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I like history and have taught
the histories of English, American, and Western World literature at
Glendale College, but I was surprised over twenty years ago when a
respected counselor, Leroy Herndon, told me that students often came to
Glendale College with three strong dislikes: English, math, and
history. As an English teacher, I knew the first two subjects are
intimately connected with students' self image, which bad experiences
can scar. But history is one long fascinating story of causes and
effects. How can students come to college disliking history?
But they do. And large numbers have not increased their liking of the
subject since. When I started teaching English at Glendale College in
1962, there were three sections of English Literature Survey. Ten years
later there were only enough students to offer one section each year.
Since I accept the challenge and duty of trying to make my students not
only understand my classes, but also enjoy them as much as possible, I
cast about for what had gone wrong and what could be done about the
problem. One answer I came up with is that my students, reading less
and speaking-listening more, have been influenced by television more.
Marshall McLuhan argued that students raised on television would be
more influenced by visual images than students raised on reading books.
Television presents mostly contemporary popular dramas, but sprinkles
occasional historical dramas incoherently among the movie multitude.
Our students may be forgiven for thinking that all the dramas are
contemporary with some of the actors in peculiar costumes. As modern
popular culture triumphs over educational learning and our community
college students become less culturally advantaged, they understand less
of what we mean as history teachers when we talk about “colonial
America,” “galleon,” “big wig,” “Spartan,” “the Great Awakening,”
“chariot,” “Mogul emperor,” “assegai,” “Roundhead,” “samurai,”
“Holocaust,” or “slavery.” The history teacher has spent many years
poring over books with pictures here and there, and gone to some
museums, so he has images in his head to go along with these words. Our
disadvantaged students, not given to much reading, lack this background
and find their reading labored and vague in meaning. They have not the
money nor perhaps inclination to travel the world or visit museums to
make up their disadvantage. The teacher has to find a way to reach
them.
Documentaries are a way to remedy this situation and give the students
an opportunity to travel in time and space without leaving their
classroom in Glendale. Ken Burns' Civil War documentary gives the
student a wealth of visual images of the places, events, and people
during that war. The documentary
Troy
allows a student to travel to Turkey and to visit the probable site of
that city, and allows him to learn of the culture of the Spartan Greeks
who laid siege to that city. The documentary
Death Mills
gives the lie to Holocaust-deniers with official footage of emaciated,
liberated inmates and hundreds of corpses being tossed into mass graves
at Nazi death camps. The documentary
1900 House
studies modern people living the life of people in a house in 1900 and
makes palpable the great strides that have been made since then. Such
documentaries could make history classes more meaningful and concrete to
students attending them.
Another answer to the question why students dislike history is that our
students have an unshakable faith that history is the story of dead
people unconnected to them today. We can tell them that those who
forget history are doomed to repeat the mistakes of history—much as we
are repeating the mistakes of the British in Iraq at the end of World
War I. But the students seem to be unimpressed.
What to do? I noticed that some teachers have been effective by giving
anecdotes in their history classes that make some of the issues and
characters come alive. Those classes seem to work well. Then I wondered
whether history classes would work even better if this literary device
(adding anecdotal details to lectures) were enhanced by the wonders of
the Hollywood dream machine—by the use of historical moviedramas. But
in the 1970s and 1980s there were only a few films for me to borrow from
the county library, and those few rapidly fell into disrepair through
overuse. Nowadays we have the pedagogical opportunity to bring to our
classes scenes from historical dramas through videocassettes and DVDs.
Now we can show that the people of the American Civil War may be dead,
but were alive at the Battle of Gettysburg in the movie
Gettysburg.
Here were dead ancestors seeming alive to our eyes struggling mightily
to producethe world we live in today—without slavery.
Waterloo
dramatically gives the feel of the ending of the Neoclassical Age of
Reason.
Three Sovereigns for Sarah gives
the plightof “witches” in the Salem theocracy.
The Lion in Winter
shows the medieval warrior—warts and all.
Tom Jones
gives the feel of living in the English Neoclassical society. Such
historical dramas must encourage students to think that historical
people were once alive, were confronted with issues like theirs, and
struggled to make our modern world.
With these two
answers and their solutions in mind, I have been gathering historical
documentaries and historical dramas on video and more recently on DVD
and donating them to the Instructional Technology Services (ITS) for use
by history teachers in music, art, literature, economics, language,
politics, astronomy, and paleontology. In my collection music, art,
language, and economics are rather limited. But British and European
history are pretty well represented; American history is improving.
Classical history of Rome, Greece, and Judea are weak; ancient history
is weaker. Japanese, Russian, and Indian history are light. Chinese
and Middle Eastern (Islamic) history are very weak. The natural history
of the universe (astronomy) and the evolution of ancient lifeforms
(paleontology) is light but getting stronger. At the desk in
Instructional Technology Services, there is a book listing all these
historical videos and DVDs with some description of them. They are
grouped by subject matter and subdivided by period to help the history
teachers. There is a further list of the DVDs and videos (with brief
descriptions) on line at
www.glendale.edu/movie. The list
can also be accessed by clicking on the “Faculty and Staff” button on
the college's website. These helps are available for use—in whole or in
part—by history teachers in their classrooms or for the personal
education of the teachers. It is my hope that their use will lead to a
great increase in the popularity of history classes.
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