My blog

As communism fades from memory-history into discipline-history, so does one meaning of “front.” In Cold War parlance, a front was a political shell company, an organization funded by and beholden to the interests of a government. The irony of the Cold War was that it saw the flowering not only of state-funded propaganda on an unprecedented scale, but also of the Non-Governmental Organization (NGO), an entity celebrated for its autonomy from political influence. Here was the Cold War’s antithesis—international NGOs like the UN or the Olympic Games that stood for peace and mutual understanding. What history has lost sight of, and my site seeks to bring back into view, are the international fronts that emerged after World War II, styled as NGOs. A contradiction in terms, they constituted a key arm in the war of ideas that made the Cold War “cold,” yet about which hardly anything has been written.

My existing website plots out where the “cold fronts” met, and so give viewers a visual representation of East/West, Iron Curtain/free world competition that contests those categories. Communist fronts met outside of Communist-led countries almost as much as Western ones met outside of liberal democratic countries. The site will add to this geographic feature samples from the print propaganda that they produced—namely, magazines. Here, visitors will be asked to determine which publication belonged to which alliance. Who published World Youth, for example, with its interview with Sting the musician in 1986?

The historical thinking featured on the site is substantive inasmuch as it will devote a separate page to each of the state-backed NGOs that appears on the map. It will employ procedural history by asking users to infer the origins of a document based on content alone. The site will thus be of use to teachers who wish to take their students beneath the categories of Cold War propagandas to their contents.

The principal expectation of history teachers advanced by non-history teachers has been remarkably consistent over the last century: that they teach fact. As Cornell Carl Becker argued in 1931, and a chorus of critics echoed more recently, the expectation is blinkered, or by psychologist Sam Wineburg’s diagnosis, outright “crazy.” Time and again, standardized testing has shown that students know far less about names and dates and customary causal narratives than their elders think they should. When we add to this the fact that “substantive,” fact-based teaching was the norm a century ago, but yielded results little different from today’s, the view that students know too little because they’re taught too little what and too much how—not least how good history is conducted—is specious.

            So how might digital technology help history teachers turn back the tide of fact-obsessed curricula and tests in favor of a more “inquiry-based” model that empowers students to conduct historical research, with teachers acting as coaches rather than spoon-to-mouth instructors? Mills Kelly’s call for teachers to have students “make, mine, mark, and mash” offers a hint; but Kelly’s laundry list no more specific on how to do so than I do when I write under student outcomes for my course: “[students] will interpret sources mindful of the biases they carry.” And herein lies the challenge. The digital turn offers teachers and students a toolbox different from the notebook, laptop, and textbook. Yet historical scholarship remains unchanged: in print with a few illustrations at best, and not a drop of real-time interaction with the reader. Digital history, meanwhile, is set aside for teaching purposes by history professors, rather than for citations in upcoming publications. And yet, when the time does come to teach, modules like the ones in “Reflective of my Best Work” remain on the shelf. We heard at the end of our first class a professor comment on the digital syllabus that she had written in the course, but hadn’t yet “had a chance” to teach. I could not help wondering whether it was that the department didn’t allow it, or that the gravitational pull of familiarity proved too strong. That same pull of tradition works is even harder on the general public than it is on teachers. So to return to the question of when digital technology will jar history loose from the constraints of substance over procedure, knowing over thinking, it’s only when parents and PTOs and lawmakers acknowledge the digital toolbox as a vital component of any public education that history curricula assignments will be allowed to evolve. What the history paper was to 20^th-cen. lawyers—a first step on the way to writing thesis-driven briefs based on legal precedent—Wordpress might train to their 21-st cen. successors.

As communism fades from memory-history into discipline-history, so does an alternative usage of the word “front.” In Cold War parlance, a front was a political shell company, an organization funded by and beholden to the interests of a government. The irony of the Cold War was that it saw the flowering of a new term, the Non-Governmental Organization celebrated for its autonomy from political interest, free to campaign for peace, freedom, equality, and so on. What both memory-history and disciplinary-history have lost sight of, and my site seeks to bring back into view, is that the Cold War inspired a large crop of state-sponsored NGOs. A contradiction in terms, they constituted a key arm in the propaganda war, and one that hardly anyone has written about.

The site will use the internet to plot out where these organizations met, in order to afford viewers a visual representation of Cold War competition on a much bigger world than the East/West, Iron Curtain/Nylon Curtain terminology suggests was possible.

The historical thinking that I hope to employ is substantive inasmuch as I will explain each of the groups and place them in a brief narrative page “contextualizing” them in the traditional sense of the word. I’ll then employ procedural history to ask users to participate in uploading new data, and drawing inferences from the data that do not have to abide by the standard history textbook account of the Cold War.

The people I hope to engage are students and fellow scholars and the wider world, really.

I enjoyed these texts and videos more than I expected to. Partly that’s due to their relevance to my current course, the first online one I’ve ever taught, which I want to save from becoming a read, write, submit assembly line. Partly, too, it’s a tribute to the materials assigned. In Thinking History (2008), Stéphane Lévesque reminds us of the revisionist zeal that Baby Boomers brought to historical pedagogy starting in the 1970s. The results were disappointing. The phrases are well known—“student-centered,” “inquiry-based,” “critical thinking”—but their manifestation in thirty-student high school classes, never mind fifty-student college lecture courses, did not follow. Or is that an unfair judgment? Were this a history of education course, that’s one question I would pursue. I don’t recall much rote, worksheet learning in my public high school history classes back in the 1990s, for example. But Sam Wineburg’s findings on how few students can distinguish description from causation in his DBQs on US history confirms that even if students no longer chant the Gettysburg Address from their seats, narrative history still leaves little time for “critical thinking.” What role has the post-Bush testing mania played in this, I wonder.

I chuckled reading Lévesque’s point about ‘90s postmodernism as the point where revisionism did itself in. Teachers were professionalized; history was “diversified”; but theoretically, the compass was broken. Why teach anything, Cambridge’s Richard Evans asked, if it’s all suspect? Why not keep lecturing, the method that gives you the most time to research and write?

The revisionist impulse survived the Lynne Cheney assaults of the 1990s. But now it was more modest, more pragmatic. Lendol Calder recalls entering the classroom fresh out of graduate school, ready to discuss primary sources in a circle, as if graduate school had never stopped. His shift toward “uncoverage,” or in Lévesque’s terms, procedural over purely substantive history teaching, converged with the “decoding” impulse from the University of Washington, all toward a style of teaching based on evidence rather than narrative, questions rather than answers. We’re moving from “sages on stage,” as Lee put it, to classroom “coaching,” per Calder.

Your request that we pose three questions that we’d like to answer during the course, rather than have answered, seems to follow this same method. My questions, at least at the moment, are these:

First, I found it interesting when Wineburg called for more assessments that gauge how students learn rather than what they learn. How can I build this kind of assessment? And I guess I’d use a rubric to help place a letter grade on the result. But how?

Second, we hear not a peep in these readings, with the faint exception of Lévesque, about digital media. How does it change the “coaching” in question?

Third, what are the limits and the possibilities for student-student collaboration in online learning. There’s a trend that didn’t appear in the texts for this module: the group learning approach. Actually, no, the man from UW with the white beard mentioned it on the second video. But how do you do good group work? My God, there’s a riddle I’ve never solved. And perhaps online teaching makes this easier, as you can perhaps better monitor what work has been done. Via which app?

Thanks for well-chosen texts and videos, with videos pared down to exactly the length that we professors are encouraged to pare our lectures to these days—seven minutes or less!   

I’m an adjunct professor of history at Fairfield University in Connecticut who’s moving south to Maryland this summer, where I’ll keep teaching my usual courses, only this time online. My keys skills lie in research and teaching, and my key interests span pretty much everything. Especially interesting to me now, in the professional arena at least, is how to use technology in teaching and research. I took a free course for faculty on this at Fairfield this spring, and put to use several apps in my post-COVID classrooms to good effect. Students much preferred them to Zoom, Zoom, Zoom. I also found it refreshing to read and evaluate Adobe Spark Pages, for instance, over 2,000-word papers. My learning goals for this course are to expand this fresh knowledge about digital technologies in teaching, and to note where the two courses overlap and diverge. Pedagogical theory, of which I read plenty when training to teach high school a while back, interests me much less than practice.

As for professional goals and positions, I wouldn’t say that adjunct is my American dream. But in the end it’s teaching, and I enjoy teaching. So as long as my spouse can pay the mortgage, I may just stick with it and try to get new gigs at Maryland/DC schools. But a specialization in how to teach online is certainly appropriate to the present moment, and could boost me from adjunct to associate adjunct.

In that spirit, here’s a shot of me after my daughter tied up my post-COVID hair a week ago.