Faculty Involvement and the Moral Dimension of History

Will the subjects we debate in education still be relevant a century from now? There are enduring controversies and tensions in education that continue even today.

Jonathan Zimmerman is a professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania and also the author of a number of books in the field of Education History. His latest work is Whose America?: Culture Wars in the Public Schools, and he is also the author of The Amateur Hour: A History of College Teaching in America. 

Jonathan and Greg discuss the dichotomy between research and teaching in the Higher Education system, unravel the implications of student evaluations, the necessity for peer review of teaching, and how the dynamics of teaching and learning, as relationship-based activities, leave a lasting impact on lives.

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

Episode Quotes:

What is the most effective way of teaching?

20:56: There's been a growing body of research about effective teaching, and there's a pretty strong and robust consensus about what's most effective, and the most effective teaching is the teaching that engages people in their own learning, right? It creates activities that very specifically require the students to ask and answer questions in the way the discipline does. So, the best history course makes people behave like historians, and the best chemistry course makes people behave like chemists. Now, if they've been socialized to sit there and do not a whole lot, they may bridle at that. That's life. Maybe I would, too, if I were them. But look, if our knowledge and professional authority means anything, it means that we know some things they don't, right? And one of the things we know is that they'll learn more if they are engaged in the questions of the discipline. And I think there are many good ways to do that, by the way.

Is education always political?

02:20: We're always going to have controversies around education because education is where we decide who we are. Education is the realm in which the people of a nation decide what the nation means and where they stand vis-à-vis it. So it's always political, it's always contentious, and we will always argue about it.

History as a moral discipline

59:09: I think history is a moral discipline. That's what it is: a bunch of stories, but these stories are morality plays in a very real way. And when these institutions we work at started, it was taken for granted that the faculty were in the business of trying to make better people. That was just a prima facie assumption.

Why do we have to be in the same room?

30:13: Why do we have to be in the same room? And I ask that of my students all the time. And I tell them, if I am just going to talk to you, I think I could just be on a screen. There's got to be something else. There's got to be some exchange. There's got to be some activity. If I'm just going to draw at you, you might as well replace me with a computer, but I think that should be the question that every single faculty member is required to answer. And there are many good answers, but you shouldn't be able to evade the question. Why are we in the same room? That should be the question in the frontal lobes of everybody, because we don't have to be.

Show Links:

Recommended Resources:

• Mark Hopkins
• Madrasa
• David Riesman
• Clark Kerr
• Lawrence Summers
• Lies My Teacher Told Me
• Eric Hobsbawm
• John Dewey
• Bruce lenthall - Center for Teaching & Learning

Guest Profile:

• Faculty Profile at Penn GSE
• Faculty Profile at Penn Arts & Sciences

His Work:

• Whose America?: Culture Wars in the Public Schools
• Free Speech: And Why You Should Give a Damn
• The Amateur Hour: A History of College Teaching in America
• The Case for Contention: Teaching Controversial Issues in American Schools
• Too Hot to Handle: A Global History of Sex Education
• Campus Politics: What Everyone Needs to Know
• Small Wonder: The Little Red Schoolhouse in History and Memory
• Innocents Abroad: American Teachers in the American Century
• Distilling Democracy: Alcohol Education in America's Public Schools, 1880-1925