Pivotal Moments in the History Curriculum

Think like historians”: the phrase describes an objective of many college history curricula in an academic world where “learning outcomes” often begin with the acronym SWBAT (“Students Will Be Able To”). But what does “think like a historian” mean, and at which points in the curriculum do students encounter it most explicitly? As Lendol Calder has argued, the first-year survey course affords an opportunity for “uncoverage,” where we can “expose the very things hidden away by traditional survey instruction: the linchpin ideas of historical inquiry that are not obvious or easily comprehended; the inquiries, arguments, assumptions, and points of view that make knowledge what it is for practitioners of our discipline; the cognitive contours of history as an epistemological domain.” Commentators on collegiate history education and practitioners of the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) have devoted frequent attention to the survey, perhaps because it is our moment of first contact with the greatest number of students unfamiliar with our practice.1 Other key moments in a history curriculum have received less systematic scrutiny, although they are no less significant in the intellectual trajectories of students who select history as their major or minor

Acronym · Curriculum · Epistemology · Intellectual history · Mathematics education · Pedagogy · Phrase · Political science · Scholarship · Scrutiny · Sociology · Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science · Educator Training and Historical Pedagogy · Evaluation of Teaching Practices · Innovative Teaching Methodologies in Social Sciences · Law · Philosophy · Psychology