Geography 417
California for Educators

History and Geography as Disciplines

Objectives

• Students will identify characteristics history and geography that mark them as both subjects and disciplines.

• Students will recall basic components of historical and/or spatial thinking.

• Students will demonstrate ability to apply disciplinary logic to historically or spatially novel questions.

History and Geography

• What subjects are you taking this semester?

• History is a discipline and a subject.

• Geography is both discipline and subject.

• What is the difference between discipline and subject?

• Why do so many folks forget the disciplinary component?

The Truth about Truth

• Postmodernism has brought with it new ways of thinking about what is known and how we come to know what we know.

• Epistemology is ________

• Ontology is ___________

• Can you think of instances in which an accepted truth in one place or time evolves into another truth or is abandoned?

• How do you know what you know?

• How is truth or knowledge made?

History as Discipline

• Five C’s of History

• Change through Time

• Context

• Causality

• Contingency

• Complexity

Why the 5 C’s?

• Born of a critical reflection upon History as a guild craft Burke and Thomas as they sought a way to teach pre-service teachers in a fashion inflected with pedagogical content knowledge or PCK.

• See: Sam Wineburg’s Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts

• Realized developing a habit of mind takes many years.

• How to communicate this deep knowledge to students in a semester or two, and then hope that teachers could in turn help K-12 students adopt historical thinking habits.

Change Over Time

• Easiest to grasp.

• Careful not to boil it down to change only, because continuity through time is also a very important reality.

• Think of several practices that are radically different today from what they were a generation (or ten generations) than today.

• Think of practices that have changed little.

Context

• What is context?

• Some context sets the stage for action

• Another type of context provides a framework for interpreting evidence.

• History, as the best teachers will tell you, is about telling stories.

• How could you provide context for students in your classes regarding, say life in a Mission?

Causality

• What is causality?

• Centerpiece of the science project.

• Causality is likewise very important to historians but since experimentation in the past is impossible, arguments must be constructed based on logical interpretation of primary source material.

• Multiple explanations probable and defending a perspective is a rich exercise in historical thinking.

• What was the cause of the Mexican-American War?

Contingency

• What is contingency?

• Contingency may be the most difficult of the C’s in part because one must accept that every historical outcome depends upon a number of prior conditions which in turn depend upon still other conditions.

• Change a single prior condition what happens?-- Back to the Future

• Contingency can be an unsettling idea--so much so that people in the past have often tried to mask it with myths of national and racial destiny.

• It offers a powerful corrective to teleology, the fallacy that events pursue a straight-arrow course to a pre-determined outcome.

• Contingency also reminds us that individuals shape the course of human events.

• Also requires students to accept that students and their pupils play a part in shaping the course of future history.

Complexity

• The world is and has always been complex.

• Too often history is treated by non-historians as a simple recounting of past events or as warm, fuzzy nostalgia for a time past.

• Simplistic notions of history frequently function to advance political and cultural “truths”.

• Embracing the complexity history help us understand the past on its own terms and prepares us to understand our complex present.

• How does nostalgia and chronicle create “truth” today?

Concerns…not a C.

• Can easily degenerate into a checklist.

• Take care to memorize AND understand them.

• Internalizing them takes practice.

Geography as Discipline

• Geographers likewise have a “habit of mind” that takes years to fully develop.

• Many of the same questions asked by historians are asked by geographers.

• Geographers use a more diverse “tool kit”, which includes the scientific method.

• Geography is somewhat split into physical and human sides, and has multiple approaches.

Adapting the 5 Cs to Geography

• How might the 5 Cs be adapted to Geography?

• Change through ___________

• Context

• Causality

• Contingency

• Complexity

Thinking Spatially

• Geography also suffers from simplistic misconceptions...crops and capitals.

• Geography offers a way of understanding how the world works and it requires only that privilege the question “Where?” in the process of trying to determine “Why?”

• Increasingly geographers argue that the manipulation of space is critical in shaping of what we know or think we know.

• Categories such as race, gender, etc. are spatially contingent.