31 Oct - 2 Nov 2006
Welcome to H-Education's online guest discussion: "Where Do Historians of Education Live?: Disciplines and Interdisciplines in the Academy."
Can historians of education truly be at home in either a history department or education department? What does it really mean to cross "traditional" boundaries, and how do such travels play out in a professional context? These are among the questions that will be explored over the next three days (from Tuesday, October 31 through Thursday, November 2). Leading the conversation during this period are:
The guest discussants have written introductory statements, which will be posted immediately after this email. They will then respond to questions and themes raised over the next three days.
Transcripts of the first guest discussion, on book publishing, may be found on the H-Education website, and transcripts of this one will eventually be posted there as well.
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Where do historians of education live? It's easy to answer this question empirically. They live primarily in schools of education. If you look at the membership lists of the History of Education Society and the membership of Division F (History of Education) of the American Educational Research Association, you will find that about two-thirds of the members are in education schools and one-third in history departments. Why? The most basic reason is because education is where the jobs are. Getting a job in a history department is never easy, whatever your substantive focus, and there are very few job postings in history that list education as the primary element. So historians seeking such positions have to pitch themselves as having a broader set of interests that meet the demands of particular posting, hoping to slip education in on the side. Meanwhile education schools have a lot of jobs, since the country needs to graduate something like 150,000 new teachers every year just to keep up with attrition. Of course, ed schools only rarely advertise for a position in the history of education. It's more likely that they post positions in social foundations of education, leaving the disciplinary orientation open. So this means that prospects are well advised to pitch their interests broadly within education just as their counterparts pitch themselves broadly within history. And it means that they will be most useful to their ed school employers if they are able to teach courses beyond the narrow domain of the history of education. For example, educational policy is a useful arena for applying historical insights, and there is a deep demand for people in policy. I never taught a course in the history of education during the 18 years I was in the education school as Michigan State; instead, I introduced historical issues in courses that never had history in the title.
As a practical matter, ed schools are where most historians of education live, but that doesn't necessarily mean that's where they belong. Within both HES and Division F, there is a tendency to feel some regret about the migration of the field into education schools and the resulting loss of disciplinary identity. But I don't share this concern. I think the regrets are more about status than substance—that is, being affiliated with an ed school (which has a lot of jobs but low status) as opposed to affiliation with a history department (which has fewer jobs but high status). We can talk later on during this chat about the quality of professional life that comes in teaching in an ed school (I love being in ed schools and wouldn't teach anywhere else).
But for now I want to suggest a different interpretation of the movement from history to education. As I pointed out in my 2005 HES presidential address, I think the disciplines have not been fading in relation to professional schools in American universities in the last 100 years, even though the latter have been expanding faster than the former. Instead, I think the disciplines have been colonizing the professional schools, turning them increasingly into academic outposts where people like us transmit disciplinary knowledge under cover of professional practicality. In this view, historians of education can comfortably pursue their craft within ed schools in the knowledge that they are bringing the insights of history to a much broader audience than would be possible in a history department, and also that they are having an impact on one of the most consequential of social institutions, public education. Not bad for sojourners finding their way in a distant land. In fact, it's a good reason to do what I've done, namely settle down and go native.
Of course, you may want to discount all this in light of the fact that I'm not a real historian. My doctorate is in sociology, and no history department would have me. I've spent nearly all my career in education schools (Michigan State and Stanford), after two years in sociology departments (Georgetown and Widener), and I've found I much prefer life in a professional school to a disciplinary department. But that was my experience; others may feel quite differently. And that will make an interesting conversation. I'm looking forward to our chat.
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Hi, my name is Mona Gleason and I am an Associate Professor in the Department of Educational Studies at the University of British Columbia (UBC) in Vancouver. As is likely the case for many of us drawn to this discussion, I wear several different hats—I teach both pre-service teacher education courses and graduate level courses in the History of Education, the History of Children and Youth, and the History of the Body and Physicality (graduate level). My research focuses on the history of children and embodiment—health, physicality and identity—in the Canadian context over the 20th century and I am the co-coordinator of a departmental program, Society, Culture, and Politics in Education (SCPE) which offers MA and MEd degrees.
The goal of SCPE is to use the social sciences and humanities—history, sociology, philosophy, and anthropology—to address major issues affecting educational policy and practice. While our department is made up of faculty aligned with various programs, including SCPE, Adult and Higher Education, and Educational Administration and Leadership, we find common ground—and opportunities for transdisciplinary co-operation—around a commitment to educational equity and social justice. This is my department's main contribution to the larger Faculty of Education (which houses 5 departments).
I was trained in a relatively traditional history department at a mid-sized university in the province of Ontario. Other than at the university level, I have never been a classroom teacher. My hiring was not contingent on having a Bachelor of Education degree or classroom experience. It was, however, contingent on contributing to teacher education. When a position for an historian of education was posted in the Faculty of Education at UBC, I had to rethink how I conceived of my research and teaching. When I received my doctorate in History, I never imagined I'd be at the front of a class of pre-service teachers—many, if not most, of whom had never taken a history course—asking "how can history make me a better teacher?" Partly, I have tried to offer useful and innovative answers to this question, and partly, I have encouraged my students to ask different, perhaps more fundamental and engaging questions. Hopefully, our discussion over the next few days will give us an opportunity to consider what these questions and engagements might fruitfully be and how historians of education can contribute to them.
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Hello everyone. My name is Adam Golub and I am an Assistant Professor of Education Studies at Guilford College in Greensboro, North Carolina. I'm honored to be a part of this discussion. I hope to contribute the perspective of a tenure-track faculty member in a teacher education program housed at a small, liberal arts undergraduate institution. I completed my Ph.D. in American Studies at The University of Texas at Austin in 2004; before that I taught high school English for five years and earned an M.A.T. along the way. During my time as a graduate student at Texas, I tried to forge a more interdisciplinary approach to the study of educational history, while also making the case that American Studies scholars needed to pay more attention to the field of education. This task required me to cross disciplines in my research and to also literally cross the street on campus and work with O.L. Davis, Jr. in the Curriculum and Instruction Department. My dissertation, which was supported by a Spencer Fellowship in 2002, offered a cultural history of the education crisis in the 1950s. I am currently in the process of revising this dissertation into a book manuscript titled, "Branding the Blackboard: Education and Consumer Culture in Cold War America." With regards to our prompt, "Where do historians of education live?," I would like to share a few introductory remarks.
From the outset, I should say that much of my inspiration in graduate school to attempt interdisciplinary work in educational history was informed by two sources: first, James Leloudis's preface to Schooling the New South (1996), where he writes that education must be placed "in the context of larger patterns of historical change" and that different disciplines must "lower the barriers" that separate them in the academy.
Second, the two articles published by Donato/Lazerson and Dougherty [both links require JSTOR access] in Educational Researcher following the 2000 Spencer Forum on "New Directions in Educational History." In fact, while writing my dissertation I taped one particular quote from the Donato/Lazerson piece above my desk: "Our challenge, then, is for educational history as a field to engage in a simultaneous conversation with a diversity of audiences, and to engage in research that brings together areas typically kept separate... to broaden and deepen our knowledge of the educational past and the ways that it enriches our understanding of the educational present." I cannot emphasize enough how important it was for me as a young scholar to "hear" these invitations to forge new directions in educational historiography. Indeed, I see this current H-Education discussion as a valuable follow-up to these incitements, an important "state of the field" conversation that examines our ongoing "problems and prospects."
To that end, I would like to raise several questions that I have wrestled with in both my teaching and scholarship during my first three years at Guilford:
I have my own thoughts about many of these issues, as I'm sure you do as well, so I look forward to our ensuing discussion about disciplines and interdisciplines in the academy.
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Why do so few historians of education belong to the American Historical Association or the Organization of American Historians? Why do we see so few historians of education present at the AHA and OAH conferences? And, could we benefit by being more active in these historical associations?
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Speaking only for myself, I have tried to participate in the AHA meetings (I don't belong now but could again) but I had difficulty with their session model—guidelines link below—see Section 3 on Sessions. I have not been in the practice of preparing "sessions" of scholars to present. I am used to submitting a single paper of my research and having the conference planning committee place my paper with like papers for presentation. The guidelines for session make-up (see 3.2) Selection and Participation ) also appear to put an additional burden on the person who desires to submit—while I agree that diversity of presenters is good and should be encouraged, the wording here seems to me to be more than desirable but required.
I may be all wrong about this but this is what part of my thinking that has kept me from participating in AHA—that and two rejections in years past, one of which was extremely unprofessional and made me think I could better spend my money and time with other organizations.
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Thanks for your question Christian—it's important to point out that national context will make a big different in our conversation—in Canada, for example, historians of education do tend to belong to, and present papers at, larger historical associations—in this case, the Canadian Historical Association and a variety of other venues. The field was established early in the aftermath of the social history revolution (typically, the history of education in Canada is characterized as one of the strongest and most well-established subfield of social history here) and so for decades historians of education in Canada have taken a leading role in professional organizations. It makes sense to do so, and it has been comfortably so, because historians of ed in Canada have always nested their work in a variety of themes and contexts: the family, labour, children and youth, feminism, sexuality, etc.
"Schooling" can be incidental or central to many themes in the history of education. This is clearly also the case in much American scholarship—so I defer to Adam and David for their wisdom...
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I'd like to say just a few words regarding our activity in other associations. I have seen a similar underrepresentation of educational historians at the American Studies Association conferences, though in recent years I have gotten to know many people who are doing work that is just on the periphery of educational history, especially in childhood/youth studies. To "ferret out" the educational historians in ASA and broaden our dialogue with like-minded scholar/teachers, I've helped start a Childhood and Youth Studies Caucus within the organization.
The caucus just met for the first time in October, but it brought together some 20 people who are working on similar issues. Through the work of the caucus, we can now nurture and grow our community within the American Studies Association by sponsoring panels, business meetings, and a web site (under construction). Perhaps similar opportunities exist within the AHA or OAH to start a History of Education caucus; I'm not sure.
I do think it is important for historians of education to explore diverse venues for presenting their work. By the same token, I'll admit that people like me need to do a better job of attending the HES conference each year; I've only been to the San Antonio meeting in 2000.
I will say that I talked up HES to one scholar I met at this year's American Studies Conference—his field is the history of science but he is looking at textbooks in the wake of Scopes; he did not know about HES. So perhaps we also need to actively recruit, or at least make others more aware, of our own professional society.
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Just over 20 years ago, I attended some AHA meetings. I had been a member of AHA for several years and had just recently moved from a Department of History to a School of Education. I noticed immediately the change in how historians regarded the same person once the affiliation on the name-tag had changed.
At one particular meeting, I was taking part in a session on the training of graduate teaching assistants, reporting on a programme we had developed in our School of Education to provide curricular and pedagogical instruction to faculty members teaching in the health professions and explaining how the model might be adapted for use with TAs in history or other fields. The hostility in the room came as something of a shock, not only because it was so intense, but also because it seemed visceral, completely unrelated any sort of reasoned response to the description of the programme and its components.
At the end of the session, the session chair came over to offer some comforting words. Regularly, he admitted, he sent TAs from the large university history department he chaired to the university's College of Education for assistance and instruction, but he would never be able to share that information with his colleagues, who regarded the "educationists" with complete contempt.
I returned later to hear a moving and inspiring address on history from J.H. Hexter, then left the meeting and the AHA.
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When I think about living somewhere, I think about a place to call home.
What departments, professional organizations and fields of study welcome women, African Americans, Latinos/as, and the underrepresented in acadame and in professional organizations? I belong to AHA, OAH, OHA, HES, AESA, SSHA, AERA and many regional organizations. I've attended one or more of these organizations' annual meetings. So far the closest I have come to feeling at home is in AESA because of its diversity, both in membership and topics discussed. The historical organizations are dominated by men, mostly white men. So my question is to those of you who are the majority in the historical organizations, including the HES:
What are you doing or planning to do to invite us into and then welcome us in your professional home?
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Robert's experience is horrible but unfortunately likely not unique! It has been my experience that the premium that Faculty of Education departments typically place on excellence in teaching (I know they are not alone in this, and this is far from uniformly applicable, but in my experience the demands on "quality" teaching are high) is often a sea change to those who come from other departments. The scholarship of teaching is suggestive of the reasons why Robert's proposal met with hostility: it continues to be undervalued in some very traditional departments. I would also suggest, however, that those traditional departments often find themselves out of step with student demands and community needs, and have a difficult time attracting innovative scholars. This is, at least, increasingly the case at my university in which innovation in instruction is a going concern. Given the outstanding reputation of the Mount's teacher education programme as a site of scholarly excellence across all the domains, however, I'd say Robert has won the final word!
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Unfortunately, even some of us who call ourselves historians and write about the history of children, childhood, and/or education feel like outsiders at AHA and OAH meetings. The AHA and the OAH have not paid much attention to the history of education or children's history. In 2001 a multidisciplinary group of us formed H-Childhood and the Society for the History of Children and Youth. We are making headway into the traditional historical organizations, but our main focus is to bring multidisciplinary perspectives into SHCY. As the current SHCY president, I encourage scholars who look at the history of childhood to join us. It is impossible to understand children's experiences without looking at the history of education. I would argue that it is also impossible to understand the history of any society without analyzing the history of education within that culture. Historians have generally neglected this history.
If permitted an advertisement, let me encourage H-Education subscribers to also consider subscribing to H-Childhood. The two networks often crosslist postings and share ideas. I also urge scholars interested in the history of education to join and SHCY. Our focus is not limited to the AHA and the OAH. Instead, SHCY is an international organization that will hold its next biannual meeting at Linkoping University in Sweden, 27-30 June 2007.
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While I am disheartened to read this email, I could offer similar tales from both national and regional meetings of historians, but I will not. Rather, I will comment on how the disdain is horrendous and demeaning. It perpetuates a wrong-headed elitism that serves NO ONE and least of all the students we teach—who see us model this behavior and think they should emulate it.
I am a professor of educational leadership, a curriculum historian and I taught US History for 15 years. I hold degrees in each of these disciplines, but because my doctorate is not in history, my comments are rarely greeted and accepted as worthy.
We have much work to do.
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As a starter you may wish to enlarge the universe of locations e.g. to include Independent Scholars and others outside the "Academy" as in NGOs and government agencies.
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Arnold makes an excellent point—and he reminds me that historians who reside "in" in the academy also have opportunities to bring their work, research, etc, to organizations outside of it! For example, I have done some work here in Vancouver with the City Heritage department. Many of our older schools are under threat of being demolished because bringing them up to earthquake code is thought to be too expensive. As a "historian of education," I was asked whether I'd be interested in helping to develop a set of questions and criteria for establishing the "heritage value" (in itself a complicated proposition) of our city schools. The entire process was fascinating and helped me imagine a place for our work outside the formal structures we get stuck in!
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I responded directly to Christian Anderson's comment dealing with educational historians' attendance at and presenting to the major History conferences as is shown below. However your comment made me think that perhaps it may add to the general discussion. So here it is.
Dear Christian
Scholars of history of Science and those in the history of Technology each have a vibrant professional society and wonderful refereed journals. As an outsider I don't seem to see the same thing happening in the history of education. On a personal matter sometime ago I wrote up a paper based on my research for the book described at the below sites. I could not find a home for it in any of the Higher Education outlets.
Because of the breadth of the book, I already have six (6) different papers accepted and or published based on this material but none in Higher Ed. That seemed as the most natural discipline to have been interested in this history of a from-zero-base-up Higher Ed development case at the national level.
This was surprising to me as over a career in other disciplines I have amassed more than 200 papers published in refereed journals so it's not a matter sour grapes.
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The theme of the recent joint Canadian History of Education Association and History of Education Society conference, "The Educational Past: From Margin to Centre," aptly raises similar questions of where historians of education live and belong. If Canadian and American historians of education feel that they are in the margins of academia, and somewhat confused as to whether they belong to education or history, this 'identity' crisis is even more pronounced for historians of education who are doing education histories in Asia (and Africa)! Education is a not the main concern in the scholarship at the Association of Asian Studies, and being interested in the study of the History of Education in Singapore, I wonder which discourse community I belong in—history of education? history? Asian studies? comparative and international education? Is there a place for non-European and non-Canadian/American historians of education in North America?
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I wouldn't worry too much about finding the right discourse community. It's best to have multiple overlapping communities. This allows you access to a variety of issues and audiences. It also allows you to construct an identity that is mixed and flexible, so you don't get trapped in a particular academic subculture and so you can credibly apply for jobs in several different areas. Of course, you don't want to be too eclectic or you'll have trouble feeling grounded and difficulty establishing your credibility as an expert. But having two or three labels that apply to you can be helpful and professionally stimulating.
So at various times I have been a sociologist of education, historian of education, ed policy person, and teacher educator. In a professional school environment, that combination is not seen as incoherent, since they're all organized around the institutional arena of education. In a disciplinary department, this mix of interests might be suspect. Which is why I prefer being in a professional school.
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The questions that Yeow-Tong raises are of course central to many of us who struggle with notions of where our work "fits" in various communities. We are not unique in this quest for a strong and stable professional identity—many scholars, in any number of circumstances, find themselves either firmly nested within an easily identifiable community of peers or, conversely, searching for just this community.
Increasingly, I am coming to the conclusion that we each need to forge this community of peers for ourselves and on our own terms. As historians of education broadly defined, we may find a good fit with scholars who work on similar themes to us—regardless or in spite of national boundaries—or with scholars who share our disciplinary orientation, or theoretical bent. We may find our community of peers in non-traditional academic settings—with community activists, for example—or with individuals and groups who share an important component of our personal identity. A colleague, for example, considers his First Nations home reserve as an important community to which he belongs as a historian of education. I think as our research interests, community work, and teaching foci are honed and developed, we begin to forge ties with others—who these others are offer powerful clues about who we each consider to be apart of our "home" as scholars in education.
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I have to say at the onset that I was not trained as an historian, but I do history of education across the curriculum because I don't believe we can understand the present unless we understand how we got here. I teach adult and post secondary education, have a background in lifespan development and aboriginal education...lots of reasons to do history.
For example this term I am teaching the development of higher education and am using a resource on the development of English as a discipline which my interdisciplinary students then can use as a "type" to examine their own disciplines: medicine, dentistry, vocational education, occupational counseling, etc.
I do history in my school and society undergraduate program that students really didn't want to hear about. And because the survey texts don't really exist for Canada and while the American text I was using was great for trends, etc., the disjunction between American and Canadian educational development was too far for them to leap with. And the publishers said we don't have such a Canadian resource (S. Tozer).
I guess I see the discipline development being in an integrative stage at this point. Where it becomes "context" dependent in a way. There still needs to be the integrity of the "disciplinarity" but it also must fit into the context—that is how our students seem to be learning. The high level of field dependence is probably an intermediate phase in the development of disciplines within the academy and a larger topic that situatedness can't begin to address.
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From 1988 to 1998, I focused on policy rather than history, studying how the ideas of my mentor, Ted Sizer, took shape in Delaware and Kentucky. In a commentary for Educational Researcher in 1995, I described the incentives to cross boundaries, and I also discussed what I believe is a risk: overextension. Here's a Cliff Notes of the article:
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When I first joined the University of South Florida in 1996, I was one of three newly-hired historians in the college of education. I met some colleagues from Arts and Sciences, and one of them asked me, "So where did you get your degree?" I named the institution.
"No, no. I meant, from which department?"
"History," I replied.
"Oh," she said. "You're a real historian, then."
I felt a frozen smile spread across my face. I couldn't help thinking, but I didn't say, "You're probably not aware that my advisor had his degree from one of those reprobate colleges of education. And my new colleagues, whom you disdain because they don't have the right pedigree, had advisors with degrees from history departments. I guess that just means we're all half-breeds."
Fortunately, I haven't encountered that attitude very frequently, perhaps because I hang out with interdisciplinary associations (AERA, AESA, Social Science History Association). Truth to tell, the real reason why I am not a member of AHA is because the annual meeting still has the graveyard simulation more commonly known as the Job Registry, but that's a different story. My advisor pushed me to take courses from different colleges and to think about different types of jobs, including in colleges of education. And am I glad of it! Graduate students benefit their own careers when they become interdisciplinary.
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I am in the process of applying for a variety of jobs – in foundations, history of ed, area studies—and am trying to think ahead (way ahead!) to publications and tenure. I hope to publish in a range of journals – in area studies, history and education, and hopefully in some of the better-known. Is this kind of “interdisciplinarity” a problem when one comes up for tenure? For example, if I have a position in foundations, would publishing in a well-known area studies journal that is not read by many in education be valued less than publishing in an education journal with comparable status? This is something I will ask if/when I interview in the coming months, so I’m hoping to have a feel of the general terrain surrounding this topic. I appreciate any thoughts from the panelists about how this aspect of interdisciplinarity might be approached.
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Chris raises some important practical and conceptual (not to mention strategic!) questions. Very much, I suggest, depends on the culture of the particular department you are entering—whether or not the whole idea of actually operationalizing interdiscipinarity is rewarded or penalized. In some places, I fear, the latter might still be the case. If we want to get really mechanistic here, consider this—if the journals you are publishing in have a considerable circulation reach, publish less than 70%—60% of the articles that are submitted (this is information that you should be able to get either from the managing editor or from Ulrich's Periodical Directory), this speaks volumes.
In other departments, your ability to publish in a range of journals—international and national—is seen as highly desirable. You may have to append to your promotion and tenure file a brief synopsis of the relative stature of the journals in which you publish. In the case of my department, this has become a rather routine practice since we are all publishing all over the map!
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In response to Chris’s point, let me suggest one thing to think about. For people with strong interdisciplinary interests, and disciplinary department can be a risky location. In a history or sociology and political science department, you can face the test of disciplinary correctness, with people saying that your work is not really history or whatever. Experiments with interdisciplinarity are chronic in U.S. higher education, and so is the failure of these programs. They tend to fade and the organization of work regresses to the disciplinary mean.
The one stunning exception to this rule is professional schools. These are inherently interdisciplinary structures, in which scholars from a wide variety of disciplines and perspectives train their attention on a particular institutional arena defined by the school’s dominant professional identity. The stability of the focus creates continuity in interdisciplinary work. So the short answer to Chris’s question is that if you’re committed to being interdisciplinary, seek out work in a professional school, where that work is valued and rewarded.
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I can only echo Mona and David by saying that in my particular position in a teacher education program at a liberal arts college, there is great latitude with regards to publishing. Tenure at Guilford requires first and foremost quality teaching, then advising, then service, and finally scholarship—in pretty much that order. The review committee does want to see professional "activity" (presenting at conferences) and publications in refereed journals, but I am not expected to focus just on educational history (or on teacher education, or on American Studies...), in my scholarly aspirations. At the same time, however, I know that the review committee wants to see new faculty develop a focused, intentional research agenda, so in my bi-annual reviews I need to show how my work in these disparate areas is related to a few key, overarching questions or issues.
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I am an interloper to this listserv. My knowledge of the history of education comes from my life experience of forty years in higher education first as a professor of studio art in a flagship university and more recently as a professor of art education holding a PhD in university that began as a normal school a hundred years ago and now is seeking to become a first tier doctoral granting institution. I also spent a few years in K-12 teaching. Two thoughts come to mind—one related to advocacy and the second to the divide between professional education and liberal education.
Advocacy: As I have been reading these discussions about the history of education, I have become acutely aware of how peripheral the history of visual art education is in any geographic location even though the fields of visual art form the visual and built environments in which we live. The ways that students are educated in visual art impact the broader culture of most societies. Critical histories of art education often provide significant insight into relations between class struggles, economic structures, political movements, religious motivations, and gender relations. I recently traveled to Lviv, Ukraine, where they have been documenting the history of art education since Neolithic time. It was an impressive view of the development of the culture of that region. Where would a historian of art education live? In an art department, school of education, department of history?
The Divide: The academic status divide that Professor Labaree refers to in his introduction seems like a dewclaw—a vestigial remain from another time that ill serves the dual purposes of liberal and professional higher education in the 21st century. It seems that attending to and including interdisciplinary studies in university curricula is a pre-requisite for both liberal and professional programs. Professional program researchers use the tools of traditional researchers. Liberal arts educators who do not address the practical, professional needs of students risk losing relevancy and connectedness (The ivory tower syndrome). Perhaps by having more discussions about the problems professors encounter as they navigate the uncharted waters between professional and liberal educational fields will encourage more faculties to see a broader picture and celebrate the goals of both strands.
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Wonderful points, all. Thanks for the conversation. The bit I might add is this: my academic home is an English Department, and my area of specialization is Rhetoric and Composition. Like a number of composition scholars around the country who work in English Departments, I'm interested in the history of writing instruction in 19th c schools and colleges (my particular interest is in the ways writing instruction was taught in the schools). So English Departments represent another site where folks are working on the history of education (if education as a term/concept is broadly conceived). For my work, I rely heavily on textbooks used in 19th c schools and 19th c student papers; other scholars study, for example, school reports, school records, etc.
If I may, a note of thanks to Professor Labaree for your study of Central High School . . . it was useful to me as I wrote about the work of John Frost (a teacher at Central High from 1838-45) whose 1839 Easy Exercises in Composition is, I argue, a critical text in the history of writing instruction.
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Thank you very much for the opportunity to engage in this discussion.
I'd like to ask a question in a different way, but I think it makes sense, since you all are touching on it in various ways. How do you deal with the potential clash of academic cultures in professional schools? I am not in an education school or history department, but I am a newly minted historian of African American history in a school of social policy and practice where the majority of our students are those going for their master's of social work. Like many of you I haven't taught a history course yet; my courses have been on race and social work practice, race, gender, and social change, race and the law, and the courts and social policy (I also have a JD but I don't have an MSW). I have had a few students in their evaluations and adjunct faculty members who are all about social work say or imply, "What do you know, you're not a social worker." How do you as historians trained in history deal with what may be defensiveness on the part of professionally trained teachers (or in my case social workers) when let's say you try to recommend adopting more of a sophisticated historical perspective on race and education? It strikes me that I am dealing with similar issues that you all might be dealing with or have dealt with.
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The point Damon raises about the "legitimacy" of historical knowledge in a professional school curriculum is excellent and timely. I know I have been confronted more than once with students—specifically pre-service teachers—who question my position as an "authority" on teaching. In Damon's case, the students are heading towards an MSW degree.
In my first few years of teaching in the BEd programme, my lack of a BEd degree and lack of experience as a classroom teacher caused me a great deal of anxiety. But I got over it. I came to realize that students heading for a professional degree in education needed a critical and sophisticated understanding of the evolution of their chosen field. In this regard, historians have tremendous amounts to offer. Teachers, and social workers, nurses, lawyers, etc., need to have a critical appreciation of how—and why—their profession has changed over time.
Positioned as they are to make a considerable difference to policy and practice, students in professional schools need the time and space to ask difficult, historically informed, questions. For example: teachers need to consider their reasons for going into the profession. What are their assumptions about the purposes and value of education? What is education for? Who benefits from education, and why? What is the difference between schooling and education? How has education confronted and compounded social inequality as well as acted as a source of liberation? These are all deeply historical questions that pre-service professionals in various areas need to consider.
I am very upfront with my students—I disabuse them of the idea that a history of education course is a course in classroom management. I tell them upfront that I am not a K-12 teacher. Then I get on with what I hope is an interesting and useful course about how the past can help them hone critically sophisticated understandings of their chosen field.
In a sense, I turn their skepticism around and try to help them discover that historical knowledge of their field is in fact critical to enlightened and effective practice.
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Damon's description of the clash of academic cultures in a professional program seems, from my experience, to be not uncommon. When educational historians join professional programs, we are potentially seen as the individuals who like to live in dusty archives that are disconnected from the "real classroom." Meanwhile, our colleagues with doctorates in Ed Leadership and Curriculum and Instruction are typically involved in action research, quantitative analysis, pedagogical innovation, PDS projects, etc. I've tried to bridge that divide in my own department by collaborating with a colleague on a project that focuses on pedagogy and school partnership work. He's the lead, and I'm learning quite a bit about educational research in the process. The research emerged out of work he and I were already doing in the secondary methods courses, so it was a natural progression to move from classroom practice to collaborative research project.
I admit that in my particular case, my work on this project seems to "validate" me in the eyes of other faculty (and even some students) as more of a "teacher education" person, so perhaps a case could be made that increased collaboration across disciplines *within* professional programs might help bridge the academic cultural divide. However, I am by no means suggesting historians need to abandon or curtail their scholarly agenda for the sake of achieving some sense of authenticity in professional programs. I'll still talk excitedly to my colleagues and students about my research trips to those dusty archives. And in the classroom I remain an unapologetic historian; I agree with Mona that teacher candidates (or social work candidates, in Damon's case) still need to acquire a sophisticated, critical, inquiring historical perspective on their field. They need to engage with primary documents, wrestle with cause and effect, and be aware of context as they try to make sense of educational innovation and inequalities past and present.
A majority of my students will go on to teach elementary school, and they will need to teach social studies at some point (hopefully at many points), so I believe it is imperative that educational historians model ways to "do history" for future teachers.
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In the past, I have taught African American history to students from a variety of disciplines at my university. I think the key is relevance. Students want to relate to what you are teaching. I discuss the history of education as it relates to African Americans and also include the history of social work beginning with settlement houses. These can be done within the general framework of American history, or in my case, African American history.
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I teach in the Women's Studies Department though my doctoral work is in educational foundations with a specialization in educational history, curriculum and policy studies. I teach a wide variety of courses including Black Women in America, Women in Leadership and Inter-Cultural Women's Studies. Most of my students are upper-division undergraduates preparing to enter into the teaching profession but occasionally I will have a seasoned teacher or two taking the course for re-certification. What I have found with almost all of the discussions that deal with race is strange "presentism" as if contentious race issues have no historical precedent. A lot of my students tend to erect a defensive wall before I can even begin the day's lecture so what I've found useful is to engage students in what they think they already know. This means I engage them critically on their current ideas about race and gender and then I go backwards from there. I'm not sure why but it seems to work. It's like I'm validating their body of knowledge and then adding on.
The same holds true for issues of gender for which I'll share a recent example. I have two wrestlers (identical twins at that!) in one of my courses and in providing a general overview of American women's history, one shouted that Title IX was a bunch of crap that penalized male sports, particularly wrestlers. Taken aback by the outburst, I decided to ask this student questions about his sport and asked questions about how he perceived other male sports. This lead to a conversation about the disparity in scholarship money given to athletes by gender and sport played. The student started to calm down because I was engaging him on something he was passionate about. Then I explained how athletics was really only a minor part of the Title IX provisions. I then read parts of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 which had several loopholes regarding sex and how women's access to public education was not protected. Thus Title IX's scope reached beyond athletics. I could offer him a more nuanced analysis of Title IX once I got him engaged.
In your case, have you tried to demonstrate how the information you present in class directly impacts their work as social workers? I mean, have you given them case studies where they can apply that knowledge in a real-world setting? I'm sure you do but is there any place where you can add more praxis (fusion of theory and practice). I once took a higher education law course that was a requirement but after one or two sessions, I realized through the examination of cases how I could apply this information to my work on issues of academic misconduct, FERPA and tort. Our instructor gave us regular cases that were applicable to our job situation (education). Thus the information wasn't abstract but practical.
The last thing to remember is that student evaluations only really tell you the truth about your performance according to the person doing the evaluating. You might want to give the students a mid-term evaluation to glean from them their attitudes about the direction you are taking the course. I've found that when I've given the students more than one opportunity to evaluate me, they are more inclined to be objective than operate on emotions.
Best of luck and welcome to the trenches.
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I have a Ph.D. from a history department and am currently an assistant professor in a history department, where I teach general history courses and history education courses (such as the methods course required by pre-service history-social science teachers). From my personal experience, I find that most historians within the discipline are very amenable to the notion that educational history is important and its practitioners should be more welcomed into the discipline. But often these very same historians tend to have a vague sense that most educational history isn't up to the standards of the discipline.
I would pose the following questions to the participants. Why might this be so (that general historians think educational history sub-par)? Does such a notion stem from their ignorance or lack of awareness of educational historiography? Or from the type of status superiority/condescension already discussed? Or are there very real differences between general and educational historians? And if so, are these differences rooted in the barriers between the disciplines and the professional schools? Thanks.
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Applied disciplines such as business administration, social work, education have immediate practical exigencies, a fact which does not facilitate introspection or reflection of one's discipline. The more "academic" disciplines thus look down upon "applied" sciences. It is sometimes useful to remind historians and social scientists that both Durkheim and Bourdieu made their mark first in education.
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I appreciate Andrew's experience here but I have to say that, in the context of Canada and in my experience, the history of education does not suffer from the same misconceptions that seemed to have dogged his experience. Nonetheless, a couple of things strike me about Andrew's points—what precisely is a "general historian"? Is it useful to think of the history of education as hived off from other fields—the history of the family, history of children and youth, labour, masculinity, etc....? I think the deep connections between education, school, work, family, social production and reproduction, identity and state formation, citizenship, and on and on, are worth capitalizing on as we characterize our work.
In Canada, the history of education quickly distinguished itself in the early 60s as a strong and vibrant stream within the larger pool of social history. It was in the history of education that feminist historians, historians of labour and class, historians of social welfare, historians of children and youth, historians of race and ethnicity, amongst others, forged their burgeoning subfields. So the notion that the history of education is a world apart from other subfields in social history—and that it plays no part in "general history" is an epistemological fiction. A question that I would ask Andrew's colleagues is "how does conceptualizing history of education as "beneath" general history shore up particular relations of power that reward some and keep others "in their place"?
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Samuel Kaplan makes a good point. In regard to academization of applied disciplines or professions I recommend reading ...
Abbott, A. 1988. The system of professions: an essay on the expert division of labor. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL.
or Sir Karl Popper, a philosopher of science.
I am sad to say that what I have been reading in these chats I have personally lived through over a 40 year career in Operations Research, a discipline which started out as being applied/relevant—including many good and useful studies in the education sector—and via inbreeding over the years has been taken over by the theoretical types so at this stage it too like some of the professions Abbott writes about is closing in on the state of extinction.
Stay relevant and don't let the turkeys get you down.
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Current historical research of education is anything but moribund. The wide array of issues, research agendas, and theoretical perspectives all testify to the vitality of the sub-discipline. In the past two decades, historians of education have creatively situated school knowledge and institutions in their multiple and different historical contexts. Some scholars have attended to the historical conditions within which school forms of knowledge are socially constituted; others have productively explored the processes by which competing ideas about gender, ethnicity, class, and sexuality are deployed in schools; still others have addressed the political implications of education in society. Common to these otherwise disparate projects is an attempt to connect critical perspectives on the politics of knowledge in order to ask non-traditional questions without relinquishing traditional empirical research.
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From the art teacher's point of view, I was surprised to read [in Adam Golub's posting]: "his response was that among some people there was a perception that studying schools and children was in itself kind of juvenile, less glamorous, too 'institutional,' or even simply boring."
In the United States, many of the criminals in our prisons were identified as bullies and prone to violence in elementary schools. Currently our schools look somewhat like prisons. Perhaps now it might be glamorous or cutting edge for a historian to document the history of violence in United States schools. Can a historical review uncover the institutional features that have led to the current situation?
Perhaps such documentation has occurred or may be in the materials listed below and I am unaware of these writings.
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I'd like to respond at once to Andrew's probing questions about general vs. educational history and also Kriste's key observation that "it is also impossible to understand the history of any society without analyzing the history of education within that culture. Historians have generally neglected this history." I find myself wondering how to account for the apparent parting of ways between educational and "general" historians in the years since Bernard Bailyn's Education and the Forming of American Society (1960) proposed and demonstrated a necessary linkage between both fields. Mona's earlier remarks suggest that the turn toward social history in Canada came with a natural uniting of educational and general historians toward a common research and teaching goal... was this not the case in the U.S.? Were educational and general historians of US history on separate but parallel tracks in the years after Bailyn (and Cremin)? Or separate but unequal tracks—unequal in that general historians may have perceived the work in educational history to be somehow "less than"? To echo Andrew's post, what accounts for the perception that educational history is necessary and important but somehow less rigorous than other kinds of historical work? Is it the professional school specter, as has already been suggested? Or a fundamental misunderstanding of what educational historians do?
For my orals exam in American Studies at Texas, the only expressly “educational history” book assigned was Cremin's Transformation of the School. Tangentially, I was also required to read Graebner's Coming of Age in Buffalo, Gilbert’s Cycle of Outrage, Gaines's Uplifting the Race, and Townsend's Manhood at Harvard. Why these particular education books "crossed over" into the general reading list for American Studies while so many others did not was always an interesting question to me. I think there was the sense that Cremin’s book covered all the bases you needed to know about US education, but then again the department simply may not have been familiar with the historiography. The American Studies program at Texas was heavily focused on training cultural historians, but when faculty in my department heard about my research interests, they genuinely wondered what it would mean to write a cultural history of education. So I'm left wondering if it's a communication issue, and if we need to do a better job of communicating what we do to others.
Dare I say the “status” question may also relate to what is considered trendy (or "sexy," as some unfortunately say) in new scholarship? Years ago when I talked to fellow American Studies graduate students at Texas who were doing “cutting edge” ("sexy") work in public memory and public history, I always asked if they were looking at how schools transmitted cultural heritage, and they never were. A few even frowned when I suggested they might want to include education (unsexy) in their investigation. Why has the examination of schooling become so excluded from current trends in historical and cultural inquiry (the history of childhood being an obvious exception)?
I once asked a senior scholar at an American Studies conference why he thought there were not more people doing work in educational history; his response was that among some people there was a perception that studying schools and children was in itself kind of juvenile, less glamorous, too “institutional,” or even simply boring. Ouch. Ultimately, as David and others have suggested, maybe we should continue on with our excellent work and not worry too much about it...
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This is a very fruitful discussion, and I really appreciate hearing all the comments that are flowing in.
I wanted to comment on one major theme that has been arising from the contributions, about the ed school status problem. We have heard some chilling examples of the disdain that scholars in history departments often have for their colleagues in education. Why are we such easy targets? One reason is that education seems like an open book. We all have 15,000 hours of observation of teachers accumulated during our K-12 years, and nothing seems mysterious or erudite about it. How big a deal can it be to train people to pass out papers and grade standardized tests? Ed schools therefore don’t look very academic or esoteric compared to other fields on campus. Add to that the fact that our knowledge base is extremely soft and extremely applied compared our colleagues in fields where knowledge is harder and purer; and the latter characteristics are the ones that are rewarded in the academic status systems. Fields that are soft like us (say sociology) try to compensate by being more theoretical; fields that are applied like us (say medicine) compensate by cloaking themselves in hard science.
What people forget is that the medieval university emerged as a guild of teachers who provided training and issued degrees allowing apprentices to become master teachers, much like other guilds initiated people into their trades. The university, in short, began as a normal school. The colleges of arts and sciences that now rule the roost in the academy are byproducts of teacher education. But, of course, that was then and this is now. And now we don’t get respect. I’ve given up worrying about this. When I first arrived at Stanford I thought, in vain, that things might be different. No way. The first day of classes I found the following spelled in a large chalk letters in the path leading to the ed school with an arrow pointing to the building: “Edukashun Bilding.” Oh well.
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I, too, think this is a useful and interesting discussion. The only comment that I have at this point is to build upon what David is saying about how our modern universities began as normal schools (whether these institutions grew from medieval Christian universities or from regional state normal schools). In my humble view, we have made a serious mistake in our study of the history of higher education by ignoring the conception of curriculum that grows out of the normal schools (and, by extension, the medieval institutions as well). During the 20th century, scholarship on the history of higher education painted the normal schools as 'backwater' institutions that only focused on 'methods' of teaching (familiar points, aren't they?!).
Well, any serious look at course catalogs from places like Oswego State Normal School or even Southwest Texas State Normal School in my state reveals that the curriculum was interdisciplinary, that it was rigorous, and that thinking and doing (or 'theory' and 'practice' if we must use those terms) were integrated quite successfully within these institutions. The laboratory schools focused as a site of integration and service to the public good. I certainly don¹t want to paint some rosy view of normal school curriculum, but I think we will do well to think anew about the history of higher education. The history of higher education that we know has been dominated by (and was written from) a certain perspective that is concerned, first and foremost, with 'status,' not universal education or universal curriculum or teacher education. Status was not the main issue within medieval universities and curriculum.
I wonder what a history of higher education written from the perspective of teacher educators would look like?
P.S. For an interesting book on these matters that many of you have probably seen already, take a look at Harry Lewis's Excellence Without a Soul: How a Great University Forgot Education. Lewis is a former Dean of the College of Arts & Sciences at Harvard. The book is about Harvard. He gave a lecture on the book last week here at Baylor. I told him that he should have used the sub-title 'How a Great University Forgot Curriculum.' I think there's a difference!
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I like Wesley's take on turning things around, by viewing the history of higher education through the lens of the normal schools from which the university derived. The revisionist view of the normal school that is emerging now makes the case for it being the kind of intellectually stimulating place that Wesley describes, with a serious effort to combine theory and practice in a single location. As normal schools evolved into what are now regional state universities, the theory and practice were separated, with the former going to arts and sciences and the latter to the ed school. This hasn't worked to anyone's benefit, but it's part of the diminished academic reputation of the ed school.
The best book on this history of the normal school is Chris Ogren's The American State Normal School.
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We're halfway through the guest discussion on "Where Do Historians of Live?: Disciplines and Interdisciplines in the Academy." Thank you to all who have sent in such thoughtful questions and responses.
Rigidity, turf wars, snobbery—it all sounds a bit glum out there in the academy. As Louise Allen brought up, one wonders about what scholars transmit to their students, including prospective academics, by building such fences around their disciplines. But just as political pundits conjecture that the Internet is transforming the way that elections are won, perhaps online communication will also transform the academy. Interacting with one another online and building "virtual intellectual communities" through listservs such as H-Education will change the way that scholars interact with one another—for the better, I believe. And those changes may very well lead to transformations in research and teaching.
Does anyone see evidence of these positive changes? Has online collaboration enhanced scholarly work, or perhaps one's professional standing? Let's not forget that "analog" environments are still vital.
Adam Golub has commented on a research project he undertook with someone of a different disciplinary background. Has team teaching in the classroom afforded similar, beneficial opportunities to strengthen interdisciplinary relationships for historians of education? These are some questions I've been thinking about over the course of the discussion.
One more note, Kriste Lindenmeyer pointed out the many connections between H-Childhood and the SHCY with H-Education. This moderator is herself a member of SHCY and writes for their newsletter. Perhaps alliances among our various communities will help knock down some of those fences.
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Thanks very much to the panel and to everyone writing in to this discussion.
I am moved (but not at all surprised) by the anecdotes of scholars being rejected or cast aside, apparently by dint of their disciplinary affiliation (or lack thereof). From Sherman Dorn's comment about the work of advisors (those introducing young scholars to the field of history of education and/or training them in relevant disciplines) and from Anne Phillips's questions about how the field's organizations welcome people, it strikes me that we should perhaps turn the topic on its head and ask what an ideal home for historians of education would be like. Would it be the interdisciplinary school of education David Labaree describes, so long as the history department stopped pooh-poohing its work from across campus? Or would it be interdisciplinary with a different balance of disciplines (e.g. more economists, fewer psychologists)? Something else entirely? Are there models out there, especially outside of the USA and Canada, for how this might look?
I wonder: Is it good or even necessary for scholars to be shown a particular route or ought scholars in today's globalized interdisciplinary education market be looking to forge their own professional paths—not to find a home (with the permanence that implies) but rather to occupy a series of time-shares? It seems to me that those of us who regularly move not only between departmental/disciplinary cultures but also between regional/national/ethnic/other cultures in our lives and/or work already have strategies for how to get on and maybe even to get ahead while straddling boundaries. We just need to apply them to career and network development. To my mind, this is also where Adam's description of his experience with collaboration comes in: historians tend not to collaborate with each other, let alone with 'others'. They (we) are missing out. Perhaps this is one thing advisors and organizations can support?
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Kristen's comments have definitely hit a nerve—maybe a soft spot is a better characterization—for me. It is more than sentimental for those of us who occupy (both uneasily and comfortably) multiply "homes" inside the academy and out, in history or education or English or social work departments (amongst a myriad of others), to crave a place that is easily defined, afforded respect, and seen to be important.
Increasingly, I am of the mind that we must create our own homes—not because they don't already exist in some form or another but because there are so many more opportunities if we use our knowledges creatively and usefully. Adam's interdisciplinary work sets a good example.
Another interesting approach, and one that folks in my department are starting to explore, is to organize our work around "clusters of interest" or thematic synergies—youth exclusion, for example, or poverty—that can be "tackled" from a variety of perspectives. So, our disciplinary differences—whether one conceives of them as opportunities or great divides—recede to the background or perhaps more accurately are recast as positive attributes. What becomes important is the various insights, methodological innovation, and theoretical wisdom our various training brings to the amelioration of a particular research challenge.
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On finding a home in homelessness...
Greetings, I have benefited much from this discussion...thank you for hosting it! I am writing from a place on the fringes of the margin...homeless at best...and enjoying every minute of it.
I earned my doctorate in African American Studies (with a concentration in history and politics). I also earned a graduate certificate in Advanced Feminist Studies. I hold a joint appointment in both of my primary fields: Black studies and women's studies. In general, I have very friendly relations with folks in history departments and in colleges of education, but most regard me with uncertainty, suspicion, or both. I don't fit neatly into their paradigms and I really don't mind...I like where I am...way out here. I have argued (successfully to some of my colleagues...unsuccessfully to some mainstream journal editors) that interdisciplinary studies—especially in non-traditional fields—is not a euphemism for intellectual confusion. Some of us don't want to fit.
As many in this discussion have stated, academic rigidity, turf wars, and snobbery are real; but these struggles are reflected throughout academe. Even some in the margins demand conformity. For example, beyond not claiming a traditional home, I am often greeted with suspicion because I refuse to chose between Black studies or women's studies programs as my sole residence. I insist on living in both spaces. Again, not very neat. I'm OK with that.
My main methodological framework comes from John Hope Franklin and Stephanie Shaw, traditional historians (albeit Black historians), but my work also draws from education (John Dewey and Jane Martin), sociology (Patricia Hill Collins), philosophy (Rousseau, Carole Pateman, and Charles Mills) and feminist studies (Sandra Harding). I attend ASALH (Association for the Study of African American Life and History) and NWSA (National Women's Studies Association) for my regular professional conferences, though I have also presented at AERA, Southern Historical Association (SHA), and will present at OAH this year. I have stayed away from OAH and AHA for the reasons many have mentioned, but (now that my book is done) I will attend both without fear or shame.
Rigorous interdisciplinary research requires identifying clear disciplinary roots. But that does not mean one has to live in mainstream professional spaces, which are often quite scary. At SHA, the chair of my panel (in an attempt to refute my assertion that racism plays a significant role in educational history, college access, and institutional development), began her critique of my paper with, I may be just a Honky, but... Yup, I am perfectly okay with being on the fringe—I want no part of that nonsense. Plus, I know enough historians who are invested in moving the traditional field of American history in a progressive direction, so that as the field opens up, I will not have to work so hard kicking down the door because folks will be there unlocking the door from the inside.
In the meantime, I benefit greatly from various e-communities like this, but don't really want to jam my round self into anyone's academic square space. As I demonstrate in my book Black Women in the Ivory Tower, 1850-1954: An Intellectual History (available February 2007...shameless plug) , I am simply one of many (but, alas, too few) who have successfully negotiated a complex social contract with institutions of higher education...on my own terms. But Black women are not the only misfit curmudgeons in collegiate history.
As Sam Kaplan mentioned with his point about curricular origins, a close look at institutional development demonstrates a much more diverse foundation than some in the mainstream are willing to recognize. That foundation includes a series of battles between established disciplines and cranky newcomers, like sociology, anthropology, education, and even American history....
With that being said, I have questions for the group. It is apparent why educational history has not fit into history programs, but I often have wondered where educational history fits into colleges of education.
Where would be the best "home" for educational history if it were housed in colleges of education? Like my fields of Black studies and women's studies, this area seems to be at home on the margins, even within education. Though educational history is established through communities in AERA and this list, there is no widespread specialty established where folks can get a degree and a job in that specific area. Thus, is it possible to acquire a significant home in either education or in history?
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I am coming at this discussion from a very different direction. I am not professionally-trained in either history or education. I had a brief stint in an interdisciplinary Ph.D. program and have been reading professional literature pertaining to the history of education (primarily on the history of the common school movement), attending some conferences, and participating in list-serves, such as this one.
One thing troubles me about the professional school affiliation of many of you. Does the need to be relevant endanger your ability to do unbiased research? Of course, we all have biases based upon who we are and what our individual experiences have been. That can't be ignored, but it needs to be recognized and, I believe, neutralized as much as possible by the historian. The quest for knowledge can be distorted too easily if it begins with too much of an "agenda".
At a reception before a recent HES conference, after explaining the project that I am working on (a book length manuscript on the origins of the American public schools), a department head at a major institution asked me how my project would help today's schools. Having read some and thought more about the philosophy and practice of history, I have to say I was more than a little shocked. Pursuing research with the idea of its "usefulness" seems to be a bad attitude for a historian, yet I could see this easily happening in the environment of a professional school.
Again, I am quite an outsider to most of you. I don't really know your "world". I have enjoyed reading all the posts, but wonder what your take is on this.
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I am grateful to Thomas for reminding us that historians of education live in various locations and come at historical work from varying perspectives. I must say, however, that I don't quite agree that it is dangerous at all for historians to have some kind of "agenda"—I read this to mean political standpoint or commitment to bringing certain overlooked perspectives to light—the idea of neutralizing this presupposes that there is some kind of historical "truth" out there, singular or otherwise, that we need to discover and share. I don't buy this. It would be valuable, however, and in keeping with what I think the spirit of Thomas's point is intended to be, that we are transparent and reflective about our historical interpretations. Certainly the recent posting by Stephanie Evans is a useful reminder of how high the stakes can be in this regard.
Also, it occurs to me that engaging with questions of the "usefulness" of our research needn't be an entirely negative thing. Of course if this "usefulness" is nested within a neo-liberal or neo-conservative agenda about which knowledges get to "count" as important, I think we need to be concerned. However, it is also the case that in many instances those outside the field "under appreciate" how central an historical perspective can be to adding clarity to any number of pressing contemporary challenges. Questions of our "usefulness" are also opportunities to educate colleagues about the importance of historical knowledge in deepening our understanding of the present.
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I'd like to briefly take issue with Thomas's concern with bias in scholarship. Because education is by definition socialization within, and on behalf of, a particular political order, it is a concept heavily charged with political connotations to which people from a wide variety of demographic and political conditions assign different meanings and functions. What research agendas count as useful or relevant in education (whether "applied" or "theoretical") is closely related to the epistemological premises of knowledge. Nietzche once remarked that only concepts that have no history are definable. Thus, I find it welcome that scholars today attend to the historical and social contexts of epistemological concepts in education and their political uses.
For non-Western scholars working under the penumbra of Anglo-American academia, epistemology is far from straightforward or neutral. The concepts and categories frequently deployed to organize and advance arguments about education and society derive from what are taken to be dispassionate epistemological premises of knowledge, premises that position an idealized West as the final endpoint of history. Not surprisingly, many education researchers take to task the linguistic and social impartiality of analytical concepts, that is to say, axiomatic notions about historical processes, society, and education that are assumed to have universal validity, irrespective of time and place, and above all, to encapsulate human agency and experience. Their meaning invariably changes in conjunction with, or in response to, cultural, social, and economic resources, all of which are closely connected to historical relations of power within a society and between societies.
Thus, both the premises of education and history must be treated as objects of study and not as objective methods to study society. What remains challenging is developing and applying those critical perspectives to best describe and theorize the social and political transformations of education. Such a challenge is being increasingly met by excellent historical studies on schools and children.
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A few years ago, I wrote an essay about the isolation I felt in mySchool of Ed, where I had decided to choose historical topics and methods for my dissertation...
[Moderator's note: Below is an excerpt. Members are invited to contact the author at for a copy of the entire essay.]
The fact that there are perhaps, no core methods intrinsic to the field itself, has not encouraged the field to mine the potential wealth buried in its history. Even in admitting that the scope of research traditions now includes both quantitative and qualitative (and even mixed method!) designs, it is both fair and accurate to suggest that within education, the neglect of historical research is both apparent and appalling. Let me not suggest that there is no historical research in education. Indeed, there is some, a fact to which occasional papers in the Teachers College Record will attest. But by and large, doctoral programs in education neither encourage historical research nor explicitly devote any substantial instruction on the subject. Few professors in education programs have likewise been trained in the art, preferring instead to emulate the experimental models on which they cut their own teeth. Too, departments and their research preferences must also be seen as an epistemic moment held hostage by political and economic forces of their institutions....
In the end, my struggle with the disciplines is a personal one, waged for a selfish reason: I am displaced and bored "inside" my field, ungrounded in a canon of hows and whys. So, overdramatized or not, I see myself striking out in search of my birth mother, not only in the subject matter of my dissertation, but also in the rich, meaning-making, method of historical research. My adoptive parents—qualitative and quantitative methods—are well meaning, but in the end, I want to feel rooted in a way of knowing.
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Your post echoes many of the concerns I am having as a doctoral student in a Educational Foundations program where my research is a fusion of history and critical educational policy studies (ala McLaren, Giroux, Apple). I have had difficulty with my work because there is essentially no guide for how to do historical research in education. I did run across one book that I thought would be promising—Historical Research in Educational Settings—but because it is written from a British perspective, I wasn't sure exactly how this would work for my project. I find myself stuck somewhere in the middle between education and history because while my methodology isn't traditional historiography, it does draw on historical events to explain and understand educational practice. I feel a sense of frustration because I think that the field of education could gain a lot of refreshing perspective from history if we would let down these disciplinary barriers we've erected and trained all students in a variety of methods—qualitative, quantitative and historical. No singular method can answer every question. Isn't that the reason the field (education/social science) embraced post-positivist research methods in the first place? Shouldn't educators esp. be willing to challenge themselves to find new ways to solve educational problems?
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Where does the historian of education fit in education? In which education discipline[s] is there the best fit? Early Childhood Education, Elementary Ed., Middle School, Secondary, Special Ed., Multicultural and Peace Ed., other?
Our discussions over the past couple of days have tried to forge answers to this question—in the midst of this, we have all become more aware of the diversity of our orientations and the work that we do. A colleague of mine in the Adult Education programme in my department constantly reminds us—at every venue possible from coffee breaks to full faculty meetings—that "we work in a Faculty of Education, not a Faculty of Schooling!" He brings this up not just to defend the work that he does (although clearly this is part of it), but to bring to the table the idea that the professional training of teachers for the K-12 system in my province of British Columbia is only a portion of what our Faculty offers to prospective students. In Departments like mine in which education is defined as broadly as possible, the opportunities for historical work is enormous and varied. Students contemplating taking graduate degrees in the field might be surprised at the variety of programmes offered internationally in which "education" is linked to a rather staggering array of topics and themes: motherhood, work, health, spirituality, and on and on!
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It has been a great privilege—and a wonderfully collaborative experience—to have joined this discussion. Thanks to Adam Golub and David Labaree for their wisdom and Nancy Zey for so elegantly moderating our conversation. If we were to summarize our discussions, a number of challenges and triumphs seemed to come to the fore. I note that a not so subtle distinction between where historians of education "live" and where they in fact "fit in" came to prominence. This is, of course, at least partly reflective of a traditional tension (productive tension?) between applied/professional schools and those inclined along more traditional approaches to the production of knowledge—I am deliberately careful in my language here because I think we have inherited not-so-helpful and "hierarchized" conceptualizations of these two spaces. A great deal of energy is currently deployed to ease these distinctions—I think historians of education can further this work. Thanks to David and the many participants who lingered at this juncture to tease out a bit more carefully why this divide has developed and why it is something of a "false dichotomy."
I am also mindful of the fact—as articulated in our discussions—that even within the field of the history of education, we need to continue to work to ensure inclusion—not just pay lip service to it. There are still non-traditional affiliations—NGOs, independent scholars—and topic areas, methodologies, theoretical frameworks and political imperatives that are cast as peripheral—or indeed worse—to the field. We need to ask what these areas are and why they continue to suffer from lack of support and political will. We can't complain of being left out, misunderstood, or undervalued if we are unsupportive of our colleagues engaged in work that, although it may differ substantially from our own, deserves attention. The recruitment of new scholars, as well as the retention of experienced ones, depends on open doors, active imaginations, and structural guarantees of equity.
I am increasingly intrigued by a central question that our discussion has brought forth: when, and in what settings, do historians of education find themselves having to justify their work? What are the terms within which such justification is requested or indeed demanded? How do we respond to these moments? As a feminist historian focusing on children and embodiment in education, I am no stranger to having to justify what I do. I know most of us in this discussion have articulated similar positions. It seems to me, however, that all inquiries into "why and how is your historical work relevant here" are NOT created equal. It is important for us to pay attention to the differences between them. Some of these requests are opportunities to bring to the uninitiated a clearer understanding of the powerful explanatory potential that a historical perspective can bring. At the other end of the spectrum, as the experience of Stephanie Evans so clearly and painfully shows, are iterations of racialized, classed, and gendered power dynamics—power that polices how the history of education "goes"—our narratives, it probably goes without saying (but I'm saying it anyway) have political importance. We need to be savvy in our responses to both. Adam has suggested a very useful path forward—engage with colleagues on collaborative, interdisciplinary projects that focus our energies on the production of understanding, clarity, equity.
Historians who work within professional faculties tend to work differently than their colleagues in history departments. As a scholar trained in a traditional history department and then hired into a Faculty of Education department (history, sociology, philosophy, anthro of ed, adult ed and higher ed, and educational administration), I believe my "home" has encouraged me to become a better historian. I feel this to be the case precisely because those elements of my research and teaching that connect to contemporary concerns, periennal challenges, and future possibilities have real purchase to pre-service teachers and to graduate students interested in education broadly defined and enacted. I know this has not been the experience for many in our discussion—I think here of the testimony of Shelly Rafferty Withers—and I wonder if this is not a problem endemic to academic history writ large? Interestingly, people in various communities outside the university or college system—in my own experience, First Nations elders or members of the Vancouver-based Chinese Canadian Historical Society of British Columbia—have a clear and compelling understanding of the value, relevance, and import of the history of education. They need no convincing. It may come down to each of us considering a crudely simplistic question about what we do as historians of education: "so what?" How we answer that question for ourselves and how our peers inside and outside formal institutions make use of our answers will have a significant role to play in our having a clear sense of "home."
Thanks to everyone for an insighful discussion.
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I just wanted to thank H-Ed
ucation for sponsoring this wonderful discussion. It's given me a great deal of food for thought about where historians of education live, where we time-share, and where we might ideally live. As we come to the end of our three-day focused conversation, I hope that the dialogue will continue on H-education and in other venues. Thanks especially to Nancy Zey for organizing and moderating this discussion.Return to the Table of Contents
This message marks the end of the guest discussion, but I hope it is only the beginning of an ongoing conversation on where historians of education live within academic disciplines and interdisciplines. I would like to take this opportunity to thank our discussants:
Each of them was very generous with their time and insight, and they helped pull together the discussion's various threads. Indeed, they have given us much to think about—and quite a bit to read. The readings suggested by the discussants in several postings will be compiled and posted on H-Education soon.
Why have a guest discussion in the first place? I can't say it any better than Jack Dougherty, when summing up May's discussion on book publishing: "These important conversations don't always occur naturally, so that's why we need to help make them happen. As a free, moderated email list, H-Education can play a special role in opening up dialogue to all 800+ subscribers across the globe (not just those who can afford to attend an academic conference in an expensive, distant location).
Maintaining the health of the field of ed history requires everyone to work harder in sharing our collective wisdom—and to avoid the tendency that Robert Putnam describes as 'bowling alone.' (See more on this theme in Educational Researcher 29 (November 2000): 16-17)."
Why a guest discussion on academic "real estate" for historians of education? I believe that the number and intensity of postings over the last three days indicate that this is a topic much on our minds. List editors continually strive to bring the members of our community together, but I also have a personal interest in this topic. As a student, I feel I have always been encouraged to pursue interdisciplinary research, but as I enter the academy as professional historian, I'm becoming aware that career advancement seems to rely more on disciplinary boundaries. I was particularly struck by Chris Smith's first person account entitled "An Incomplete Picture of Me" in The Chronicle of Higher Education (May 25, 2006). Having joint departmental appointments seemed like an ideal interdisciplinary scenario, but the result was that half of his work was discounted in the separate tenure reviews. How can we say we support crossing boundaries when advancing as a professional requires staying in one place?
How do we cultivate respect as historians who study education? This question concerns institutional and independent scholars alike. We've heard some very disheartening accounts over the course of this discussion, and I'd like to throw in my own war story. Early in my doctoral studies a professional historian asked me where I saw myself as a scholar. I realize now that the question was really "Where do I want to live?" There are several fields where I see my home, including the study of gender, social welfare, and children and families. I said so, and added that the study of education was a way to bring these areas together. This last admission provoked a response: "Trust me, you don't want to do that boring history of education stuff." I realize now that, from the established academic's perspective, I was being warned against choosing life in a shack when there were scholarly mansions and villas to occupy elsewhere.
Whatever the shape of my academic home as an historian of education, the view looks good and the neighbors are great.
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