Visit to Orphanage
From the Teaching column of the December 2011 issue of Perspectives on History
Instilling Civic Responsibility in the Classroom
By Rebecca Bates
Since the early 1990s, there have been calls inside and outside the academy for a reform of higher education. Reformers advocate teaching methods that include engaged learning and ethical training for citizenship, rather than mere knowledge acquisition and abstract speculation. In response, many teachers of American history have experimented widely with service learning, although those of us who specialize in other historical fields have generally not embraced this trend. Instead, we have responded to the call for engaged learning with the old claim that our discipline uniquely prepares students to gain citizenship skills by cultivating critical thinking skills, objectivity, cultural sensitivity, and an awareness of the complexity of our world.
Committed to helping students become independent learners (rather than regurgitators of rote answers), I must confess to being a bit skeptical of service-learning courses which appear to me to have the singular objective of helping "the other." Consequently, I responded to a funding opportunity offered by Project Pericles to design a course that encouraged social responsibility and participatory citizenship. Much to my delight, Project Pericles endorsed my proposal to design a non-service learning course. As this brief discussion of the course design and implementation illustrates, I hope, history classes can be excellent models of a civil society.
Interested in focusing on a topic with a rich historiographical tradition, I proposed to teach a class on English responses to poverty from the 17th through the 20th centuries. Entitled "Social Responses to Poverty," this upper-division history course was open to students of junior and senior standing, regardless of their major. Enrollment was limited to 10 students. Topics included institutional responses to vagrancy; the
Instilling Civic Responsibility in the Classroom
By Rebecca Bates
Since the early 1990s, there have been calls inside and outside the academy for a reform of higher education. Reformers advocate teaching methods that include engaged learning and ethical training for citizenship, rather than mere knowledge acquisition and abstract speculation. In response, many teachers of American history have experimented widely with service learning, although those of us who specialize in other historical fields have generally not embraced this trend. Instead, we have responded to the call for engaged learning with the old claim that our discipline uniquely prepares students to gain citizenship skills by cultivating critical thinking skills, objectivity, cultural sensitivity, and an awareness of the complexity of our world.
Committed to helping students become independent learners (rather than regurgitators of rote answers), I must confess to being a bit skeptical of service-learning courses which appear to me to have the singular objective of helping "the other." Consequently, I responded to a funding opportunity offered by Project Pericles to design a course that encouraged social responsibility and participatory citizenship. Much to my delight, Project Pericles endorsed my proposal to design a non-service learning course. As this brief discussion of the course design and implementation illustrates, I hope, history classes can be excellent models of a civil society.
Interested in focusing on a topic with a rich historiographical tradition, I proposed to teach a class on English responses to poverty from the 17th through the 20th centuries. Entitled "Social Responses to Poverty," this upper-division history course was open to students of junior and senior standing, regardless of their major. Enrollment was limited to 10 students. Topics included institutional responses to vagrancy; the