APUSH Teachers - What Do You Think?

The other day I wrote a short piece on why I think APUSH is an outmoded approach to accelerated instruction in history. And to be honest, I feel that way about high school history survey courses in general, which seem to emphasize covering enormous amounts of material in a limited time frame. My guiding idea is this: focus less on getting through the material and emphasize the process of learning history. For example: what if you had the time in a US survey course to spend a full two weeks (or more) on a topic like the Harlem Renaissance. Imagine what you could accomplish!

Teachers…please hear me out.

Sure, spending a lot of time on one thing means you would have to cut something else from your curriculum – there are only so many weeks in the school year. And I understand that this might seem like it would cause frustration and anxiety for you and your students.  But the benefits far outweigh the losses here. So maybe you won’t spend quite as much time on the traditional narrative, but you’ll open the door to rich conversation based on documentary evidence, you’ll be able to weave in ideas from other disciplines such as art history and literary critique, and most important, you will encourage critical thinking.

This is the point – our students are going out into the world where they are not necessarily going to have to know the traditional historical narrative but are most certainly going to have to know how to think in sophisticated ways about the realities that come their way. I promise, the world’s woes sleep for no one. So, they are going to have to know how to deal with these realities intelligently and discuss them in a reasonable fashion having looked at and contextualized the evidence. 

They can learn how to do this in history class. But the classes that focus on the material alone at the expense of deep analysis are not going to help them.    

Up next – I’ll give you a taste of what I did in one of my US History classes – spending weeks answering the question: does the United States Constitution recognize property in man? My decision to dedicate time to this question has yielded wonderous results in the classroom. Stay tuned.  

With compliments,

Keith