Students as an Impressionable Audience

As a future educator, the audience that I plan to share my knowledge of history with is mainly my students, a very impressionable audience. As I think about my history classes in grade school, I realized that I learned mainly through textbooks and clips of movies which I can assume many people still learn from in the same manner. How reliable were these sources? Where were the multiple points of view? Where should students go to understand history?

The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History by David Lowenthal looks at the problems with history textbooks that students are reading today and in the past. Students have not been taught to question the textbooks or the authors, however the authors vary from historians to non-historians, some have extensive knowledge on the subject and some do not (p. 116). As an impressionable high school student, I never thought to question the text. What they were telling me was right, right? We need to teach students to question the text and introduce them to multiple points of views. This way they can create their own conclusions and see that history is not full of right or wrong answers. Although teachers must deal with a curriculum and time restrains, they still need to teach less from the text and more with other sources. Textbooks are good to get gather some facts and get the authors point of view, however students need to see more. If teachers only teach from the textbooks, the students are mostly likely to believe every word and encounter some ‘bad’ history.

The History Channel seems to be another source that students and teachers turn to for ‘good’ history, when in fact ‘bad’ history can appear here just as easily as in textbooks. Shows like Ax Men, Pawn Stars and Madhouse (which are the three most watched shows) have little historical value. I found it hard to actually watch a documentary since they are scarce in the evening. These documentaries are normally narrated through historians that tell facts and events chronically that they believed happened, just like a textbook. Is this a good source to find history and not heritage? These documentaries as well as educators generally teach more heritage then history (p. 125). Information is provided to us that we desire, that will make sense and led to another event. This is not history.

When students first walk into your classroom, some may have ideas or images of history that may not necessarily be accurate. Family members, other teachers or movies might have easily influenced the way they view historical events or people, especially movies. Many children grow up watching Disney movies that take place in a past era or have a character that was a famous individual in the past. Disney created entertaining stories around famous past people like Mulan, Pocahontas and Hercules. Although some of the facts are correct in these movies, many are not (p. 102). For instance, Pocahontas was never John Smith’s lover. She was merely twelve and he is his thirties when they met, however children of all ages are coming into the classroom with a false image of the two. For the teacher these false images may be hard to break or undo. This just shows how impressionable students are and that they need to learn to questions sources that they have gained historical knowledge from.

I have been thinking a lot about the types of sources I want to make available for my students. I myself was once influenced by Disney, movies, textbooks and families members until I sought to research on my own, therefore I want to encourage students to look at many primary and secondary sources, to see events from many angles, to question texts and to learn that history is not black and white. I want to create fun but informative hands-on activities that will help students to understand history better. Teaching history means teaching the undesirable outcomes as well as the desirable, teaching all points of view and teaching the hard to talk about subjects as well. The bottom line is that students need to see that “the past can never be totally reconstructed, that the study of history is always unfinished (117).”