Why Learn History When Its Already On Your Phone

Download or read book Why Learn History (When It’s Already on Your Phone) written by Sam Wineburg and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2018-09-17 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A look at how to teach history in the age of easily accessible—but not always reliable—information. Let’s start with two truths about our era that are so inescapable as to have become clichés: We are surrounded by more readily available information than ever before. And a huge percent of it is inaccurate. Some of the bad info is well-meaning but ignorant. Some of it is deliberately deceptive. All of it is pernicious. With the Internet at our fingertips, what’s a teacher of history to do? In Why Learn History (When It’s Already on Your Phone), professor Sam Wineburg has the answers, beginning with this: We can’t stick to the same old read-the-chapter-answer-the-question snoozefest. If we want to educate citizens who can separate fact from fake, we have to equip them with new tools. Historical thinking, Wineburg shows, has nothing to do with the ability to memorize facts. Instead, it’s an orientation to the world that cultivates reasoned skepticism and counters our tendency to confirm our biases. Wineburg lays out a mine-filled landscape, but one that with care, attention, and awareness, we can learn to navigate. The future of the past may rest on our screens. But its fate rests in our hands. Praise for Why Learn History (When It’s Already on Your Phone) “If every K-12 teacher of history and social studies read just three chapters of this book—”Crazy for History,” “Changing History . . . One Classroom at a Time,” and “Why Google Can’t Save Us” —the ensuing transformation of our populace would save our democracy.” —James W. Lowen, author of Lies My Teacher Told Me and Teaching What Really Happened “A sobering and urgent report from the leading expert on how American history is taught in the nation’s schools. . . . A bracing, edifying, and vital book.” —Jill Lepore, New Yorker staff writer and author of These Truths “Wineburg is a true innovator who has thought more deeply about the relevance of history to the Internet—and vice versa—than any other scholar I know. Anyone interested in the uses and abuses of history today has a duty to read this book.” —Niall Ferguson, senior fellow, Hoover Institution, and author of The Ascent of Money and Civilization

Download or read book Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts written by Samuel S. Wineburg and published by Critical Perspectives on the P. This book was released on 2001 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Whether he is comparing how students and historians interpret documentary evidence or analyzing children's drawings, Wineburg's essays offer rough maps of how ordinary people think about the past and use it to understand the present. These essays acknowledge the role of collective memory in filtering what we learn in school and shaping our historical thinking.

Download or read book Reading Like a Historian written by Sam Wineburg and published by Teachers College Press. This book was released on 2015-04-26 with total page 169 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This practical resource shows you how to apply Sam Wineburgs highly acclaimed approach to teaching, "Reading Like a Historian," in your middle and high school classroom to increase academic literacy and spark students curiosity. Chapters cover key moments in American history, beginning with exploration and colonization and ending with the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Download or read book Positive Learning in the Age of Information written by Olga Zlatkin-Troitschanskaia and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-12-15 with total page 421 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While information and communication technology has a vast influence on our lives, little is understood about its effects on the way we learn. In the Age of Information, students – consciously or not – are learning in diverse formal and informal environments from a broad variety of sources, with scientific knowledge competing against unfounded assertions, and misinformation and biased data spreading through social and mass media. The Positive Learning in the Age of Information (PLATO) program illustrated by the contributions in this book unites outstanding and highly innovative expertise on the fundamentals of information processing and human learning to investigate a new paradigm of positive learning as a vital, morally and ethically oriented approach, which is of existential importance to maintaining the civilization standards of a modern society in the digital age.

Download or read book The Case for Contention written by Jonathan Zimmerman and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2017-04-24 with total page 129 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the fights about the teaching of evolution to the details of sex education, it may seem like American schools are hotbeds of controversy. But as Jonathan Zimmerman and Emily Robertson show in this insightful book, it is precisely because such topics are so inflammatory outside school walls that they are so commonly avoided within them. And this, they argue, is a tremendous disservice to our students. Armed with a detailed history of the development of American educational policy and norms and a clear philosophical analysis of the value of contention in public discourse, they show that one of the best things American schools should do is face controversial topics dead on, right in their classrooms. Zimmerman and Robertson highlight an aspect of American politics that we know all too well: We are terrible at having informed, reasonable debates. We opt instead to hurl insults and accusations at one another or, worse, sit in silence and privately ridicule the other side. Wouldn’t an educational system that focuses on how to have such debates in civil and mutually respectful ways improve our public culture and help us overcome the political impasses that plague us today? To realize such a system, the authors argue that we need to not only better prepare our educators for the teaching of hot-button issues, but also provide them the professional autonomy and legal protection to do so. And we need to know exactly what constitutes a controversy, which is itself a controversial issue. The existence of climate change, for instance, should not be subject to discussion in schools: scientists overwhelmingly agree that it exists. How we prioritize it against other needs, such as economic growth, however—that is worth a debate. With clarity and common-sense wisdom, Zimmerman and Robertson show that our squeamishness over controversy in the classroom has left our students woefully underserved as future citizens. But they also show that we can fix it: if we all just agree to disagree, in an atmosphere of mutual respect.

Download or read book History Lessons written by Dana Lindaman and published by The New Press. This book was released on 2006-07-04 with total page 433 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A “fascinating” look at what students in Russia, France, Iran, and other nations are taught about America (The New York Times Book Review). This “timely and important” book (History News Network) gives us a glimpse into classrooms across the globe, where opinions about the United States are first formed. History Lessons includes selections from textbooks and teaching materials used in Russia, France, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Cuba, Canada, and others, covering such events as the American Revolution, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Iran hostage crisis, and the Korean War—providing some alternative viewpoints on the history of the United States from the time of the Viking explorers to the post-Cold War era. By juxtaposing starkly contrasting versions of the historical events we take for granted, History Lessons affords us a sometimes hilarious, often sobering look at what the world thinks about America’s past. “A brilliant idea.” —Foreign Affairs

Download or read book Who Owns History? written by Eric Foner and published by Hill and Wang. This book was released on 2003-04-16 with total page 251 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A thought-provoking new book from one of America's finest historians "History," wrote James Baldwin, "does not refer merely, or even principally, to the past. On the contrary, the great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it within us, are unconsciously controlled by it in many ways, and history is literally present in all that we do." Rarely has Baldwin's insight been more forcefully confirmed than during the past few decades. History has become a matter of public controversy, as Americans clash over such things as museum presentations, the flying of the Confederate flag, or reparations for slavery. So whose history is being written? Who owns it? In Who Owns History?, Eric Foner proposes his answer to these and other questions about the historian's relationship to the world of the past and future. He reconsiders his own earlier ideas and those of the pathbreaking Richard Hofstadter. He also examines international changes during the past two decades--globalization, the collapse of the Soviet Union, the end of apartheid in South Africa--and their effects on historical consciousness. He concludes with considerations of the enduring, but often misunderstood, legacies of slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction. This is a provocative, even controversial, study of the reasons we care about history--or should.