Teaching Writing in History Classes

This is the first post of what I hope will be many posts where I ruminate on the experience of teaching writing in history classes. I find myself thinking about this topic a lot, and I know that others also think about it a lot, and yet I find that the published scholarship on this topic is fairly small. So I plan to write a series of blog posts where I post provocations, and I would love to get some discussion going about ways forward for teaching writing in history classes.

So, some background on my experiences with teaching writing in history classes. At present, I teach two distinct classes per semester: one freshman-level naval history class, and one upper-level class of some stripe. Sometimes it’s a content class, like American maritime history. But I’ve also been teaching in our majors seminar sequence. All history majors here have to take three seminars: one methods class as a sophomore, one methods class as a junior, and then as seniors either a class where they write an original research paper, or a class where they read deeply in a particular historiography and then write about that. So far I’ve taught the sophomore and junior level. Next year I’ll be teaching the senior level.

In all of these classes, both my freshman naval history and the upper-level classes, the expectation in my department is that the students do a reasonable amount of writing–something like 15 pages over the course of the semester. It’s a constant point of discussion in our department about how much time we should be spending on teaching students the mechanics of writing.

All history professors recognize that history is a writing-intensive discipline. (That statement seems a little disingenuous, to be honest: what discipline isn’t writing-intensive, if by that denominator we mean that we expect our students to be able to communicate effectively?) But I think many history professors I interact with (both at my own institution and elsewhere) bristle a little at the idea that we should have to spend a lot of time teaching students how to write. What did they do for their whole pre-college education, if not learn how to write? Why does it fall to history instructors to teach writing when the English department is right there? I’ll confess to having many of these thoughts myself.

The reality, though, is that if students in my history class are falling short of writing in the way that I think they ought to be able to, then I need to teach them how to do it. So I began searching for insights from the scholarship of teaching and learning, and I’ve been surprised at how little published scholarship I’ve found about the practice of teaching writing in college history classes. It may very well be that I’ve just missed an entire portion of SOTL literature—if that’s the case, I hope someone will point the way in the comments.

I’ve found a fair number of ideas for one-off assignments or even big ideas like unessays (which I adopted a while ago) as ways to help students communicate their ideas, but I’ve found very little about the big picture of we’re actually trying to do when we ask students to write in a history class. There are lots of great books about how to think about historical research and writing, but those books don’t address the pedagogy of history writing in the way that I was looking for.

Somewhere along the way, I ran across a book called Naming What We Know: Threshold Concepts of Writing Studies, a volume edited by Linda Adler-Kassner and Elizabeth Wardle. That book has absolutely transformed my thinking about writing and about how we might think more coherently about writing across an entire college history curriculum.

So to begin my thinking about teaching history writing, I’m going to post about some of the provocations I’ve encountered in that book, and I hope we can have a conversation about what it looks like to teach our history students to write. In particular, I’m really interested in talking about the distinctions between our expectations for students in core/general education history classes v. our history majors. What kinds of writing and what kinds of instruction should we be giving our majors that differs from our general education students? How and why do we teach history students how to write in the discipline knowing that most of our students will not go on to be professional historians? These are the kinds of questions I’m hoping to talk through.

These days, blogs are rather passé, and Substacks are where it’s at. So I’ve started a Substack, and I hope you’ll follow me over there. The rest of my musings will likely go up over there.