

Such imaginative projection into the heartsand minds of others in the past is, for a numberof philosophers and historians, a critical re-quirement for understanding and doing his-tory. In particular, idealist historians such asCroce (1921) and Collingwood (1956) arguethat historical truths are not generalizations ofthe sort that the physical scientists seek butrather individual, applying to a particular eventrather than to a category of events. Under-standing indi.:idual events is possible becausethese experiences are a consequence of humanthought and doings which are accessible to thehistorian. According to Walsh (1984/1967),the historian can "re-think or re-live" thethoughts and experiences of individuals in thepast: "This process of imaginative re-living . . . is central to historical thinking, andexplains why that study can give us the indi-vidual knowledge which other sciences fail toprovide" (p. 44). Elton (1967), in distinguish-ing between amateur and professional histori-ans, observes that "Wile purpose and ambitionof professional history is to understand a givenproblem from the inside" (p. 18).

Vinten-Johansen views the experience ofimaginative re-thinking and re-living as a criti-cal antidote to the presentism common notmerely among his students but characteristicof the way many in society think of the past.The issue arose in the first seminar discussionof The Armada when a female student ob-jected to an analogy Mattingly uses to com-pare the way Elizabeth I managed the peopleof England to the way a woman manages herlover. The student accused Mattingly of sex-ism. After soliciting other students' views ofthis observation, Vinten-Johansen discussedthe charge:

If you are going to stand back and try to beobjective, it is a sexist description, by ourcurrent standards. But then, as a practicinghistorian, you have to stop and say, "Wait aminute. What kind of society was this?" In sofar as that society was sexist by our standards,then it is possible that Mattingly has capturedsexism in the society. If Mattingly had writtenthis book thirty or forty years later than he did,it is very possible that he would have figuredout a way to let us know whether he approvedor disapproved of that sexism, but writing inthe 1950sactually he started writing in the1940swas essentially a decade before thefull popular explosion, so to speak, of thenotion of sexism.

Notice that in this class, the second of theterm, Vinten-Johansen is already includingstudents in the category of "practicing histori-ans," explaining to these novitiate historiansthe culture and the conventions of the enter-prise of doing history. Vinten-Johansen, inclass, frequently asks questions intended toalert students to their use of contemporarybeliefs, knowledge, moral standards, and atti-tudes to judge the actions of individuals in thepast. In discussing students' first drafts oftheir research papers, he frequently questionsstudents about their judgments of Members ofParliament or James I, asking what purpose isserved by characterizing Jamesas one stu-dent didas "stupid" because he insisted onthe divine right of kings.

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Historical accounts should be judged ontheir own terms according to how well thehistorian substantiates his or her thesis

This component of Vinten-Johansen's view ofhistory is central to the total experience of thecourse. Many of his comments on students'paperslike the quotation from his commentson Dick's paper abovefocus on this issue.This parallels Vinten-Johansen's insistencethat historical events be understood, as muchas possible, from the "inside," although heacknowledges, as Berlin (1954) argues, thatour capacity to do so is restricted by the degreeto which our understandings are framed by themoment in which we live.

The emphasis on judging historians in theterms of the purposes and methods that theyset for themselves appears to be Vinten-Johansen' s way to help students think aboutthe importance of internal consistency andoverall coherence to the persuasiveness of theargument they will make in their researchpaper. His comments on students' papers andto students in individual conferences and classfocus on the viability of the arguments theyare attempting to make rather than on whetherthe interpretation is right or wrong.

In the following student conference, Vinten-Johansen addresses his comments to Kathy'scriticisms of Mattingly in the comparativeessay:

Kathy: I guess I'm judging Mattingly by . . .

PVJ: By Fernandez-Armesto's criteria? Is thatfair?

Kathy: I guess not.

PVJ: Would you want somebody to decidewhether you have had a successful under-graduate career on the basis ofyour buddy'sstandards of what makes success, your par-ents' standards to success, or your ownstandards of success?

Kathy: My own.

PVJ: All right. Then you've got to extend the samecourtesy to Mattingly. What was he trying todo in his book? Does he do that well? Whatwas Fernandez-Armesto trying to do? Doeshe do that well?

History is written for the presentgeneration and, hence, the past needs to beperiodically re-interpreted

A critical aspect of Vinten-Johansen's view ofhistorical knowledge is that our understand-ing of the past changes as circumstances in thepresent change. This is evident when he dis-cusses the use of both Mattingly's andFernandez-Armesto's accounts ofthe Armada.Published some 38 years apart, they offercontrasting interpretations of the event:

It becomes a . . . perfect instance in which onecan show the need for constant historical revi-sion. That we are writing for a present genera-tion and that present generation is never thesame. So that even if no new material isunearthed on a subject like the Armada, let'ssay, one can go backand with differenteyes, different assumptions, with differentgoals in mindcan make a very valuablecontribution in trying to [understand theevents].

The experience of the workshop itself is de-signed to convey the idea that "different eyes"may produce different interpretations. AsPostan (1970) argues, "[t]he facts of history,even those which in historical parlance figureas 'hard and fast,' are no more than relevances:facets of past phenomena which happen torelate to the preoccupations of historical in-quirers at the time of their inquiries" (p. 51).

19Michigan State University, East Lansing, Michigan 48824-1034 SR 11193 Page 17

DiscussionVinten-Johansen's understanding of histori-cal knowledge and the enterprise of doinghistory can be viewed as part of the largerdiscourse about knowing in history and his-torical inquiry. Like other historians and phi-losophers, he views history as primarilyinterpreting the past, of weaving together pastevents in a way that creates an explanationboth for individual events and for the resultingwhole fabric. For Vinten-Johansen, the es-sence of historical inquiry is uncovering therelationship of a specific event to the widercontext in which it is embedded and, thereby,coming to understand the event in its contextfrom the inside. This is, however, only half thehistorian's task. Historians must also commu-nicate their understandings to others. To doso, they must create a text driven by theirunderstanding of the events and substantiatedby the evidence of the events themselves andfrom the contextcultural, social, political,economic, diplomatic, intellectualin whichthe events occurred. By coming to understandthe context and recreating this for the reader,the historian can produce a text that mayinduce the reader to re-enter, with him or her,the particular moment in the past and see theevents from within. This describes Mattingly'sThe Armada, a text that Vinten-Johansen holdsin high esteem.

Vinten-Johansen's understanding of historyas a field of human inquiry represents but halfof the knowledge that makes him an unusualpedagogue. He has also thought a great dealabout what experiences are likely to help stu-dents develop the understandings of historyand the doing of history for which he aims. Heappreciates that merely reading history andabout history is unlikely to enable students todevelop such understandings of history andhistorical inquiry. This appreciation may betraced to Vinten-Johansen's own experiencesas a student of history. As a graduate studentin history at Yale, Vinten-Johansen studiedwith Professor Jack Hexter who pioneeredwork in the use of history workshops. That

experience appears to have been seminal notonly in Vinten-Johansen's notions about his-tory and historical inquiry but also in his ideasabout how students come to develop an appre-ciation for these views of history.

The historiography course as described aboveis the point at which Vinten-Johansen's viewsof history and historical inquiry intersect withhis ideas about learning history and his knowl-edge of his students. He has modified the ideaof the history workshop he experienced as agraduate student to fit the level of intellectualdevelopment he believes typical of his under-graduates. Rather than leaving students ontheir own, as he had been left as a graduatestudent, to decide what information they wouldneed to make sense of the case and where theymight find that information, Vinten-Johansenhelps students identify the contextual factorson which they require more information andplaces on reserve in the library secondarytexts he knows contain this information. Hisselection of texts for the course serve doubleduty: They exemplify different types of histo-riesspecifically, narrative, analytical, so-cial, and politicaland they provide contextualinformation for the case they are researching.Paper assignments are carefully articulatedwith the rest of the course. Early papers aredesigned to help students recognize and, then,construct a thesis and understand how histori-ans go about substantiating a thesis. The semi-nar itself is also an exercise in identifying,constructing, and substantiating theses aboutpast events. All of these experiences have incommon the direct involvement of students:Students in the course rarely have the oppor-tunity to be passive, even if they might preferto remain so.

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Students' Thinking aboutHitstoryf

Ideas about doing history

As the above account reveals, most of thehistoriography seminar focused on students'understandings of writing narrative history;how historians gather, assess, and make senseof evidence; how they decide the relativeweight to give different bodies of evidence;how they develop and test historical theses;what problems are inherent in constructinghistorical accounts and explanations and howhistorians deal with these. Such understand-ings are vital if students are to develop acritical attitude towards the historical accountsthey encounter. Understanding the extent towhich historical accounts are products of theparticular historical circumstances in whichtheir creators live and are dependent on theavailable evidence is the essence of appreciat-ing the constructed, interpretative, and tenta-tive nature of our knowledge of the past.

Such an appreciation prepares prospectiveteachers to help their students develop per-spectives on historical accounts. For instance,such an appreciation prepares teachers to helptheir students understand why certain groupshave been under-represented both in accountsof the past and in constructing the accounts ofthe past on which non-specialists depend.Understanding the constructed nature of his-torical accounts is critical if teachers are tohelp students appreciate why all accounts,including those of the present day, are subjectto constant revision. Finally, such an appre-ciation, to some extent, de-mystifies the writ-ing of history and may, perhaps, promptteachers to see themselves and their pupils ascapable of constructing their own accounts,however modest, of past events and people.

At the beginning of the historiography course,the students in our sample, while they heldsomewhat disparate views on doing historyand the nature of historical accounts, seemedto share several conceptions. The first of these

is that, in writing history, first -hand accountsof events are more reliable than more distalaccounts. In describing how they would writean historical account, they rarely mentionedthe use of secondary sources. Several studentsalso recognized that eye-witness accounts,while highly reliable, often conflict. In suchcases, the historians' task is to balance theaccounts, rather like an accountant or a math-ematician:

You'd have to take everything from the Southand the North like a grain of salt and then putit all together some way and see if like some-one in the South said there is a hundred sol-diers in this troop and then the other one saidthere was like ninety-eight. That's pretty close.So it must be true. Kind of like math.(Steve, IV#1)'

During the interview, we gave students a copyof the text of President Johnson's speech to ajoint session of Congress that eventuated inthe Tonkin Bay Resolution that provided alegislative justification for the military build-up in Vietnam in the mid-1960s. We askedthem how they might go about writing anaccount of this speech for a student historyjournal. Nearly all the students mentioned theimportance of learning more about the con-text in order to understand the speech and theresulting resolution. To discover more aboutthe context and the resolution itself, nearly allsaid they woulu consult secondary sources incontrast to their observations that historiansseek out eye-witness accounts.

Most seemed to have a point of view on theissue of Vietnam and assumed that they wouldwrite an article to support that point of view.The purpose of consulting secondary sourceswould be to gather information to substantiatea position they had already taken, not to helpthem interpret the speech. None mentionedthat the actual processes of researching andwriting would be means to get clearer aboutwhat they thought about the issue. This as-sumption that historians bring predeterminedpositions to the writing of historical accountsis consistent with the reflexive view, expressed

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throughout the interviews, that all historicalaccounts are, by definition, biased. Bias canbe traced to the personal circumstancesraceand region of birth, for instanceof the histo-rian

We presented the students with brief summa-ries of four conflicting interpretations of Re-construction drawn from Foner's (1988) recentreassessment. Most were unaware of any ac-count of Reconstruction other than the one wechristened the "Gone-with-the-Wind" view:Northern Reconstructioniststhe dread car-petbaggersmanipulated ignorant and largelypassive former slaves to their own self-ag-grandizing ends. When asked which of thefour versions they found most credible, notsurprisingly almost all of the students chosethe one with which they were most familiarthe "Gone-with-the-Wind." versiondespitethe fact that historians, for several decades,have attacked and discredited this interpreta-tion (DuBois, 1935; Foner, 1988; Woodward,1986). Interestingly, one student who had readFoner's account for a survey course in Ameri-can history, mentioned that Foner's differ-ences with David Donald (1965), anotherhistorian of the Reconstruction era, arose fromthe fact that Donald was a Southerner andFoner a Northerner.

Virtually all of the students, asked to explainthe differences among the various accounts ofReconstruction, ascribed these to the histori-ans' personal biases: whether they were fromthe North or the South, whether they wereblack or white, and whether or not they wereprejudiced toward blacks. As one student toldus, "If Jimmy Joe Bob from the South iswriting about the Civil War, I'm sure he'd bebiased to reasons why the South had the rightidea and the North didn't" (Jeff, IV#1). An-other observed that a Southerner could nothave constructed the interpretation that char-acterized Reconstruction policies as essen-tially conservative because they didn't entailland redistribution.

Two students who also subscribed to the gen-eral notion that historical accounts are bynature biased talked less about the role ofpersonal biases and more about how the pre-occupations and concerns of a given timeshapes historians' perspectives. Respondingto a revisionist account of Reconstruction thatfocused on the role of African Americans inshaping not only the agenda and policies ofReconstruction but also Southern society andinstitutions in the immediate post-war period(Foner, 1988), Curt said:

I think it was written more in the time of thecivil rights movement than after because Idon't think that anybody would've looked atthings that way before. I assume that this waswritten by a black, just because I don't thinkthat anybody before that looked to say that theblacks were the center of everything. It justseems like something that you wouldn't thinkabout until there was a big black movementagain. (Curt, IV#1)

After learning when the various interpreta-tions of Reconstruction that we gave her toread had been constructed and by whom, Marymentions both the role of personal bias and ofthe historical moment in the historian writes:

It makes a big difference if you know wherethey're coming from. If you know if they'reblack or white, if you know when they'rewriting, because you can think of what theirculture is like at that time. You know whatmight be affecting their views. (Mary, IV#1)

Views of history

For another analytical category that we termed"views of history," we drew on several differ-.ent questions in the interview as well as fromstudents' comments in the seminar. In theinterviews that we did at the beginning c f:theseminar, two-thirds of the students in thesample believed that historians' accounts are,to greater or lea. c degrees, instruments oftheir personal biasessuch things as theirgender, race, regional origins, political com-mitments and nationality. A few students domention that historians need to be conscious

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of their own biases and that such awarenesscould help them counterbalance their biases.By and large, however, 'he students assumedthat biases are irresistible forces against whichhistorians are impotent. As one student com-mented,

With something like the civil rights movement,our way of looking at things is not too differentthan it was in the 50s, 60s, and 70s because itwa, that long ago. So we would only see itfrom our bias. We wouldn't see it from anoutside point of view . . . because you get emo-tional about something, you have strong emo-tions either one way or the other. It's going toblind you a little bit to the ways things really are.You may get all the facts right but it will color ita little in your mind and if you're writing aboutit or talking about it, it will color it in the mindsof other people . . . like the examples I readabout the four versions of Reconstruction. Wehad the Northerner writing that the RadicalReconstructionists were great guys because hewas really caught up in that cause and he reallybelieved in it, so he downplayed what reallyhappened and built the Radical Reconstructionposition for the Negro and doing all these won-derful things out of the goodness of their hearts.(Karen, IV#1)

Historians write accounts of the past in orderto push their own political agendas. Such abelief in the dominating power of personalbias produces a fashionable cynicism, a rela-tivism in which all accounts are equally bi-ased. According to this view, no account isentirely wrong nor are any entirely right.

Skepticism toward historical accounts is pre-cisely the stance most history instructors wouldlike their students to take. Certainly, Profes-sor Vinten-Johansen tried to help his studentsdevelop such stances. Yet, a cynicism thatignores the standards and criteria that histori-ans have developed for judging the relativemerits of various accounts is as reflexive andunthinking as a gullibility that accepts allaccounts as equally true. Having arrived atsuch a cynical position, students can easilymistake their stance for critical analysis andreasoned judgment.

This skeptical stance is, however, fertile groundfor teachers bent on encouraging a criticalview of history in their students. As Vinten-Johansen observed, "[h]istory is a series ofinterpretations and viewpoints that are basedin evidence but various readings of the verysame evidenceissues of selectivity, the back-ground of the historianwould eventuate indifferent outcomes . . . "a point of viewshared by numerous practicing historians andphilosophers of history (see, for example, Carr,1954; Collingwood, 1956/1946; Croce, 1921;Geyl, 1955; Handlin, 1979; Walsh, 1984/1967). From at least three of the students, thedata we collected seemed to show an evolu-tion of thought beyond the reflexive cynicismdescribed above. In the first interview, Mary,one of ti.e three, responded to our question ofwhy historians' interpretations of Reconstruc-tion differ as follows:

I think a lot has to do with like the time theylive in and their background. Like the one byW. E. B. Dubois.... He was black and you cansort of tell that he's trying to make the blacks,make it sound like they were actively in-volved in the Civil War and actively involvedin getting themselves free. (Mary IV#1)

A year later, focus of her remarks shiftedaway from the ineluctable effects of personalbias and toward the indeterminate nature ofpast events. In the following, responding to aquestion about whether facts or conceptsshould be the focus of history instruction,Mary references her experience in Vinten-Johansen' s seminar:

When I had Peter's class, we read two differ-ent books on the Spanish Armada. One bookI hated because I thought he contradictedhimself the whole time and I didn't agree withwhat he was trying to say. But if he had madea case for it, if he'd supported himself better,I would have said, "Oh, OK, this works." Butthen the other book had different ideas and hesupported himself well. And I don't necessar-ily subscribe to one or the other, but I'm like,"OK, I can see this" and "OK, I can see this."You've got to figure out what's going on fromthe two different ideas. But if you don't sup-port yourself, people just aren't going to be-lieve you. That's why I don't like textbooks

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because they'll say, "This happened, this hap-pened, this happened and this is why," andthat's not necessarily why.. .. You know a lotof that's up in the air. I mean you can makespeculations and you know you may be rightand a lot of people may think that this is why,they may think t;ie same reasons. But youdon't know, you weren't there. (Mary IV#2)

As we conducted these follow-up interviewsduring the Persian Gulf War, Mary used thisconflict to illustrate her point in the context ofa question about the war in Vietnam:

I don't think that history is all cut anddry. . . I mean, you can say, "Yes, thishappened on this date, this happened onthis date" . . . but you can't talk aboutmotives. I don't know what I think motivesfor Vietnam are. Twenty years from now,me or somebody else is going to think dif-ferent motives. . . . That's the kind of stuffthat you can't tie down. .. . Some historianwill write [about the Persian Gulf War] andsay this is what happened and this is why,but then another historian's going to comeout and say this is what happened and thisis why and neither of those two people aregoing to agree. It's going to be totally dif-ferent accounts. (Mary IV#2)

In this response, we can discern a focus onhuman motivation- -that is, reconstructingwhat lay behind the actions of people in thepastas well as an appreciation for the funda-mentally interpretative nature of all historicalaccounts. Evidence or similar concerns forhuman motivation and appreciation of theinterpretative nature of historical accountsappears in the follow-up interviews of sevenof the nine students for whom we have data onthis dimension of historical understanding.

In the initial interviews, three of the studentsexpressed another view of history: history ascyclical. Again, this view was largely reflex-ive, a reflection perhaps of popularized ver-sions of Santayana's dictum that "Those whoforget the past are doomed to repeat it." Karen

is typical of those who held this view. Askedhow she would respond to a hypothetical highslhooler who wondered why bother studyinghistory, she said:

I'd tell him, "So you don't go out and makethe same mistake yourself one day and getus involved in another war." Because, likeI said last time, I believe history is cyclical.Events will happen, not exactly the sameover and over again, it's kind of impossibleto get all the same things but same generaltype of things will go on again and againbecause history really isn't paid too muchattention to by anyone. And so they'll comeup to a situation . . . that had happened inthe past once or several times, same basictype of situation and choices and they'll goright ahead and make the same choice thatwas made before when it may have haddisastrous consequences. You need to havethe knowledge so you can possibly avoidrepeating the same mistakes and having thesame problems. . . . All history is basicallywar, peace, war, peace, preparing for thenext war. (Karen IV#1)

In the third meeting of the seminar, whenKaren suggested that history was cyclical,Professor Vinten-Johansen, aware of the ap-peal of this view for the popular mind, spokedirectly to the difference between historical

rallels and the view that "history repeatsitself." In the follow-up interviews we con-ducted a year after the seminar, Karen re-turned to her view that history is cyclical butshe devotes equal attention to her belief that

history can be interpreted in different ways.In a lot of cases, it's kind of hard to con-clude that this interpretation is absolutelywrong, one hundred percent and this inter-pretation is the only right one. A lot of it ispersonal opinion, not fact. (Karen IV#2)

In the follow-up interviews with the other twostudents who had offered the view that historyis cyclical in nature, both appeared less certainthat about their earlier beliefs. Bill, for in-stance, who was perhaps most insistent about

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the cyclical nature of history, devotes, in hissecond interview, greater attention to the in-terpretative nature of history than to its cycli-cal nature.

One explanation for these apparent changes isthat students learned from Vinten-Johansen'scritique of this view that it is unpopular amonghistorians. This isn't, however, what studentscommunicate in the interviews. Rather, at leasttwo of the three students who initially ex-pressed this view seem to have moved beyondit, developing conceptions of history moretextured and variegated than simplistic dictaon the nature of history.

Finally, one student, particularly interested inarchaeology, initially viewed history as theorderly presentation of information about pastpolitical events and the people involved. Askedin her first interview about the historiographyseminar, she opined,

In this 201 class, we don't have a textbook sowhen we read the Armada books, they weremainly just the author's interpretation of thework. They were facts in a way but they werekind of tainted by their preference and I liketextbooks, how they come across as straight-forward and just give me the facts. . . . Theydon't have opinions or personal feelings inthem. (Nancy IV#1)

A yeas later, Nancy's beliefs that the facts ofhistory are unsullied by opinions, personalfeelings, or perceptions and that textbooks areneutral compendia of facts have not changed.In response to a question about what highschool students should learn about the CivilWar, she replied,

The facts. I'd have to get my facts straightbefore I could teach them. I'd have to look attext books and make sure I was telling themthe right idea. I'd just want to make sure thatthey knew the facts. I wouldn't want to put myopinions or perceptions over the facts. I wouldjust want to tell them the strict facts about it.(Nancy,IV#2)

Perhaps most surprising about Nancy's viewis that is wasn't more widely shared by othersin the class.

In sum, most of the students in the samplebelieved, at the outset of the seminar, that thepersonal circumstances of historianstheirgender, race, regioncause them to skew his-torical accounts. In this view, historical ac-counts are the means that historians use topursue their interests and the interest of othersin their group. A year later, a subtle shiftseems to have taken place in the views ofabout half the students: They appear to havedeveloped a greater appreciation for the de-gree to which the present moment and thepreoccupations of the present moment shapehow all of us, historian and non-specialistalike, see the past. In their frequent referencesto the historiography seminar, moreover, weseem to be able to discern the effects of thecourse, particularly their work on the Goodwin-Fortescue case and the comparison ofMattingly's and Fernandez-Armesto's treat-ments of the Armada. The idea that history iscyclical, a repetition of the same events indifferent times and places, figures less cen-trally in the year-later interviews of thosestudents who argued for this view at the outsetof the seminar. And the one student who heldthat history was "just the facts, ma'am,"seemed, a year later, to continue to hold thisview.

View of teaching and learning history

Perhaps most striking about students' viewsof history and the doing of history is theirrelative sophistication. Most view history asinterpretation of the records of the past shapedlargely by the concerns and preoccupations ofthe present. When we look at these samestudents' view of teaching and learning his-tory, however, we are struck by the extent towhich they are prisoners of their own experi-ences. And, compared to the effect that the

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historiography seminar had on the views ofseveral of them, the effect on students' beliefsabout teaching and learning history was mini-mal.

When asked how they would help high schoolstudents learn the knowledge of the Civil Warthat they believed important, most of the stu-dents said they would lecture. This reflectstheir own experience in secondary and univer-sity history classrooms. Few had experiencedany approach to teaching history other thanlecturing. Two of the students did mentionthat they might have students do projects, onetouted the value of discussions, one suggestedthe use of primary sources, and one reportedhe'd tell "good stories." The latter is an ap-proach that several students believed distin-guished good history teaching.

Asked the same question about teaching thecivil rights movement, several resorted to thelecture as the primary approach. Most, how-ever, mentioned the use of documentary films.Three students also mentioned the use of pri-mary sources or contemporary accounts.1 ourtouted the value of discussions. Several stu-dents also suggested that they would havepupils read "real books"that is, works ofhistory that are not textbooks.

Although most of the students considered thehistoriography seminar the best history coursethey had taken, only one student mentionedthe workshop approach in their discussion ofmethods they might adopt. When we askedthem about using such an approach with highschool students, several expressed their doubtthat high school students have either the mo-tivation or the ability to carry out work of thistype. This is perhaps consistent with theirbeliefthat Professor Vinten-Johansen 's semi-nar required them to work more than any otherhistory class they had taken. Describing hisexperience in the course, one student, wholiked the course in spite of receiving a failinggrade, said, "Peter puts us through hell."

Most considered learning history asunproblematic, as simply a reflex of learn-ing (Cohen, 1988). Consequently, to learnhistory, learners need only be told whathappened and whythis despite the strongcriticism most heaped on the history classes,nearly all of which were lecture courses,they had taken in high school and at univer-sity. Jeff' is a notable exception. Somewhatbaffled by the seminar at the outset, Jeffcame to rethink not merely the nature ofhistory but also what it means to know andlearn history. Responding to a questionabout how he might help eighth graderslearn about the Civil War, he said:

I'd want to teach them how to learn becauseyou can't tell someone histoty because thenit defeats the purpose. If you learn it your-self and put your own interpretation on it,you can be guided.... The who, how, what,where, when, why are very importantquestions . . . even Ph.D.s and doctors arcstill asked that when they write articles."What do you think about this?" Or " Howabout this? You didn't consider this." Andthat's not telling someone they're wrong.It's just saying maybe you can considerthis, too. . . . How to learn is important,knowing how to go to the library and lookup what's interesting to you. (Jeff, IV#2)

Mark's view of learning also differs frommost students in the sample:

If you just go in and just teach out of a textbook and just have them learn things, they'regoing to get bored and they're not going toknow why they're doing it. You have togive them a reason why they're learningand you have to give them some kind ofinformation that they can use out ofschool. . . . School can't just be a placewhere you go and then that's the only placeyou use your knowledge. You should getsome kind of knowledge that you can useelsewhere and I think that's what you haveto try and do in teaching history.

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Unlike the other students in the study, Marktook teacher education courses between thefirst and second interviews. He attribut. s hisoutlook on learning to a sp,cific teacher edu-cation course:

Before the class ["Learning and School Sub-jects"] I had last term I used to think more interms of what I was going to do as a teacherinstead of what they were going to do asstudents, and kind of a two-way thing I haveto look at how I'm going to help them learninstead of just tell them I'm going to teach.(Mark, IV#2)

In sum, despite their beli that they had learnedmore in the historiogri. by seminar than inany other history course, most students' viewsof teaching and learning changed little be-tween ..he beginning of the seminar and oneyear later. Most believe learning is a reflex ofteaching; most say they would lecture to stu-dents despite the fact that their own experi-ences of lectures are overwhelmingly negative.Several students also thought film documen-taries and primary sources were appropriatefor teaching about the civil rights movement.Two students offered different views of learn-ing, one perhaps due to his own struggle tounderstand and the other because a coursefocused his attention on learners' experiencesof learning.

DiscussionWhat are the effects of experiences such as thehistoriography seminar described here on stu-dents' understanding of history and the teach-ing and learning of history? Answering thisquestion is fraught with all the problems thatattend attempts to trace any individual's un-derstanding or knowledge, or back to a par-ticular source. In the first instance, we don'tknow the relationship between a person's un-derstanding and a particular experience. Thatthey developed new understandings, beliefs,

insights, knowledge, behaviors after a givenexperience in no way establishes that the ex-perience is responsible for thechange. Changesmight well be due to other experiences notinvestigated. In addition to attending otherclasses, students, during theyear we followedthem, also talked with family and friends andothers, read a range of texts, viewed televisionand movies, listened to the radio, and so on.The evolution of their understanding may wellowe as much or more to these experiences thanto the 19 meetings of the historiography semi-nar.

The difficulty of tracing understandings backto particular experiences is further com-pounded by the dimensions of knowledge inwhich we were interested. As the discussionabove reveals, our understandings of the na-ture of historical inquiry and knowledge arebound up with broader understandings such ashow we determine the truth about anything.Appreciating the role that contexthistoricalmoment, material circumstances, class andrace, relation to political authority, culturalmilieuplays in shaping how individualsmake sense of experience is fundamental, notmerely to understanding the argument that ishistory but to understanding why gr:Nup3 andindividuals come into conflict. Developingsuch an appreciation can just as wellandprobably farmore often occur in the courseof daily life than in formal academic settings.

Not only are understandings difficult to traceto their sources, bat they are difficult to grasp.Much in our culture, in fact, legislates againstunderstandings of the type Professor Vinten-Johansen has designed his seminar to culti-vate. We are led to believe, particularly asyoung people, that in virtually all matters, trueand false exist unambiguously. Stories areeither true or false. Either former African-American slaves were the ignorant dupes ofcarpetbaggers or they weren't. A belief thatstories are either true or false is less taxing onusand especially on those of us chargedwith teaching historythan the alternative:that we often cannot determine precisely what

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VaiiKeVerdki ...1happened in the past and even if we could wecan't be sure what meaning to impute to whatseems to have happened. Were African-Ameri-can ex-slaves the dupes historians of the Bur-gess-Dunning school made them out to be? Orwere they the active but tragically frustratedarchitects, in cooperation with Radical Re-publicans, of a design for genuine politicaland economic freedom undone by the machi-nations of Southern Redeemers and by widereconomic misfortune (Foner, 1988)? For along time, the former was regarded as truth,celebrated in such popular icons as D. W.Griffith's Birth of a Nation and MargaretMitchell's Gone with the Wind. Today, histo-rians may regard the Foner's version as nearerthe truth. Grasping that what we widely regardtoday as truth may soon be regarded as myth,as a version of reality that, like the Burgess-Dunning version of Reconstruction, jervesthe interests of a particular group, is no smallintellectual feat. Consequently, expecting stu-dents to develop such an appreciation for theconstructed nature of reality, for truth, in asemesteror even in a yearis probably un-realistic. I could mount similar arguments forthe other understandings Professor Vinten-Johansen hoped his students would develop.

That we did find some evidence that a major-ity of the students appreciated this aspect ofhistorical knowledge and, moreover, that theirunderstanding seemed to become more tex-tured, more nuanced over time was as encour-aging as unexpected. Unexpected because,however intensive, the seminar is but one thinstrand in the skein of students' total experi-ence. Moreover, university classes are rarelycompelling experiences.

Most of the students in the historiographyseminar seemed, in fact, to find the experiencecompelling. Aspects of the experience thatrender the workshop a compelling experienceseemed to include: attempting to make senseof events not already treated by historians;sorting through and making sense of evidenceand the context collaboratively with one'speers where progress in understanding is genu-

inely dependent on others; and developing anoriginal thesis and mustering support for itunder the close critical attention of a teacherwho expresses his concern for student growththrough the seriousness with which he treatstheir efforts.

Although most students did appear to find theexperience compelling, their developing un-derstanding of the nature of historical knowl-edge and inquiry seems largely disconnectedfrom their beliefs about teaching and learning.I was surprised that a learning experience thatwas as powerful as apparently the seminar wasfor most students should have provoked solittle reflection on learning a Id teaching. Thisshould raise questions about the assumption,common among some policymakers, thatgreater subject matter exposure constitutesbetter preparation for teaching. Even engag-ing and compelling experiences with a subjectmatter such as the historiography seminar isunlikely to provoke students to reconsidertlieir beliefs about teaching and learning thesubject matter. Of the two students who didreconsider their beliefs, one traced his recon-sideration not to the seminar itself but a laterteacher education course.

ConclusionI undertook this study to find out more abouthow students respond to an experience de-signed to challenge their understandings ofhistorical knowledge. In particular, I was in-terested in the influence of such an experienceon students' understanding of the nature ofhistorical knowledge and inquiry and the teach-ing and learning of history. I reasoned thatwhat prospective teachers regard as historicalknowledge is critical to a variety of decisionsthey make as teachersfrom the materialsthey use in teaching to the kind of discoursethey encourage in their classroom. I further

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'item-Mao

reasoned that an experience of learning his-tory that students felt to be compelling mightalso influence their views of teaching andlearning the subject.

I found that the course did, indeed, challengetheir views of historical knowledge and did soin compelling ways. I also found evidence thatseveral of the students in the seminar recon-sidered their initial beliefs about the nature ofhistorical knowledge and inquiry. How muchof this reconsideration was motivated by theseminar experience, I cannot determine. Yet,the data suggest that the experience did play asignificant role.

Most of the students began the seminar withthe view that historical accounts were shapedlargely by the personal biases of historiansand that historical accounts were the instru-ments of their authors' self-interesta pro-foundly cynical view. A year later, several ofthese students had evolved views in whichhistorical 'counts, inevitably, bore the im-print of the times in which they were written.These students still believe that readers mustconsider personal biases in judging compet-ing accounts, but more pertinent might behistorical context in which the historian con-structs his or her account.

Yet most of the students' views of teachingand learning history remained unchanged.Teaching is seen as largely a matter of makinglearners aware of past events and the rationalefor these events. Learning would follow. Stu-dents who had reconsidered their ideas abouthistory knowledge were not moved to reexam-ine their beliefs about teaching and learning.This suggests that merely addressing prospec-tive teachers' knowledge and understandingof their subject matter may not be sufficient. Ifprospective teachers are to rethink teachingand learning their subject, their unexaminedbeliefs may need to be challenged as ProfessorVinten-Johansen's seminar challenged his stu-dents' beliefs about historical knowledge.Forcing prospective teachers to take more artsand science cour- es in their subject matterseems unlikely ..roduce such a challenge.

Notes'The information in parentheses following quotations

from student interviews include the student's pseudonym andthe number of the interview (i.e., IV#1=baseline interview andIV#2=follow-up interview conducted one year later.

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Tosh, J. (1984). The pursuit of history. New York: Longman.

Vinten-Johansen, P. (In this volume). Reflections ofajourneymanhistorian. East Lansing: Michigan State University, NationalCenter for Research on Teacher Learning.

Walsh, W. H. (1984). An introduction to philosophy ofhistory (3rded., rev.). Westport, CT: Greenwood. (First published in1967).

Woodward, C. V. (1986). Thinking back Baton Rouge: LouisianaState University.

Youings, J. (1984). Sixteenth-century England. Harmondsworth,UK: Penguin Books.

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alen.

Reflections of a Journeyman HistorianPeter Vinten-Johansen

Reading Bill McDiarmid' s study, Challeng-ing Prospective Teachers' Understandings ofHistory: An Examination of a HistoriographySeminar yields mixed feelings for me.' I amflattered by Bill's interest in evaluating theteaching rationale and methodology I employin an introductory historiography workshopHistory 201at Michigan State University. Iam also delighted by his interest in finding outwhat the undergraduates learned, how theylearned it, and whether this course experiencehas any staying power for them.

Nonetheless, Bill's construction strikes me asmuch too tidy. It does not capture the anxiousuncertainty I felt at the beginning of this (andevery) course, my persistent reliance on intu-ition and tacit knowledge long after I sortedout the initial teaching encounters, and thefrequent mid-course corrections in strategyrequired in a course I had already taught sev-eral times. These were my thoughts after myfirst reading of Bill's essay, as I pondered howto convey my reservations in a companionessay he wanted me to write.

So I did what I often do when my mind ismuddledwent for a run. I needed a long oneinto the south-campus stretch of research ani-mal barns and pastures. Unfortunately, middle-age knees now limit me to shorter distances intown. But maybe I've learned to do more withless, for I returned home with a clearer headane a resolution to my dilemma: It is unrea-sonable to expect Bill McDiarmid to suggestthe personal and professional context that ex-plains what I do in History 201 and why I doit. Only I can deconstruct an outsider's pictureof my teaching by reconstructing how I be-lieve it evolved. I'll begin with the run thateventuated in this resolution.

Running with someone else provides me com-radeship; penning alone is the closest I willprobably ever come to meditation andpsychoanalytical free-association. I have donemore of the latter in the last few years than Icare to because one running-partner movedaway and the other (poor chap) episodically

goes lame.2 But on that January morning whenmy mind was troubled, it was just as well thatthere was no one to hook up with at the cornerof Hagadorn and Melrose. It was relativelybalmy for winter in mid-Michigan, so I wasunencumbered by windbreakers and scarf. Iused to reach a comfortable pace within thefirst mile; now it takes longer, but eventuallymy breathing leveled off and my mind wentblank for an indeterminate period. Then camea flashback:

Two stacks of essays on my desk, about thirtyin each. I had promised myselfa treat when Ireached the half-way point in grading the firstset of take-home essays, but my stomach wastoo queasy to digest the bialy I had saved fora snack. Instead, I was fidgeting in my chair,wondering why I felt part of a colossal fraud..

This image triggered a mental reconstructionof a critical pedagogical episode during myfirst experience as a graduate assistant (forl'ranklin L. Baumei at Yale University in1973).3 The students' assignment was to sum-marize the argument in one of the books, andso far I had made the marginal notations andconcluding comments as Baumer had in-structed: "Read the books yourself, then markthe papers in terms of how closely they ap-proximate the author's argument." It hadseemed straightforward enough when Baumerand I discussed a few in his office before Icarted off the rest: Evaluate the essays like themid-term examinations, where the content ofBaumer's lectures provided the standardagainst which I had measured the students'

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synopses. I had had no difficulty grading thesein-class examinations, but the essays wereclearly troublesome, even though I couldn'tput my reservations into words. I began pag-ing through Robert Goldwater's Primitivismin Modern Art, the selection among four booksthat most students had chosen to read.4 It wasidle paginglooking at illustrations, readingcaptions, skimming my underlinings, andglancing at my marginal notations.

There came an epiphanous flash. Althoughmy mind's muddle absorbed most of it, I hadsomething to work with. On a piece of scratchpaper, I wrote "INTERPRETATION." Whennothing else came to mind, I doodled aroundthe one I did have until phrases spun tangen-tially from the center of the page. Slowly, Itransformed (by a process analogous to whatis now termed clustering) an insight into anotion: If the historical profession considers itlegitimate for Goldwater to interpret, ratherthan summarize, modern art; since my mar-ginal dialogues with Goldwater's argumentreflected a similar orientation in my own pro-fessional training; weren't we, therefore, mis-leading undergraduates about history whenwe expected them to regurgitate the assignedreading? I sensed that I would feel more com-fortable grading their essays as interpretativeexercises. But did the unmarked stack lenditself to such an evaluative standard?

I skimmed a couple of essays, decided thatBaumer's insistence on an overview sentencein the opening paragraph was adaptable to mynotion, then marked a half-dozen in terms ofhow effectively the students supported theirown views rather than approximated mine.After class the next morning, I asked Baumerto read a sample from each stack.

"Why? Is there a problem with plagiarism ?"he replied.

"No. I'm the problem. I marked one essayaccording to the guidelines we discussed, theother is an experiment. I'd prefer to gradethem all by the latter method, but it's yourcourse."

"Can you meet me at my office in thirty min-utes?" asked Baumer.

"Sure."

And we walked down the stairs, chatting aboutthe lecture, before parting in the street. I ran afew errands to kill the time Baumer needed toreflect on the marked essays, then knocked onhis office door. Nearly twenty years after theevent, I still remember how I felt before thatmeetingtotally at ease. Although I had noidea about the outcome, two years of conge-nial graduate study under Baumer's directionmade me confident that he would make adecision that was fair to the students and giveme a full explanation of his reasoning. Heopened the door and invited me to sit in anarmchair next to his own.

He said nothing for a few moments, lookinginstead at two essays. I had the impression thatthis was painful to him, but I was unclear whyuntil he began to speak: "I'm embarrassed thatin more than a quarter century of teaching, ithas never troubled me to expect students in thesurvey only to summarize content. If you havetime to mark all the essays according to theexperimental criteria and provide mewith thegrading scale you used, I'll read them all andtake responsibility for handling any studentmisgivings. We can also set aside some classtime to explain the criteria, even have thisessay serve as a rehearsal for the remainingtwo essays for silidents who show improve-ment. It means a lot more work for you than Ihad anticipated, however; are you certain youhave time for it?"

"Not really," I replied; "but if I don't do itnow, I probably never will."

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So began two decades of tinkering with struc-tured essay assignments that promote inter-pretation of historical evidence. The idealproduct is idiosyncratic rather than originalan analytical essay in three parts. The openingparagraph (thesis paragraph) begins with rel-evant historical context, defines terms, intro-duces the work to be discussed, and concludeswith a thesis statement. The thesis statementshould contain the student's interpretation ofthe author's major argument and an explana-tion of the meaning or significance of thatargument in terms of the historical contextestablished earlier in the paragraph. Substan-tiation of the thesis constitutes the middle partof the essay. Substantiating paragraphs shouldhave topic sentences that walk the readerthrough a systematic and comprehensive proofof the thesis. Within these paragraphs, thestudent is expected to marshal the evidence(documented quotations and paraphrases) thatbear on the topic and show explicitly how theevidence is relevant by 'explaining it in termsof the historical context. That is, I emphasizethat quotations do not explain themselves;students are expected to analyze the evidenceby connecting it to their own thesis state-ments. The final part of the essay is the con-cluding paragraph, in which the student restatesthe thesis in light of the evidence analyzed inthe substantiation. I now expect students in allmy classes to follow this analytical model,although I only teach writingcomprehen-sivelyin a modem European intellectualhistory sequence.'

The fundamental premise ofthis writing modelis that it facilitates intellectual engagementbetween teacher and students. Regular andsystematic interactions, geared to improvingeach student's capacity for interpreting his-torical evidence, can significantly advancethe development of analytical skills amongthose who make conscientious efforts at eachstage. My initial successes (in the mid-1970s)caused me problems for a number of years

thereafter, however, because I became inflex-bly attached to the first set of schematic

exercises that brought results and to the devel-opmental pace of a particular student cohort. Iexperienced a couple of pedagogically ener-vating years--defending my method againstbewildered and (eventually) recalcitrant un-dergraduates, grousing about what I perceivedto be inadequate preparation in high schooland "freshman composition" courses, and es-caping into my own research and writing.Although my first sabbatical year (1983-84)was devoted to scholarly projects, it also pro-vided sufficient distance from my teaching forme to be able to reflect on what I had done todate.

I resumed teaching duties in the Fall term of1984 with several modifications that, periodi-cally refined since then, have prevented rep-etition of the sinkholes I created earlier. First,writing exercises have become alterable means,parts of a process toward a goal, not ends inthemselves. While I continue to be explicitabout my goal for every studentwriting anessay that contains clear interpretation andanalysis of historical evidencethe processfor achieving that goal involves adjustmentsreflecting both collective and individual needs.

Second, I realized that I needed somethingthat would help me establish a rough writ-ing-baseline for each class. An ungradeddiagnostic essay, written in response to anintroductory outline of my expectations,now permits me to situate a new group ofstudents within a workable range on thecontinuum and then revise my stable ofwriting exercises accordingly. For me, thereare compelling psychological advantagesin such a strategy. By beginning my inter-actions with where students "are at" in termsof my expectations, I can focus the time andenergy I have available for teaching en-tirely on learning: advancing the students'intellectual development, as measured byenhanced facility in discrimination, analy-sis, and synthesis. My standard for successin learning became relative progress for

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individual students on the writing con-tinuum, eventuating in the model essay de-scribed above and evaluated according tocriteria reflecting progress toward thatmodel. It is also easier for me now to focuson the task at hand, rather than dissipateenergy by carping about deficiencies in stu-dents' academic backgrounds; the problemsthat exist become my problems, whether Itackle them myself or send students to some-one else who has expertise I lack. Usingrelativistic standards on a common con-tinuum creates a situation in which studentsfrom unusually privileged academic back-grounds remain challenged and involvedbecause they are "competing" against theirown baselines rather than their classmates.

My third modification was to make the class-room environment more conducive for stu-dents to practice the analytical skills that Iexpected in their essays. Why was I dismayedby the summation that dominated student es-says when I structured the majority of classtime around information-dispensing lectures?That is, I was using the classroom simply tolecture about background and complementarysubjects to the assigned readings, expectingthe students to take notes and (on their own) toextract the information needed for context intheir analytical essays. The choice was straight-forward: either change my essay expectationsor change the structure of the class experience.I chose the latter and launched the first of anunending series of experiments whose objec-tive is to use the classroom as a collectiverehearsal space for the modes of reasoningthat I expect the students to adopt when com-posing their essays.

At first, I confined such experimentation toseminars, the third course in the intellectualhistory sequence, and team-teaching opportu-nities.6 Testing new exercises and directeddiscussion formats on a limited numbers ofstudents, many of whom I already knew quitewell, permitted me to sort most successes andfailures into two categoriesthose entirelyidiosyncratic to a particular group or class,

and those that might have some staying power.The blend of directed discussion, regulargroups, and shuffle groups (a term I prefer to"jigsawing") employed in my workshop ap-proach to History 201 reflects several years ofsuch experimentation.'

The unexpected outcome (for me at least) ofslowly making classroom activities more in-teractive was a progressive growth of studentself-esteem and respect for each other. In myearly years of teaching, most classes eventu-ally developed an informal hierarchy reflect-ing student achievements on the essays;although I steadfastly refused to post grades,student scuttlebutt usually undermined myown efforts to de-emphasize grades in a situ-ation where improvement was rewarded. Butwhen I augmented class discussion, particu-larly via the small-group format where theobjective was to formulate a response for laterpresentation, most students came to value per-spectives offered by classmates for whomanalytical writing was often not a strong suit.Students who had faded into the wallpaperduring general discussions could gain intel-lectual confidence from structured group in-teractions. Meanwhile, most of the talkingheads learned how to listen to their class-mates. I'm not oblivious to the fact that somestudents insist until the last hour that group-work is childishly annoying and a waste oftime compared to what I could provide inlectures. When the student grapevine workswell, however, self-selection keeps me fromconfronting such unproductive criticism; af-ter all, there are plenty of lecture classes amongwhich to choose.

To faculty who argue that our bailiwick has noroom for parcels like self-esteem and respect,I respond that there is considerable intellec-tual development connected to the successfulinteractive situations I use. For example, gen-eral discussions are often more focused whenpreceded by small-group exercises. Moreover,students who have come to know and trusteach other gain self-critical skills more quicklyfrom peer review of thesis paragraphs than

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from individual meetings with me (where au-thority issues are more complicated). I wouldalso add another advantage of interactive learn-ing, this time advantageous to the teacher. Atthe end of every course, I realize that close andregular engagement with the students has gen-erated new pedagogical ideashow I mightteach the material more effectively, with re-spect to the standard described earlier. And asI become increasingly comfortable with theunpredictability in open-ended (albeit struc-tured) classroom experiences, I am increas-ingly receptive to the original, sometimesilluminating, insights into the material itselfgenerated by the students. At some point nottoo long ago, the advantages that can accruefrom interactive learning finally outweighedworries about losing control of the class. NowI'm hooked for good.

My approach to teaching is obviously time-consuming. Although experience has alreadyyielded some efficient short-cuts, especiallyin evaluating writing exercises, colleaguestell me that teaching takes more of my time, onaverage, than it does for them. The explana-tion is rarely variation in commitment to teach-ing; we have some shirkers in the Departmentof History at Michigan State University, butvery few in a department that now exceedsfifty faculty members. When I speak withcolleagues from other research universities,they are frequently surprised to hear my view-point that the preponderant majority in mydepartment are conscientious teachers: mostincorporate new material into their lecturesand readings; most are accessible to the stu-dents; very few utilize any standardized test-ing instruments at all; and canceled classes area rarity.

A more likely explanation for differential timerequirements associated with teaching is theperceptual gulf dividing conscientious teach-ers into two varieties. On one side of the gulfis a variety who view their roles primarily as

dispensing information and evaluating its re-ception by their students. On the other side isanother variety, composed of those who areprimarily concerned with how students pro-cess information and reason about it. Mem-bers of the latter variety find it more difficultto routinize their teaching tasks than the former;hence, I believe, the difference in time spenton preparation and evaluation between thetwo varieties.'

More than a decade ago, a few of us in thedepartment attempted to formulate distinguish-ing personality and background characteris-tics for the two varieties. We first tested thenotion that colleagues who had been politi-cally active in the 1960s and early 1970s wereprocessing teachers. We found many excep-tions. However, a generational factor did seemto recurthose who reached adulthood in thelate 1960s and early 1970s frequently be-longed to the processing variety. I fit thatprofile. But no one, least of all myself, couldexplain why I was so zealous about teachinginnovations, occasionally counter-produc-tively so. When I thought about it all, I as-cribed it to a combination of generationalrebellion and cultural dissonance (from in-complete naturalizationI was born a Dane).If I may alter the bias somewhat on a bowl byBernard Shaw, I had drifted to an impressionrather than steered to a conclusion.9

Someone else helped me understand thesource of my zeal. In the mid-1980s, thedepartment chairperson, Gordon Stewart,suggested that we meet informally to dis-cuss my long-range teaching schedule, aswell as an essay containing an autobio-graphical component I had recently writtenfor an anthology. Our conversation mean-dered to departmental attitudes about teach-ing and scholarship, including the generalperception that I was a mutation from theprofessional stock. I blurted out my half-baked notion about cultural dissonance, withthe modification that being a Young Danemust have something to do with prioritizingthe teaching of students how to analyze

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higher than more traditional pathways toprofessional accomplishment s Ich as pub-.lished scholarship. Gordon gave me apuzzled look, which in itself did not sur-prise me since we often come down ondifferent sides of issues (although we sharecommon goals in our teaching). Then, withsincere affection, he said something likethe following lines: "Peter, I'm about yourage and a foreigner, too; I belong to thesame teaching variety as you do, but I holdtraditional attitudes about the historical pro-fession. What makes you a mutant is Viet-nam."

Two flashbacks from 1966 about how Viet-nam shaped my attitudes about the primacy ofteaching in my role as an historian:

He really seemed an old man, ready for theretirement he had talked about while inter-viewing me. I knew the job was mine when henodded at my answers to several factual ques-tions about the American Civil War. We hadnever gotten to American Government; fish-ing in Narragansett Bay preoccupied him toomuch. Then he handed me a textbook. "Teachthis to all five classes. I'll pop in occasionallyto check up on you."

And another:

My first visit to the principal's office since thehiring interview. He had attended one class,opening the door quietly abcut twenty min-utes into the period, sitting for fifteen minutesin the back of the room, then leaving just asunobtrusively. That was this morning. Afterschool, there had been a note in my box to seehim. "You have a hearing problem," were hisfirst words. Not to my knowledge; at leastnothing problematical showed up during myenlistment physical. "But you must. Youcupped your hand behind your right ear when-ever a student was talking." That was a signalfor them to project their voices so everyone inthe class could hear. "You must be hyper-kinetic, too. You never stood still behind yourdesk." Another signal. I want the students to

converse with each other, not just respond tome. "Converse? Thcge pupils aren't on thescholarly track. Most already spend half theschoolday in costuyne-jewelry factories."

The unasked question in the second meetingwith the principal was why the pupils had notbeen discussing the textbook. Lucky for me,or a merely bewildering session could havetaken a catastrophic turn. I had begun as theprincipal had directed, assigning so many pagesand so many questions from the end of eachchapter for homework every night, thenploughing that sterile ground again in class.After all, I had no teaching experience and noeducation courses in my undergraduate back-ground. I was hired to teach twelfth gradecivics only because the school district still hadtwenty vacancies two days before the openingof classes; a body was a body, even if it mightbe dragged away to Officer Candidate School(OCS) before the year was over. The socialstudies and history teachers in the adjoiningclassrooms were helpful chaps, one of themeven lending me his lesson plans from the lasttime he had taught civics. So I followed in-structions for three weeks until I was morebored than the pupilswho had learned theuseful art of resignation long before my ar-rival.

But they could also erupt into an unruly massthat I had nary a clue how to handle until, indesperation, I asked my third period class (the"Hands" in the factories) how they felt aboutbeing pupils in this school. At first, they ver-bally fell all over each other. I picked up thetextbook and threatened them: "It's back tothis if you can't shut up when someone else istalkingand listen while you wait your turn."At the end of the period, I found myself sum-marizing what they had said and promising tocontinue the discussion the next day. By theend of the week, we had struck a bargain forthe futureone day on the text, four days onother stuff, if they kept up with daily assign-ments. To my horror, they kept their end of thebargain and I was scrambling for new things todo in class. The principal observed that class

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about a week later when we were discussingdifferent forms of government, using the highschool as a basis for comparison. Fortunatelyfor my continuance, the pupils had alreadyreached the conclusion earlier in the week thattheir school hovered between a dictatorshipand an oligarchy; when the principal openedthe door, we were sorting out whether thecountry had really made a transition from itsrepublican beginnings to full, participatorydemocracy (as the textbook claimed). He leftbefore someone called for a votethe resultof which would have infuriated him.

Meanwhile, I continued to teach the text to theother four classes. One day after lunch, how-ever, I overheard mutinous whispers as thefifth perioders shuffled into and about theroom. Did I pay attention? Of course not; Itook attendance and proceeded straight to areview of the chapter questions. I kept at it forten minutes before their conspiracy of silencedefeated me.

"OK, what's going on?"

Not a peep. I tried making light of it, but thesullen faces were unmoved. It is embarrassingto admit that the only arrow left in my quiverwas a threat: "Fine with me, peoplepopquiz!"

Boom! I felt like the man in the now widely-distributed poster, who grips his armchair as atorrent of sound blasts from a speaker system,whipping his hair straight out behind him.

"Unfair! Jerk! Bastard!" Slamming of books,stomping of feet, scatological expletives,andwhat was that innuendo from someonein a seat by the windows?

"Pardon me?" I said, adroitly deflecting themessier slings coming my way. "What did yousay?"

Then the accusation hit me square in the chest:"You play favorites."

I had no idea what she meant. If I did anythingwell in my brief (and looking very brief, in-deed) teaching career, it was to spread thequestioning among all the pupils.

She followed up without any encouragementfrom me. "Third period doesn't just go overthis crap!" I made a reflex duck as she bran-dished the textbook. "They talk about thingsthat matter." Support for her braverycrescendoed to a din of noise. "Time out!" Iyelled, wishing I could whistle between myteeth like my father, rather than the feeble"tweet" I occasionally muster between twofingers. Why they quieted down is still amystery to me; obviously, I was not a figurewho commanded authority by mere presenceand tone. "Julie has something to say."

Luckily for me, Julie didn't clam up but be-came the fifth period spokesperson for equi-table treatment in my classes. I listened to herand several supporters before asking, "Butwhat about your part of the bargain?" Suddensilence, shifting eyes, then a few hushed "Whatdoes he mean?" before someone asked medirectly.

I explained the agreement I had with the pupilsin third period that underlay the new class-room format. After a bit more discussion ofthe mutual obligations involved, the class votedoverwhelminglyonly a few abstainedtojoin the "Hands" in the interactive mode (as Ilearned much later it was called). With newrespect for the student grapevine, I immedi-ately extended the same offer to the sixthperiod class that afternoon, the first and fourththe following day. All accepted, although thesixth period (the college-bounders) was themost suspicious and resistant of all; perhapsthey feared an inadequatelyprimed pump whenit was time to sit for the SAT.

I was in unchartered waters for me, and Ithrashed about and made little headway untilI developedsome new strokes. The first was tocover a textbook chapter on Mondays; this

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schedule made Sunday homework a drudge,but the cod liver oil prescribed by the districtwas down the hatch at the beginning of theweek. The second stroke I developed was todeliver a mini-lecture on new material eachTuesday, immediately followed by a ques-tion-and-answer session focused on the con-tent of what I had presented. The period endedwith a handout (made from a smudged dittomaster), listing questions we would discussthe next day; sometimes I assigned primaryresponsibilities for questions by rows. Therest of the week was spent on forays awayfrom,and back to, these study questions, usu-ally in general class discussion, but some-times in groups (again by rows). Everyonesoon tired of rehashing my mini-lectures forthree days, but the only material available insufficient quantity for 148 pupils were text-books. The head of the social studies sectionpermitted me to requisition a variety of historytexts, which I spread among the five classes. Iraided both the Providence public and BrownUniversity libraries for additional sources,and I spent many an afternoon in the schoollibrary, setting up group research activities forsubsequent days.

It was my good fortune that the school librar-ian assisted and encouraged me in every man-ner possible, including accepting supervisoryresponsibility for groups of students who pe-riodically appeared at her door with hall passesand research assignments, but without me.The first time I sent a group to the library "onits own," a teacher down the hall lassoed andtowed them back to me with the comment,"Group hall passes aren't permitted at HopeHigh." So I wrote out six individual passesand sent them off again. This time, however, Idecided to wait in the doorway until theypassed the dragon's den. Even though mypupils were quiet lambs on that occasion, mycolleague was vigilant and pounced upon themagain. They shielded themselves behind sixyellow passes, paused momentarily, thendashed to the stairwell as the dragon looked atme instead of his prey. 1 was persona non gratain the teacher's lounge from that day forth.

But I'll give my colleagues this accoladethey unfailingly kept their disgruntlement withme and puzzlement about my methods to them-selves. "He's a weird one," I once overheard aneighboring teacher say to a first-floor col-league whom I rarely encol entered; but to myknowledge, no one ever gossiped to the prin-cipal or criticized me in front of the pupils.

The pupilsnot mecalled into question theirassumptions about historical objectivity whenseveral groups discovered conflicting expla-nations of the same event. That is, I don'trecollect any conscious decision on my part to -

distribute various United States history text-books to each group or to structure compara-tive readings. Within the same week, however,at least one group in each period presentedevidence to their classmates that historianscan differ in their narratives of the past. "Who'sright," someone invariably asked. "Maybe theyall are; maybe none of them are," I eventuallyreplied, but all stuck to their doubts until wediscussed a recent fight between two boys. "Isthere a true account of the fight?" I asked. Halfa dozen were articulated within five minutes,to which I added other possibilities. Althoughmost of the pupils remained unconvinced thatany story but the one they believed was thetrue one, the seed of historical relativism wasplantednot by me, but by each other. So wasa germinating reservation about authoritativestatements. In their minds, both books andteachers were authorities; those who remainedunconvinced by my statement that multipleexplanations existed for every event were none-theless troubled by the incontrovertible dis-agreement that their classmates had discoveredin the textbooks. It was clearly a disconcertingexperience for most of them; but it was also achallenge, and they rose to it with increasingenthusiasm. They wanted to think for them-selves. They were ready to talk about Viet-nam.

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Until then, I had studiously avoided the topicin class because I did not want to impose onthe pupils my deepening reservations aboutUnited States military involvement in South..east Asia. I was a fledgling arm-chair critic,not a rabble-rouser. It had never occurred tome that I would lose my student defermentwhen I withdrew from medical school in De-cember 1965. I had applied to graduate schoolsin history for the coming academic year withunquestioned certitude that I would matricu-late somewhere. Then came a notice to reportfor a physical examination. No problem, ac-cording to fellow students at Duke; the armedforces just want to know if any of us "collegeboys" are fit for reserve duty. Several weeksafter my physical examination (a euphemismfor legalized bodily assault), I spun the com-bination on my postal box and pulled out anenvelope from my local draft board contain-ing my reclassification from student status to1A. No problem, said my buddies again; justsend them a copy of your acceptance letter tograduate school.

I decided to bring it in person and foundsomeone heading to the District of Columbiaarea with whom to share a ride. I had tele-phoned ahead for an appointmentan unnec-essary precaution since there was no queuewhen I arrived. I thought a bit of small-talkmight soften the steel-cold, bureaucratic de-meanor of the gargantuan across the desk fromme, but she impatiently snapped her fingersand pointed at the folder in my hands.

She glanced at my letter of acceptance fromYale University Graduate School, gave meback the folder, and said, "No graduate defer-ments, except in chemistry and physics; youshould have stayed in med school."

"But, but , . . ." 1 stuttered before regainingsome composure: "I have friends wh, iiavedeferments to other graduate programs."

39

"Not from this draft board, sonny. Over 90percent of boys graduating from high schoolin this district attend college, and I have aquota to fill. You've had your deferment.Expect to be called up any time. I'm busy!Goodbye."

The first draft notice reached me a month or sothereafter, but I ignored it. I was procrastinat-ing, ri pt rebelling; I had applied to the NavalOfficer Candidate School program a few daysafter seeing the draft board official, and I washoping for an alternative to the infantry. Ifexternal forces had takm charge of my des-tiny, why not saunter into a wardroom ratherthan dive for a foxhole? Fear had become adecisive factor as well; my reading of The NewYork Times suggested that I was more likely tosurvive at sea than in the jungle. After tossingaway two more draft notices and becomingincreasingly anxious about military policeknocking on my dormitory door, I was nearlyecstatic upon my acceptance to Naval OCS.

Happiness, too, is relative. At the end of thesummer, I moved to Rhode Island to awaitfinal orders to report for training in Newport.There were jobs in Providence, which waswhy I was teaching at Hope High School in theautumn of 1966and reading about the enter-prise that had disrupted my personal plans.Bernard Fall's books galvanized my inchoateskepticism about the official explanationthat Vietnam must not become another victimof international communist aggressionintoconscious, personal opposition.'° But my de-cision to use Fall as a challenge to classroomconsensus on the veracity of the official ver-sion was not a conscious attempt at ideologi-cal conversion of high school seniors.

On the contrary, the idea came to me whilemulling over a mundane, pedagogical prob-lem: How could I animate (and perhaps, jus-tify) the weekly current events sessions? Whatdid the pupils learn from hassles with a parentover cutting articles from the morning news-paper (in the pre-pop tart era, when breakfastwas more likely to be a familial activity than

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today)? Those who were successful in thiscontest usually bored the rest of us with sum-maries of stories about which no one gave atinker's damn. My inclination was to punt, butthen I would violate district social studiespolicies; my tenure already felt too dicey torisk another confrontation. I asked a colleagueif we were permitted to spread current eventsthrough the week, or whether I had to devotea discrete period to it each week.

"Nobody cares, as long as you do itbut youmust be crazy to consider more than a day aweek," was his response. The sub-text to myquestion was no more than a hunch. Since thepupils had found it challenging and enjoyableto compare textbook accounts of historicalevents, parallel exercises about contemporaryevents might elicit similar reactions.

I asked each pupil to choose one newspaper ormagazine article about Vietnam and underlineany phrases that dealt with the causes of thefighting; meanwhile, I boned up on Fall. Atthe designated session, we compiled a list ofcausal factors on the chalkboard. There waslittle variation among them. I read a few pas-sages from the books I had brought with me,and wrote contradictory factors beside thoseextracted by the pupils. "Who is this guy,anyway?" someone invariably asked in eachclass. "What does he know about Vietnam orwhy the United States must stop communistaggression over there before it spreads to overhere?" Were they certain it was that simple, Iasked. Why were the Vietnamese divided intonorthern and southern countries? Why did theNorth Vietnamese leadership distrust the Chi-nese as much as the West? Nobody had an-swers but many were intrigued. So I promisedto dig up material about imperialism and theFrench-Indochina War, whereas they agreedto look through a range of newspapers andmagazines for stories about Vietnam for ournext current events discussion. Thereafter,enough pupils in each class who made excur-sions to Brown University and the Providencepublic library reported to the rest on the varied

accounts they had found to set in motion a hostof spin-off topics that paralleled the analysisof contradictory accounts we had underway inthe civics/history portion.

My announcement that I would not be return-ing as their teacher in January because ofmilitary service actually heightened my pu-pils' interest in the topic. For many of them,my departure personalized the impact of war.They asked questions about the draft, and itdawned on some of the boys that they mightsoon pass through the same pre-military ritesof passage as I had. None of them, however,articulated the fear that I began to feel thatDecember of 1966not any longer about myown safety, but about what would surely hap-pen to some of these boys whom I had grownto know and care for after several monthstogether in the crucible of learning. Our col-lective study of Vietnam had transformed myown fear of death at an overseas posting intoanger at United States policy and its lethalconsequences for everyone concerned (al-though I was still a half-step from the resoluterefusal to participate directly that complicatedmy months at O.C.S. and Supply CorpsSchool). The mission that obsessed me duringthe last few weeks I taught at Hope High wasto had ways to prevent my pupils from beingduped about the glory and purpose of war. Ipleaded with them to reflect on what partici-pants in past wars have written, rather thanlisten to authority figures who sacrifice youthfor purposes that all too often turn out to havebeen vainglorious, self- interested, and point-less. We compared Rupert Brooke's ardentpoems on the eve of World War I with WilfredOwen's grim portrayals of life and death intrench warfare. And then I was offnot to"the War College," as a student reporter wrotein the school newspaper, but to mind-numbingregimentation and regurgitative schooling thatsome military positivist must have modeledon the utilitarian vision of Gradgrind andM 'Choakumchild."

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Three years laterone year in fact-grindingmills, nearly two as a "Pork Chop" on a re-serve destroyerI felt very much an outsiderwhen I began graduate studies at Yale inJanuary 1970. I was older than other first-yearstudents, but on the other hand, I could neverreally close the gap between me and those whomatriculated in my original class of 1966.Their concerns (finishing dissertations andfinding jobs) were a distant future to me, andmy experiences (truncated medical school andmilitary service) made me an oddity to them.One afternoon in the spring of 1970, I metsome of the older regulars for vending-ma-chine coffee in the Law School lounge (BillClinton could have been at a neighboringtable, for all I know). Since we frequentlydiscussed each other's work, I read aloud ashort passage from a memoir by a World WarI participant. Then I started to talk about theparallel with my own feelings as a veteran andthe desperation I had felt earlier to teach criti-cal evaluation skills to my civics pupils. But Istopped when I realized that the other historygraduate students did not comprehend the per-sonal dimension of my story. They were notrude, and I was not resentful. Unless I intellec-tualized the topic, they could not relate to it.Tacitly, I have known since that day thatVietnam meant something different to aca-demics whose lives were directly interruptedby it than to those who were more fortunate.But it took my departmental chairperson'ssuggestion, fifteen years later, to yank me intothe realm of understanding that Vietnam wasthe primary matrix of my teaching philoso-phy. '2

Looking back at my initial semester asBaumer's graduate assistant, I can now seewhat was unclear to me thenthat my experi-ences with the Hope High pupils primed mefor evaluating historical essays as exercises ininterpretation. But the format I began to de-velop with Baumer's blessing was derivedfrom the historiography course I took from

Jack Hexter my first semester at Yale. At thefirst meeting, Hexter passed out the packet ofprimary-source documents on the Goodwin-Fortescue controversy that I now use in myown history workshop. Hexter's instructionswere laconic: "Interpret the events herein,"tapping his fingers against a packet. I was stillriveted on his long fingernails when someoneasked what this assignment had to do withhistoriography. Mistake, I thought to myself.After dismissing the Herodotus-to-Hexter,"Varieties of History" approach to historiog-raphy (essentially, that mere exposure to os-tensibly great historians does not teach anaspirant how to become one), Hexter dis-missed us with a marching order to "do somehistory ourselves."

Did I listen to my inner voice or recall my owninstructions to Hope High students about therelativity of history? Ofcourse not. I was nowin graduate school, and I was going to blowHexter away with the range ofmy erudition onElizabethan parliaments. Was I dissuaded bythe fact that I knew virtually nothing aboutTudor-Stuart history? Of course not. I had acouple of weeks to work up the context neces-sary to explain the minor controversy focusedon in the packet. When I finished my firstessay in graduate school, over half its fifteenpages was a review of the literature that even-tuated in a speculative explanation of the ac-tual controversy. ! handed in the essay a coupleof days early, pleased with my efforts andconclusions.

The three of us still enrolled in the coursearrived early on the day Hexter promised toreturn our essays; the chap who had queriedHexter's methodology at the first meeting hadnot returned. Hexter arrived punctiliously (oneof his trademarks, I was to learn). In additionto our individual essay, Hexter passed arounda xerox copy of the first page of my paper,including his markings. He then proceeded togo through it line by line, first pointing outproblems in my syntax and diction, then not-ing that there was no mentionlet alone dis-cussionof the primary sources until the

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second half of the essay (which surprised noone since we had exchanged copies of ouressays). When I attempted to defend the sig-nificance of context, Hexter pulled his headinto safety between his shoulders and waitedme out. Then his head reemerged, his eyesglistened, and he returned to the task at handlisting deficiencies in my essay. I took Hexter' scue and slumped into a defensive posture ofmy own. I was embarrassed. I felt picked on.But the most uncomfortable moment camewhen it dawned on me that every criticism waswell-founded. So I stopped resisting thisdraught of bitters, served by a master crafts-man who sincerely believed I needed such apotent constitutional so early in my training.Eventually, we moved on to the other papers,although in a more cursory fashion. "Every-one can apply to themselves what is relevantfrom my critique of Vinten-Johansen's para-graph," said Hexter. Thanks a lot, Jack, thoughtI. I had already vowed to write a revision thatwould satisfy "the tortoise"his surreptitiousnickname among the graduate students I knew.My view that evening was that "snappingturtle" was more fitting.

I kept doggedly to my quest of writing some-thing that would evoke praise from Hexter,but I never succeeded. My revision was alsounbalanced, but the mirror image of the origi-nal. This time, I painstakingly constructed acomprehensive narrative of the Goodwin-Fortescue controversy, providing little con-text and no interpretation. Fortunately,revisions were due after the last class meeting,so I was spared a communal evaluation. Hadthere been one, however, I would have beenmy harshest critic; while I had realized on myown that my approach was problematical, itcame too late to correct it in this essay. Hexterwould never see in my coursework the fruitionof his pedagogical method, but I knew withinmyself that he had readied me for a transmu-tation. The act itself began when I became agrader in I3aumer's intellectual history course,

and it has continued to the present dayalthough Hexter's ex post facto teaching styleand shock therapy are not congenial to mypersonality.

My organization of the history workshop Iteach at MSU is also influenced by JackHexter's reverence for the historical narra-tives written by Garrett Mattingly. This influ-ence was very subtle, taking the form of anoccasional reference that we were expected tofollow up on our own when we found the time.It was after my course with Hexter that I cameacross his essays on "doing history," includ-ing a tribute to Mattingly.' 3 At first I wonderedwhy Hexter had not assigned us to read thepieces that were in print in 1970; but self-promotion is not his style, and thankfully sosince his impact on me (at least) would be lesshad he hawked his own stuff. When I had somedistance on my graduate experiences and theresponsibility of developing my own histori-ography course, I returned to Hexter's essays,read again in Mattingly's writings, and de-cided to make hands-on training in writingnarrative history the methodological objec-tive of the course.

Since I was remiss in not stressing this objec-tive more forcefully in my conversations withBill McDiarmid, I will discuss it briefly here.When I first formulated a syllabus, the cata-logue description for History 201 informedprospective students that they would be intro-duced to the work of one major historian, aswell as a range of methodologies utilized byother practicing historians. My decision tostress narrative history does not entirely re-flect personal experiences and research predi-lections; Lawrence Stone's essay on "TheRevival of Narrative" made a case for its rolein contemporary professional discourse.'4 Iuse Mattingly's book, The Armada, as theexample of narrative history on which thestudents will model their own forays as inter-preters of the past's That is, I want them (as

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Hexter had expected me) to "do" some historyof their own, rather than focus their introduc-tion to historiography on a study of what hasalready been done by professional historians.Given this objective, some may wonder if Iundercut it from the outset by withholding theGoodwin-Fortescue documents packet untilafter the students have read The Armada and acounterpoint book.16 My purpose is to forceuniversity students (as the Hope High pupilsreminded me) to recognize that esteemed his-torians frequently offer contradictory ap-proaches and interpretations of the sameeventsdepending on the contexts in whichthey are writing, the perspectives they wish toreconstruct, and the sources they have chosento use (or to which they are limited). The sub-text for our discussion of "the Armada" enter-prise is that historical interpretation differsfrom individual opinion; while opinions aresimply proffered, interpretations are evalu-ated on the basis of how persuasively theyexplain the available evidence.

Once students understand that they are ex-pected to model (rather than clone) Mattingly'smethod in their own research paper, we tackleHexter's packet containing primary sources.Granted, this is an artificial research situation;among other things, students never struggle tofind a topic that suits available resources. Butlimiting the topic to the Goodwin-Fortescuecontroversy and handing them their primarydata provides a collective matrix and addi-tional time to spend on the process involved inhistorical interpretation. If decidedly artifi-cial, there is nothing formulaic about the pro-cess. The documents are simple transcriptions(with the exception of a few translations) ofwhat one could find on the topic in a majorresearch library; the students must cut up thepacket and organize the material (chronologi-cally and substantively) before they can beginto reconstruct what happened, why it hap-pened, and decide if the controversy had his-torical significance. Internally, the documentsare messy, often contradictory, and frequentlypuzzling. Often the Diarium notes of proceed-ings in the House of Commons differ, in tone

and substance, from the smooth copy enteredinto the record titled The Parliamentary orConstitutional History of England. Recollec-tions by the protagonists differ, as do com-ments by those further removed from the fray.The packet preserves the original diction (in-cluding Latin phraseology', and spellings.

Individually, the students are usually so over-whelmed after a first reading that they will-ingly submit to reorganization of the seminarinto primary support groups (in which I at-tempt to balance learning styles, as evidencedin class discussion and the review essays).The first group task is to reach consensus onthe chronological order of events; when eachgroup of four students has put together a work-ing calendar of what happened on what days,we work through any disagreements as a semi-nar. Problematic matters are noted as theyemerge. Then we cluster related problems anduncertainties under discrete rubrics, and theprimary groups assign one person to shuffleinto temporary groups for resolving what islisted under each rubric. Such resolution fre-quently requires library research (about par-liamentary procedures, legal terms,biographical data, etcetera), which each shufflegroup organizes with advice from me. Mean-while, the primary groups continue to func-tion as the place to discuss each student'semerging narrative ofthe controversy. As moreproblematical issues emerge, existing shufflegroups manage those that fall into their baili-Wicks; others may require the creation of anew shuffle group (although there is a limit towhat can be managed in this fashion). Periodi-cally, members of each shuffle group report totheir primary groups on the material they havegathered; some issues are resolved, otherscannot begiven constraints such as avail-able time, extant resources, and limited exper-tise."

While both primary and shuffle groups aregeared to suggest the value of collective prob-lem solving, the research paper (two or moredrafts) provides each student opportunities tobe a (his)storyteller. While there is no single,

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"objectively true" explanation imbedded inthe documents, each narrative must provide aninterpretation of events, motives, and signifi-cance that is sustainable by the evidence avail-able to the seminar as a collectivity. In futureofferings, I intend to correct a past deficiencythe absence of a collective dimension in evalu-ating the narratives as they emerged from thegroup/seminar process. My experience in otherclasses is that students learn a great deal abouttheir own writing when they are given oppor-tunities to engage in constructive criticism ofanother student's writing. Henceforth, peerreviews will complement my comments onvarious drafts of the research papers.

This long tangent that spun off my initialreading of Bill McDiarmid's evaluation of thehistory workshop has sufficently tried the pa-tience of most readers to make me hesitate tolaunch another one about myself as an "ideal-ist" historian. Bill's attempt at fixing me withinan historical tradition is creative and often inthe ballpark I might imagine for myself. ButBill's bench of veteran players often differssignificantly from those on whom I consciouslymodeled myself. No matter. It is as importantfor my evaluator to clarify his own frame ofreference (albeit through me) as it is for me toexplain the genesis of mine. Moreover, Bill'smajor point in this section of his case study isindisputablethat all historians have theirown stories which explain what they do, howthey do it, and why they bother to do it at all.

If my story has relevance for anyone else, it maybe as validation of the principle of historicalcontingency. Like every teacher, unexpectedo1 qtacles in my established pedagogical path

re caused me considerable worry and confu-sion; change any significant obstacle or event onmy "life's tape," and the outcome would havebeen significantly different from what I havenarrated here.'8 For my attitudes about teachingand the methods I employ evolve from moments

of uncertainty, as I sort out whether to continuewhat I have begun or to explore other pedagogi-cal alternatives that suit my personality andsense of social responsibility.

Notes1. G.Williamson McDiarmid, Challenging Prospective

Teachers' Understandings of History: An Examination of aHistoriography Seminar. (In this volume) East Lansing: Michi-gan State University, National Center for Research on TeacherLearning, 1993.

2. Since both men remain my closest friends (aside frommy wife, Betty), who have already heard someand shapedmuchof what follows during our runs together, I mention theirnames without assuming agreement on every point: RichardWhite (now at the University of Washington) and Peter Levine(at Michigan State University).

3. Spring Semester, 1973: Modern European IntellectualHistory, part II (Eighteenth-Century Enlightenment to 1950).

4. Robert Goldwater, Primitivism in Modern Art, rev.ed.(New York: Vintage, 1967).

5. In the history workshop that Bill McDiarmid evaluated,I compressed into four weeks the gist of the structured writingassignments on the analytical essay that span an entire quarter inthe intellectual history sequence. I dispensed with the ungradeddiagnostic essay (to gauge where the students "are" as a prelimi-nary to formulating the weekly assignments); instead, I summa-rized the model essay in establishing my expectations for thefirst writing assignmentan analytical book review. I evaluatedthese reviews as an initial effort at achieving my writing expec-tations and used comments (individually and in class) to focusattention on deficiencies that should be addressed on the secondassignmenta comparative book review. While reading thefirst set of reviews, I felt that this particular class would be betterserved by a revision than anteing up to a comparative review. ButI stuck to the syllabus, with the result that composing a compara-tive review created new problems instead of resolving structuraldeficiencies in their first essays. It was a catch-up situation fromthen on, at least with respect to teaching the rudiments ofanalytical writing. By the end of the course, only half of thestudents had made up for my misjudgment. I am still troubled bythose I lost.

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6. My first team-teaching occurred with Joseph Spielberg(Anthropology), in a course we developed to provide futureteachers an interdisciplinary grounding in ethnohistory andglobal studies. Since 1986, I have taught an Overseas Studycourse, "Medical Ethics and History of Health Care in London,"during five summers with Martin Benjamin (Philosophy),Howard Brody (Center for Ethics and Humanities in the LifeSciences), and Tom Tomlinson (also at the Center). I cannotoverstate the constructive influence of such collegiality on myteaching methods and philosophy. When else does an instructorhave occasion to rehash classroom activities withsomeone whohas a parallel role but a different perspectiveon the material, thestudents, and the multiplicity of interactions that occurs in everysession? In this context, I wish to acknowledge as well myindebtedness to Peter Levine, David LoRomer (History), andRichard White. David, Richard, and I met regularly for severalyears to discuss teaching strategies, recent articles and books,and other topics of interest to three junior faculty members. Asrunning partners, Peter and I use each other as sounding boardsand counselors on many matters, including teachingproblematics.

7. Instructors of History 201 are expected to focus on thework of one major historian and introduce the students tocontemporary varieties of historical methodology. My usage ofthe expression, historical workshop, reflects the influence ofthelate Steve Botein, for whom the workshop approachmeant (in itsstrictest form) that all students read, discussed, and wrote essayson a common body of documents. There are, of course, otherways of structuring an historical workshop.

8. A couple of people who read an early draft of thisessayassumed that I considered information dispensers synonymouswith lecturers. Not necessarily. I know many instructors whocombine a lecture style with process goals. I also know someinstructors for whom an interactive approach is a means to elicitinformation on which students are later evaluated. In my view,the chief distinguishing characteristic of the two types is what aninstructor wants done with the material covered in class,not howit is delivered or obtained. My view, therefore, acknowledgesthat there many instructors who share my goals without neces-sarily employing my techniques.

9. Don Juan says to the devil, "To be in Hell is to drift: tobe in Heaven is to steer." George Bernard Shaw, Man andSuperman.(New York: Penguin, 1946 [1903]), 169.

10. Bernard B. Fall, Street without Joy: Indochina at War,1946-63,3rd rev. ed. (London: Pall Mall Press, 1963); The TwoViet-Narns: A Political and Military Analysis, rev. ed. (NewYork: Praeger, 1964); and Vietnam Witness, 1953-66 (NewYork: Praeger, 1966).

11 Charles Dickens, Lard Times for These Times (NewYork: Praeger, 1969 [1854]).

12. I cannot recall the memoir I was reading. This spring,however, I came across a parallel passage while preparing for aclass discussion of Vera Brittain's memoir about "The GreatWar":

After the first dismayed sense of isolation in analien peace-time world, such rationality as I stillpossessed reasserted itself in a desire to under-stand how the whole calamity [WWI] had hap-pened, to know why it had been possible for meand my contemporaries, through our own igno-rance and others' ingenuity, to be used, hypnotisedand slaughtered.

Vera Brittain, Testament of Youth. (New York: Pen-guin, 1989 [1933)), 471.

13. J. H. Hexter, Doing History. (Bloomington: IndianaUniversity Press, 1971); Reappraisals in History. New Views onHistory and Society in Early Modern Europe. (New York:Harper, 1961).

14. Lawrence Stone, "The Revival of Narrative: Re-flections on a New Old History," Past and Present. (1979,pp. 74-96).

15. Garrett Mattingly, The Armada. (Boston: HoughtonMifflin, 1959).

16. My most recent counter to Mattingly was FelipeFernandez-Annesto's The Spanish Armada. The Experience ofWar in 1588 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989).

17. Common readings during this stage are designed toprovide additional contextual explanation, as well as suggestinghistorical methodologies other than the narrative form. Theworkshop evaluated by Bill McDiarmid included the following:G. R. Elton, England Under the Tudors, 2nd ed. (London:Methuen, 1974) and Joyce Youings, Sixteenth-CenturyEngland(New York: Penguin, 1984). The shuffle groups first tried toresolve contextual and definitional problems by consultingthese books, then looking in the library if they were unsuccess-ful.

18. Stephen Jay Gould, Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shaleand the Nature of History (New York: W. W. Norton, 1989), 51;I adapt Gould's expression for a species populationto the life ofan individual by joining it to the existentialist concept of "limitsituations."

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Adminstrative Staff

Co-Directors: Robert E. FlodenG. Williamson McDiarmid

Study Directors: Linda Anderson, DeborahBall, Daniel Chazan, Helen Featherstone,Sharon Feiman-Nemser, Mary M. Kennedy, G.

Williamson McDiarmid, Barbara Neufeld, Kenneth

Zeichner

Director of Dissemination: Cassandra Book

Communication Specialist: Debra Peterson

Office Manager: Brenda Sprite

Publications: Tamara D. Hicks

NCRTL Special ReportNovember 1993

This NCRTL Special Report is published by the NationalCenter for Research on Teacher Learning, College ofEducation, Michigan State University. The NCRTL isfunded primarily by the Office of Educational Researchand Improvement, U.S. Department of Education. Theopinions expressed in this publication do not necessarilyreflect the position, policy, or endorsement of the Officeor Department. Third-Class postage is paid at EastLansing, MI. ISSN 1054-7673.

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