Book Reviews

Abstract

1997). Doing History: Inves figating With Children in Elements y and Middle Schools. Mahwah N$: Lawrence Erlbaurn Associates. 191 pages, paperback, ISBN 10-8058-804G2 Review by PETER SEIXAS, Faculty of Education, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC V6T 124.Unlike historians (indeed, unlike any researchers in h e humanities), educational researchers have the responsibility to thinlc about haw the fruits of their work will translate into practice. A recent TRSE symposium addressd that msponsibility in respect to research on teaching and leaming history (Barton et aI,, 1996). What are the mechanisms, the participants ask& through w h i c h research on history education can be brought into sustained and fruitful dialogue with policy and teaching? Enter Levstik and Barton with Doing Hkfo y: an exemplary review of research on teaching and learning history. The volume is aimed not at helping academics to define new research projects, but at assisting teachers to improve their teaching of history. In other words, w e have here two =searchers who have put their academic money where heir mouths are, Their achievement, Ddng Histom, is the most important volume for teachers, on teaching and learning history, to be published in North America since Holt's (1990) Thinking Historicdiy. And while it is the first to utilize the outpouring of research which has occured since that date, Levstik and Barton also draw extensively from the work of the teachers whose classrooms they have visited. Rch with voices f mm the schools, the volume thus reads as a conversation among teachers, students and researchers.A Theoretical Orientation The first thee chapters lay out approaches to historical bowledge and cognitive theory which undergird the entiw work. History, PRvstik and Barton explain in the first chapter, tells us who we are and what we can become; it's about significant themes and questions; it is interpretive; it has a narrative structure; it is more than politics; and it is contmversial. Perhaps most importantly it reflects human diversity, including the powerless as well as the powerful. A coherent vision of history is reiterated throughout the vdume. Levstik and Barton advocate: Downloaded by [Wayne State University] at 22:16 26 November 2014Theory and Resmrch in Social Education shifting the focus of history instruction from an oversimplifid emphasis on 'progress'+ery day in every way we are getting better and W r -t o more indepth study of how groups and individuals now and in other times exercise power publicly and privately, how society deals with competing claims between order and protest and how political and social meanings are transmitted to individuals and groups-Ip*lESTheir definition of history is also informed by narrative theov and the recent linguistic and rhetorical turns in the philosophy of 'history. Yet, despite the potentially disabling impact of this literature, k s t i k and Barton keep the discussion safely away from the "edge of the cliff" which has given historians vertigo in the last decade (C...