Making Sense of the Past: Learning to Think and Teach Like a Historian

Making Sense of the Past: Learning to Think and Teach Like a Historian is a crosslisted Cognitive Science/Social Science class taught by Laura Wenk and Jim Wald.

Course Description
Although many of us have learned history as a conglomeration of facts, dates, and key figures, for professional historians it is a way of knowing, a method for developing an understanding about the relationships of peoples and events in the past. In this course, we engage in studying what is intrinsic to historical thinking and how it might be taught. We do so by engaging in creating historical knowledge using local primary documents and artifacts and by reading cognitive psychology literature on the mental processes historians use. Students complete a local history project, reflect on the thinking involved and on the ways in which such a project could be used in schools.

Learning Goals

 * Project-based
 * Reading