Focusing on a course titled “History, Communities and Memory,” this article examines the course content, undergraduate and graduate student learning outcomes, and the pedagogical approaches employed throughout the semester. Using Akron’s engaging history and the portrayal of the city in public sites as a case study, the class serves as both an introduction to public history and to the interplay between history and memory. Arthur Chickering and Zelda Gamson’s seven principles for best practice inform the teaching methodologies discussed here, combined with a focus on critical thinking and civic engagement. The course content emphasizes how communities and historic sites present their history (or histories) and (following the work of Maurice Halbwachs) how memory operates simultaneously on both the individual level and the social one. The students employ Akron—especially its industrial past—to understand how the concepts and theories presented in the readings can be applied.
This is a short, somewhat eclectic listing of works by these authors that I have found helpful. Jo Blatti, "Public History and Oral History," The Journal of American History 77 (September 1990): 615-25; John Bodnar, Remaking America: Public Memory, Commemoration and Patriotism in the Twentieth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992); David Glassberg, "Public History and the Study of Memory," The Public Historian 18 (Spring 1996): 7-23; Dolores Hayden, The Power of Place: Urban Landscapes as Public History (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997); Edward Linenthal, Sacred Ground: Americans and Their Battlefields, 2nd ed. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993); Alessandro Portelli, The Death of Luigi Trastulli and Other Stories: Form and Meaning in Oral History (Albany: SUNY Press, 1990); Mike Wallace, Mickey Mouse History and Other Essays on American Memory (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1996); Jay Winter, Remembering War: The Great War Between Memory and History in the Twentieth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006).
2.
Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, Lewis A. Coser, trans. and ed (Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 1992 ).
3.
Steve Love and David Giffels, Wheels of Fortune: The Story of Rubber in Akron (Akron, OH: University of Akron Press, 1999); Frances McGovern, Written on the Hills: The Making of the Akron Landscape (Akron, OH: University of Akron Press, 1996); Joyce Dyer, Gum-Dipped: A Daughter Remembers Rubber Town (Akron, OH: University of Akron Press, 2003).
4.
David Thelen and Roy Rosenzweig, The Presence of the Past: The Popular Uses of History in American Life ( New York: Columbia University Press, 1998).
5.
The film is available online at the Akron area PBS Web site at http://westernreservepublicmedia.org/ vodshows/akron1v.htm
6.
Daniel Nelson, American Rubber Workers and Organized Labor: 1900-1941 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988); Bruce M. Meyer, The Once and Future Union: The Rise and Fall of the United Rubber Workers, 1935-1995 (Akron, OH: The University of Akron Press, 2002).
7.
Joseph J. Corn, "Tools, Technologies and Contexts: Interpreting the History of American Technics," in David Leon and Roy Rosenzweig, eds., History Museums in the United States: A Critical Assessment (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989), 237-61.
8.
See Glassberg, "Public History," 11.
9.
Steven Conn, Museums and American Intellectual Life: 1876-1926 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998); Edward Linenthal and Tom Englehardt, eds., History Wars: The Enola Gay and Other Battles for the American Past (New York: Holt, 1996).
10.
Arthur Chickering and Zelda Gamson, "Seven Principles for Good Practice in Undergraduate Education," AAHE Bulletin (March 1987): 3-7.
11.
See Charles C. Bonwell and James A. Eison, Active Learning: Creating Excitement in the Classroom, ASHE-ERIC Higher Education Report No. 1 (Washington, DC: George Washington University, School of Education and Human Development, 1991), iii.
12.
Robert B. Innes , Reconstructing Undergraduate Education: Using Learning Science to Design Effective Courses (Mahwah: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2004).
13.
David Edelson , "Learning-for-Use: A Framework for the Design of Technology-Supported Inquiry Activities," Journal of Research in Science Teaching38 (March 2001 ): 355-85.
Keith C. Barton and Linda S. Levstik, Teaching History for the Common Good (Mahwah: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2004), 17-18.
18.
Barton and Levstik, Teaching History for the Common Good, 36.
19.
Anthony E. Pattiz, "The Idea of History Teaching: Using Collingwood’s Idea of History to Promote Critical Thinking in the High School History Classroom," The History Teacher February 2004, paragraph 11, http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/ht/37.2/pattiz.html (29 Sep. 2009).
20.
Quoted in Ernest T. Pascarella and Patrick T. Terenzini, eds., How College Affects Students: Findings and Insights from Twenty Years of Research (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1991), 38. For specifics on the work of King and Kitchener, see "The Reflective Judgment Model: Twenty Years of Research on Epistemic Cognition," in Barbara K. Hofer and Paul R. Pintrich, eds., Personal Epistemology: The Psychology of Beliefs About Knowledge and Knowing (Mahwah: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2002), 37-62.
21.
Gaea Leinhardt , Catherine Stainton, Salim M. Virji, and Elizabeth Odoroff, "Learning to Reason in History: Mindlessness to Mindfulness," in Mario Carretero and James F. Voss, eds., Cognitive and Instructional Processes in History and the Social Sciences (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1994), 131-58, quote page 134.
22.
M. Anne Britt, Jean-François Rouet, Mara C. Georgi, and Charles A. Perfetti, "Learning from History Texts: From Causal Analysis to Argument Models," in Gaea Leinhardt, Isabel L. Beck, and Catherine Stainton, eds., Teaching and Learning in History (Mahwah: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1994), 47-84.
23.
David Pace, "Decoding the Reading of History: An Example of the Process," in David Pace and Joan Middendorf, eds., Decoding the Disciplines: Helping Students Learn Disciplinary Ways of Thinking: New Directions for Teaching and Learning, Number 98, Summer 2004 (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2004), 13-21.
24.
Peter J. Frederick, "Motivating Students by Active Learning in the History Classroom," in Alan Booth and Paul Hyland, eds., The Practice of University History Teaching (New York: Manchester University Press, 2000), 101-11.
25.
Wallace, Mickey Mouse History and Other Essays and Corn, "Tools, Technologies and Contexts: Interpreting the History of American Technics."
26.
Wallace, Mickey Mouse History and Other Essays, 84.
27.
Wallace, Mickey Mouse History and Other Essays, 90.
