As a former kindergarten Instructional Asssitant and reformed history hater, the “Thinking Like a Historian” article by Sam Wineberg stuck with me. I’ve always been taught that history is a sequence of events to memorize, and there was little nuance past that. In fact, I struggled with history throughout most of my adolescence up until high school. It wasn’t until college that I was encouraged by professors to be more inquisitive, rather than approaching history as a regurgitation exercise. For lack of a better phrasing, I, too, was a Kevin. The main issue I have with the reading is that it isn’t very imaginative, as it concerns teaching history to young children. In my experience in a kindergarten classroom, students learn history through books and engaging activities. But still, at the end of the book, the children are asked to explain the historical event to ensure their understanding (or that they were listening at all). Maybe that can be attributed to their youth and the fact that these skills will be foundational to their learning. Nonetheless, I can’t help but imagine “Kevin” as a high schooler, and that begs the question of how we instill the habits of a historian in younger children. What does that look like?
On another note, I also enjoyed Hillel Arnold and Laura Miller’s “Sharing Inquiry in the Archive” and Serge Noiret’s “Sharing Authority in Online Collaborative Public History Practices” for different reasons. I found that Noiret’s framing of “shared vs sharing authority” was particularly interesting. History has, and continues to, neglect the voices of the marginalized, so it is of the utmost importance to frame sharing authority as an ongoing process that has been missing from the history-making process. My only qualm with this reading is simply a semantics issue. I worry that, sometimes, the emphasis on the historian’s role in “history-making” can delegitimize how marginalized communities remember and memorialize, not create, their own history. I understand that history-making as a process encompasses historians’ choices, but I tend to shy away from the notion that it is only when these communities interact with historians that their history is “made”.
