National History Education Clearing House
Let’s use a wonderful review of the workBench and the site that’s hosting it as a springboard to investigate one of the Internet’s great challenges for teachers. First, however, a visit to the wacky, and occasionally dark, side.
It’s not likely that there is a piece of nuttiness adrift in humankind that isn’t supported with conviction and “evidence” somewhere on the Internet.
We did a Google search for “the world is flat, believers” and discovered the Flat Earth Society, which has as its mission “deprogramming” our misconceptions about living on a sphere. The Internet tells us that, in addition to the world being flat, the Holocaust never happened, nor did the Apollo 11 landing on the moon. Our government orchestrated 9/11, and poor Charlemagne, he didn’t exist. As a matter of fact, the entire Middle Ages didn’t happen.
Yikes. Life was easier when the teacher, textbook, and library gave you the story already hewn, and all you had to do was memorize it for the test. A student could thrive back then, unencumbered by an original or critical thought, in an educational world that didn’t put much stock in independent thinking.
There’s been a dramatic shift. With so much unvetted information swirling about today, digital and otherwise, and with such large dollops of misinformation craftily scooped into our political discourse, the challenge is to get students to decipher the wacky from the wise independently.
It’s more important today to be able to vet and validate ideas from within the methodology of a discipline than it is to know mountains of its stuff.
This challenge in information sorting and weighing brings us back to that fine review of the workBench that we found in “Tools for Teachers” in the website for the National History Education Clearinghouse.
After reading about the workBench, we naturally asked ourselves, Who are these guys? That’s a good, teachable response to any Internet information. How credible is this site? Does it come from verifiable rocket scientists or from a bunch of wackos wearing beanies with propellers on top?
The initial answer to our question was at the very bottom of the review page in small print. There we found the site’s parentage: The National History Education Clearing House was created by the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University and the Stanford University History Education Group, with funding from the U.S. Department of Education.
Every link above takes you to a .edu web address. Just as a web address beginning with https:// suggests security for e-commerce transactions, .edu suggests a degree of security in terms of intellectual rigor and integrity.
Let’s carry this one step further. Assume that an Astrological University of Transcendental Levitation might have somehow hornswoggled a .edu address, when it only really existed in a server in a dark basement in Des Moines. In addition to their .edu university status, George Mason and Stanford have national reputations and ring very substantial recognition bells.
Finally, getting funding from the U.S. Department of Education is intensely competitive. Applicants are carefully screened and often go through some form of peer review. All these credibility points add up to the who-these-guys-are needle aiming toward rocket scientists.
From our workBench review page, we began browsing the site and found a treasure trove of valuable information and links. Here’s a sampling:
History Content: website reviews, online history lectures, historic sites and museums, gateway to history content, ask-a-historian, links to national centers, and research tools
Best Practices: state-of-the-art practices and multimedia examples of classroom teaching using primary sources, historical thinking, and teaching with textbooks
Teaching Materials: lesson plan reviews, searchable database of state standards, primary source guides, and a gateway to history lesson plans
Under Best Practices, and “Examples of Historical Thinking,” we found a video of Professor Williamson thinking aloud about a “statement by the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) regarding the 1925 Scopes Trial.” We were delighted to find that in her “sourcing” this historical document before reading it, she was asking questions similar to ours: who are these guys? Where are they coming from? Why are they writing this?
Follow the links back to the site where Professor Williamson’s video is based, and you’ll find yourself in the Inquiry section of the Historical Thinking Matters website – another rich vein to mine. Right below Professor Williamson’s video is an audio clip entitled “Using the Think Aloud.” It explains Professor Williamson’s thought process and why it is integral to the historical analysis of any primary source material.
Think Alouds seem like such powerful tools for influencing how students formulate questions and solve problems. This whole issue of molding thought processes seems so important that it took us back to the NHEC’s other Examples of Historical Thinking.
There are powerful and transformative ideas here – and not just for historians and history teachers.
(Two brief corrections: not everyone wearing a beanie with a propeller is a wacko, and the value of .edu might be a bit wobbly for hogwarts.edu, Harry Potter’s alma mater, where good intentions can’t overcome the fact that all downloading is via owl.)