{"id":724,"date":"2024-11-19T15:55:38","date_gmt":"2024-11-19T15:55:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/catherinedenial.org\/blog\/?p=724"},"modified":"2024-11-19T15:55:38","modified_gmt":"2024-11-19T15:55:38","slug":"getting-it-backwards","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/catherinedenial.org\/blog\/uncategorized\/getting-it-backwards\/","title":{"rendered":"Getting it Backwards"},"content":{"rendered":"

It\u2019s common for students to come into my history classes believing that arguments are things you come up with before<\/em> you do the research for a paper.\u00a0 For full-time historians, this is often baffling.<\/p>\n

Students come by this honestly\u2014it\u2019s usually something they were taught in high school. And high school teachers come by it honestly, too\u2014it\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

But this gets college-level students into one heck of a pickle.<\/p>\n

\"A<\/a>
Pickles by JESHOOTS from pexels.com<\/center><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

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<\/a>. Only then do we ask ourselves \u201cwhat can I say with reasonable confidence about this person \/ place \/ time \/ event?\u201d That\u2019s when an argument is born.<\/p>\n

But when students are taught it\u2019s correct and\/or efficient to come up with an argument first, they don\u2019t cast their net widely. They look for the sources that will prove the argument they\u2019ve decided upon. This means they\u2019ll 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\u2019ve been in class, and paid attention, and done the homework can still<\/em> end up arguing something that doesn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n

(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<\/em> argument supported by evidence, as they\u2019ve sometimes been taught, they have no conception of how broadly and deeply they should be researching a topic. If \u201cprove an argument\u201d is posited as goal, they justifiably think it\u2019s doable with a handful of sources (of any kind) that match their thesis.)<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve 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\u2019s swiftly followed by confusion \u2013 why were they taught the way they were?\u00a0 (Which opens up a whole other conversation altogether. . .)<\/p>\n

For many people I\u2019m stating the obvious here, and if you\u2019re 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\u2014and them past us in return. It\u2019s a situation that merits a lot of precision in language and a lot of compassion for everyone involved. I\u2019ll let you know how it goes with my next seminar in the spring.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It\u2019s 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.\u00a0 For full-time historians, this is often baffling. Students come by this honestly\u2014it\u2019s usually something they were taught in high school. And high school teachers come by it honestly, too\u2014it\u2019s often something they have to teach for students to do well on AP exams and in other forms of testing done under tight time…<\/p>\n

Read More Read More<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-724","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/catherinedenial.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/724","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/catherinedenial.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/catherinedenial.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/catherinedenial.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/catherinedenial.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=724"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/catherinedenial.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/724\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/catherinedenial.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=724"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/catherinedenial.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=724"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/catherinedenial.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=724"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}