It’s common for students to come into my history classes believing that arguments are things you come up with before you do the research for a paper.  For full-time historians, this is often baffling.

Students come by this honestly—it’s usually something they were taught in high school. And high school teachers come by it honestly, too—it’s often something they have to teach for students to do well on AP exams and in other forms of testing done under tight time constraints.

But this gets college-level students into one heck of a pickle.

Full-time historians know that our job is to sort through pieces of written, oral, and material culture and try our best to figure out what those pieces tell us about a given person, moment, or idea. We cast our net widely, reading all kinds of secondary sources from a variety of ideological, theoretical, and historiographical viewpoints to provide us with grounding and context, and commit ourselves to a thorough consideration of all the primary sources we can lay our hands on. Only then do we ask ourselves “what can I say with reasonable confidence about this person / place / time / event?” That’s when an argument is born.

But when students are taught it’s correct and/or efficient to come up with an argument first, they don’t cast their net widely. They look for the sources that will prove the argument they’ve decided upon. This means they’ll often reject sources that contradict their thesis, or complicate it, and that can lead to them arguing things that are absolutely and demonstrably off base. This is often confusing to their instructors, because even students who’ve been in class, and paid attention, and done the homework can still end up arguing something that doesn’t make sense. The culprit is their focus is on argument as the be all and end all of the project at hand, not the act of research and discovery itself.

(This is also the root of why so many students think they can write compelling arguments about topics that we know would take a decade to research. If they are focused on making any argument supported by evidence, as they’ve sometimes been taught, they have no conception of how broadly and deeply they should be researching a topic. If “prove an argument” is posited as goal, they justifiably think it’s doable with a handful of sources (of any kind) that match their thesis.)

I’ve started having conversations with my students about this. I ask them how they learned to write history papers in high school (if they did), and how they studied for AP (if they did), and what lessons they took away from those experiences. I then lay out what historians actually do, and every time it proves a revelation. And that’s swiftly followed by confusion – why were they taught the way they were?  (Which opens up a whole other conversation altogether. . .)

For many people I’m stating the obvious here, and if you’re an instructor who already figured all of this out, I doff my cap at you! But I know that a lot of us have been talking past our students—and them past us in return. It’s a situation that merits a lot of precision in language and a lot of compassion for everyone involved. I’ll let you know how it goes with my next seminar in the spring.