History from the Bottom Up: On Reproducing Professional Culture in Graduate Education

Abstract

When the four of us-graduate student editorial assistants who had helped develop and tabulate the]AH survey-were asked to contribute an essay on the results, we resolved to make ours a collaborative project. With no experience or models in our graduate training for collaboration, we began at Dot's home on the East Fork of the White River: we brainstormed; we shut ourselves up in a room and took turns at the keyboard; we looked wistfully at our spouses fishing on the riverbank; we took home parts we hated and rewrote them; and we argued. Individually, we caved in on some points and stood firm on others. We emerged with our first draft, somewhat chastened but even more committed to collaborative effort. Although the experiences and goals that brought us to graduate school were widely divergent, we discovered common ground in our shared experiences, misgivings, and frustrations in graduate school. But before we speak from that common ground, we want to describe our separate paths to graduate school.

Rethinking the Scholarly

“…In denying full academic esteem to a vast swathe of professional endeavour, this hierarchic model of scholarship has also ensured that teaching has been relegated to the status of a secondary activity, under-represented in the discipline's structures of communication, recognition and reward -in its conferences, journals, prizes and fellowships, indeed, in its whole public discourse (Thelen, 1994). There are many 'structural' factors at work here, not least institutional reward systems, research funding opportunities, and a system of graduate training in which students train intensively as research scholars, but which offers little incentive to become equally serious about the theory and practice of disciplinary teaching and learning (see Berry et al, 1994;Brooks, 2000;Diamond and Adam, 2004). Whatever the causes, and these lie at many interconnecting levels of higher education policy and culture, the resultant separation between teaching and dominant conceptions of scholarship has ensured that there is little incentive for historians interested in pedagogic issues to research their classroom practices or, still less, investigate student learning in a serious fashion.…”