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History Alive! An Alternative Programfor Engaging Diverse LearnersBert BowerPublished online: 30 Jan 2008.

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History Alive!An Alternative Program

for Engaging Diverse Learnersby Bert Bower

A group of innovative California so­cial studies teachers, representing a dozenschools throughout the state, found that,during the late 1980s and early 1990s, theirstudents were coming from ever more di­verse backgrounds-ethnically, culturally,linguistically, and academically. Workingin isolation, these teachers began to createinteractive teaching strategies designed toreach their diverse student populations.They discovered that when history is taughtusing an active, student-centered approach,students not only remember their lessonsbut truly appreciate how history affects theirown lives.

These experiences prompted the teach­ers to form Teachers' Curriculum Institute(TCI) in 1989.The goal ofTCI was to createa series of innovative instructional practicesthat allow students with diverse learningstyles to "experience" history in the class­room/ rather than learn it in a traditionalenvironment where lecture, recitation, andseatwork predominate.

TCI aims to spread these innovativeyet practical strategies, known as the His­tory Alive! (Bower, Lobdell, and Swenson

1994) approach, to a much larger group ofsocial studies teachers. Since its inception,teachers at TCI have trained hundreds oftheir colleagues to apply the approach intheir own classrooms.

TENETS OF THE ApPROACH

TCI teachers carefully and thought­fully combined educational research andtheory with the realities of classroom teach­ing. Three tenets underlie every piece ofcurriculum they develop:

1. Studentshave different learning styles.Gardner (1983/x), argued that new ways oflooking at human intelligence must be de­veloped:

In my view , if we are toencompass adequately the realm ofhuman cognition, it is necessary toinclude afar wider andmore universalsetofcompetencies than hasordinarilybeen considered. . . . I have formulateda definition of what I call an'intelligence./ An intelligence is theability to solve problems, or to createproducts, thatare valued withinoneormore cultural settings.

Bert Bower taught high school social studies for eightyears and has written a series ofsocial studies

texts. In 1990 he received his doctorate in socialstudies education from Stanford University. As

co-founder and Executive Director ofTC!, he hashelped create an organization that facilitates

dynamic approaches to teaching history.

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Gardner argued that the human mindhas at least seven relatively autonomoushuman intellectual competencies-linguis­tic, logical/mathematical, musical, visual/spatial, bodily/kinesthetic, interpersonal,and intrapersonal. Each HistoryAlive!activ­ity taps into as many of these intelligencesas possible.

2.Cooperative interaction increases learn­ing. Researchers report that cooperativegroupwork promotes higher studentachievement and productivity than eithercompetitive or individualistic teachingmethods (johnsonand]ohnson 1981).How­ever, Cohen (1986) discovered that whenstudents perform a collective task, some aremore influential than others. She developeda type of cooperative groupwork that mini­mizes status inequities among students andhas resulted in more equitable group inter­action and learning gains (Bower 1990).

3.All studentscanlearn. The third tenetbehind the History Alive! approach is theidea of the spiral curriculum. Championedby educational theorist Jerome Bruner in hislandmark book The Process of Education(1960), this is the belief that all students canlearn if a teacher shows them how to thinkand discover knowledge for themselves.Each HistoryAlive!activity carefully spiralsfrom the basic to the more advanced, thusgiving all students the building blocks forhigher-order thinking.

Each activity is structured to lead stu­dents through a step-by-step process of self­discovery. Students first explore a historicevent, idea, or personality by using elemen­tal cognitive skills-observation, descrip­tion, identification, recall-and are thenchallenged to use ever higher levels of cog­nition such as synthesis, application, andinterpretation.This enables students from avariety of academic levels to learn togethereffectively and gives all students the cogni­tive building blocks they require to reachwhat Newmann, Onosko, and Stevenson

(1990) called higher-order thinking.Defined broadly, higher-order think­

ing is the challenged and expanded use ofthe mind; lower-order thinking is the rou­tine, mechanistic application of the mind.Lower-order and higher-order thinkingskills can be carefully dovetailed into oneanother to form a seamless series of stepsthat challenge students to learn more byprogressing from the fundamental to thesophisticated. By leading students throughthis step-by-step process of self-discovery,teachers ensure that students from a varietyof academic levels will have the conceptualinformation necessary to answer complexquestions.

The teachers at TCI developed a seriesof practical classroom strategies that en­compass these three fundamental beliefs.These strategies will be illustrated by themethods that six teachers used to adaptthem to their own classrooms.

PROBLEM-SoLVING GROUPWORK

During problem-solving groupworktasks, students are arranged in groups char­acterized by individuals of heterogenousrace, ethnicity, gender, and perceived aca­demic ability to work on challengingprojects. These projects-preparing a dra­matization of a historical episode or draw­ing a visual metaphor to represent a histori­cal period-require the use of multiple abili­ties. In this way each student can contributesomething to the group effort. Debra, a sev­enth-grade world history teacher, utilizedthis strategy to teach her students about theCrusades.

Debra was trained in cooperativelearning techniques championed by vari­ous researchers (Kagan 1989; Slavin 1983;Johnson and Johnson 1975). She utilizedthese techniques in her classroom by put­ting her students in heterogeneous groups,giving them challenging tasks, assigningroles, promoting positive interdependence,

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and allowing for both group and individualaccountability. She discovered, however,that when students worked together in agroup,one or two students seemed to domi­nate group interaction. She was determinedto find a way to get all of her studentsinvolved.

Debra turned to the research of Cohen(1986), who discovered that when studentswork together on a collective task, an un­equal status orderemerges.High-status stu­dents tend to dominate group interaction,leaving their low-status peers out of theloop. To overcome these status problems,Cohen advocated creating academic tasksthat require the use of a wide range ofabilities. She recommended telling studentsthat while no individual will be good at allthese abilities, everyone will be good in atleast one .

Debra created a multiple-abilitygroupwork task revolving around the Cru­sades. Each group was to create a multime­dia presentation about a group affected bythe Crusades, including Byzantine Jews,European Christians, and Muslims. Thepresentation required the students to worktogether in selecting appropriate music andvisual aids, as well as in writing a script forthe presentation. Because the task requiredthe use of many different skills, each groupmember would have something of value tocontribute. Furthermore, most of Gardner'sseven intelligences are utilized by studentsas they create their multimedia presenta­tion. For example, they use visual/spatialintelligence when they pick images repre­senting their view of the Crusades, musicalintelligence when they incorporate song,bodily /kinesthetic when they act out eachscene, and interpersonal as they work onthe presentation together.

"As students prepared for the presen­tations, I noticed that the high-status stu­dents no longer dominated the discussionand that the students worked together more

equitably," said Debra . "Students createdcomplex multimedia presentations includ­ing choreographed sword fights with intri­cate commentary and television programscomplete with clever commercials. Due tothe unique experience, they learned andremembered the details of the Crusades allyear long. "

INTERACTIVE SLIDE LECTURE

This strategy turns lecturing into adynamic experience.Students view, touch,interpret, and act out historic images thatare projected onto a large screen in front ofthe classroom. Kelly, a high school U.S.history teacher, found the technique a greatway to reach his students.

The first time Kelly lectured aboutturn-of-the-century European immigration,his students were unimpressed with hiscareful organization of materials and use offamily anecdotes to enhance the lectures.The next year he taught the same materialvia an interactive slide lecture. With an old35mm camera and a set of close-up lenses,he made slides of 10 different aspects ofEuropean immigration.

To prepare for the lecture, Kellychanged his students' seating arrangementso that each student could see both the slidescreen and the overhead projection screen.A space was left in the front of the class­room to allow students to touch the slidescreen. The lesson began with an image ofimmigrants leaving a crowded dock in Eu­rope.

"That first slide was like magic," Kellysaid. "I asked students to describe every­thing they saw in the picture and then tostep into the slide and act out what theythought was happening." Kelly pretendedto have a microphone in his hand as heinterviewed his students. "Why are youleaving? What do you hope to gain inAmerica? How do you feel about this?" Hearranged his questions in increasing com-

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plexity, putting into action Bruner's (1960)notion of the spiral curriculum. With theslide as a prop and the semidark room forcover, Kelly's students were soon able toanswer his questions in great detail andwith appropriate humor.

When the five-minute role-play wasover, Kelly asked students to list reasonsimmigrants left Europe. Several hands shotup, and Kelly was immersed in a rich dis­cussion. He listed more than 15substantivereasons for immigration on the overheadprojector, the majoritysupplied by students.

Kelly continued to use slides in thisinteractive way for the rest of the immigra­tion lesson. For example, the students expe­rienced the immigrants' transatlantic jour­ney by huddling on the ground in front of aslide of a steerage deck as Kelly moved theprojector back and forth like a rocking ship.The experience continued with a slide ofthe main hall at Ellis Island. The studentssat on chairs in front of the slide, eachstudent wearing a sign with a differentforeign name printed on it. Kelly played therole of an immigration officer, Anglicizingthe students' names as they were processed.

By the end of the lesson, Kelly's stu­dents had vicariously experienced the im­migrant condition. Rather than relyingsolely on linguistic input, the lesson chal­lenged students to use their visual!spatial,bodily /kinesthetic, interpersonal, andintrapersonal intelligencesas well .This gaveall of his students access to the concept ofimmigration and motivated them to learnmore; after the lesson, the class read a shortplay Kelly had written about his family'simmigration history and even shared theirown families' stories. "1was amazed at howdifferently students reacted to this lessoncompared to my lesson the year before. Ifyou give students a chance to think forthemselves and to go back in time to relivea bit of history, you are going to create amuch more powerful learning experience."

SociAl STUDIES SKILLS

In this strategy, students work in pairsto complete fast-paced, skill-oriented taskssuch as mapping, categorizing, interpret­ing political cartoons, graphing, identifyingperspectives, and analyzing primarysources. The teacher begins an activity bybriefly modeling the skill and then chal­lenging students to practice that skill againand again. Students receive immediate feed­back as they work. Terry, a seventh-gradeworld history teacher, adapted the strategyto teach his students about the Maya calen­dar.

Terry is passionate about teaching his­tory---especially the often-ignoredhistoriesof Africa, Asia, and Latin America. But aftera lecture and a worksheet about the Mayacalendar failed to ignite his students' inter­est in ancient Latin America, he experi­mented with a new method of presentingthe materials.

The next time Terry taught about thescientific accomplishments of the Maya, hetold his students how the Maya had usedtheir knowledge of astronomy to create theircalendar. To begin the activity he dividedhis students into pairs and gave each pair acopy of a Maya calendar.The students wereinstructed to cut out the two wheels of thecalendar and attach them with push pins.Terry demonstrated how to line up the daysof the weeks with the numbers to identifythe first days of the Maya calendar: 1 Imix,2 Ik, 3 Akbal, 4 Kan.

"It was an exciting moment when mystudents understood how the two wheelsfunctioned together to calculate a date,"Terry said. "Many students learned the skillquickly and were ready to apply it. Othersneeded a bit more guidance."

Once the students felt comfortablewiththe calendar, Terry devised a method forgiving immediate feedback both to studentswho learned to use the calendar quickly andto those who needed more help. He put a

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Conventional

teaching reaches

fewer and fewerstudents each year.

series of word problems on colored 3-by-5­inch squares. Blue cards challenged stu­dents to make simplecalculations and greencards contained more difficult problems.Student pairs received immediatefeedback and earned points foreach problem they solvedcorrectly. If they an-swered incorrectly,they were allowed tocontinue working todiscover the correctanswer. Terry foundthatby leading his stu­dents through thisstep-by-step process ofself-discovery, he wasputting Bruner's notionof the spiral curriculumin action and reaching allof his students.

The lesson gave students theopportunity to use and refine their socialstudies skills while learning about the an­cient Maya . It incorporated interpersonal,logical!mathematical, visual!spatial, andlinguistic intelligencesso that students witha wide range of abilities could have accessto the cultural concepts. Terry's studentswalked away with a new appreciation forthe scientific contributions the Maya madein North America. It was, in Terry's words,"a moment of classroom magic."

EXPERIENTIAL ExERCISES

This strategy taps into intra personaland bodily-kinesthetic intelligences to al­low students to feel the drama of the past.Usually one class period in length, experi­ential exercises recreate historical moments,events, and circumstances. Students areplaced in historical situations-a trench onthe western front in 1918 or a turn-of-the­century assembly line-and react to theseexperiences as if they were individuals ofthe time . Connie, an eighth-grade U.S. his-

tory teacher, used an experiential exerciseto educate her students about the realities ofthe civil rights movement.

Connie found that her students re­mained largely indifferent to the

actions of the civil rights work­ers by simply reading and

talking about the period.Therefore, she created an

experiential exercisethat would bring to lifealunchcounter"sit-in"similar to those held inthe South during theearly 1960s.

On the day of thesit-in, students took onelook at the transformed

classroom and knew theywere in for a different learn­

ing experience. A row of deskshad become the lunchcounter, com­

plete with napkins and utensils; the rest ofthe desks formed a small jail in one comer.On the wall near the lunch counter hung asign reading Whites Only.

Students were randomly given a rolecard that explained the part they were toplay in the sit-in . The roles included policeofficers, African-American nonviolent pro­testers, and restaurant personnel. Police of­ficers, for example, were told to upholdsegregation laws by arresting any African­American nonviolent protesters. The non­violent protesters were told to react withoutforce, and the restaurant personnel were torefuse service to any African-American whosat at the lunch counter.

Once students understood their roles,Connie let the role-play begin. Connie be­came the on-the-scene reporter, intermit­tently asking various characters to react tothe goings-on. She was struck by the seri­ousness of her students. "When I asked anumber of the characters how they werefeeling orwhy they thought this protestwas

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occurring, their answers were, for the mostpart, historically accurate."

Within 20 minutes the jail was full ofprotesters, and emotions were running high.Connie stopped the activity to discuss whathad happened and connect the experienceto history. "Most of my students couldn'twait to share their reactions," said Connie."Many recognized the depth of convictionit took for activists to commit to nonviolentprotest in the face of hostility and physicalviolence. Itwas a joy to wa tch them learn somuch in such a short time ."

REsPONSE GROUPS

Response groups enrich classroomdiscussion and promote critical thinking.They are structured with the spiral curricu­lum in mind, giving students the carefullysequenced steps they need for success withhigher-order thinking questions. Groups ofstudents receive historical information, viewcompelling images, read primary sources,listen to music, and then discuss provoca­tive questions about the material. After thesmall-group discussions, presenters fromeach group share findings with the class tostimulate whole-class discussion. Diana, amiddle-school teacher, used the responsegroup strategy to educate her class aboutwomen's rights.

Diana, who is committed to integrat­ing women's issues into her classes, as­signed her students to read the Declarationof Sentiments and discuss the movementfor women's rights in the late 1800s. Shediscovered, however, that she dominatedthe class discussion because her studentsknew too little to discuss the subject intelli­gently and were afraid of peer reaction ifthey attempted to answer her probing ques­tions.

To remedy the situation, Dianashowed slides of five leading women re­formers while relating detailed informationabout each one . She then projected a list of

sexist quotations from the time period. Shechallenged the students to respond as ifthey were one of the reformers.

Diana then placed the students in het­erogeneous ability groups of three and pro­jected a slide showing a portion of the Dec­laration of Sentiments for the groups toread. Each group was asked to discuss thisquestion: To what degree has this grievancebeen redressed today? To represent theiranswers, groups placed a visual marker foreach grievance on a spectrum labeled Griev­anceNot Addressed and Grievance Fully Ad­dressed at either end. Students used a two­page fact sheet on women in the UnitedStates today to guide their discussion.

The activity was successful becausestudents were first exposed to the mainideas of the period and then had time tograpple with the material in groups. Teach­ers who have used this activity report thattheir students are motivated by the issues ofjustice and gender roles, and as a result tendto have heated class discussions about cur­rent successes and failures at redressing theperceived wrongs outlined at Seneca Falls.Students are also eager to participate inclass discussion because they have learnedabout the subject through several differentintelligences: visual/spatial with slides,intrapersonal with students drawing fromtheir own experiences with sexism, and in­terpersonal as students worked in groups.

The resulting discussion was immedi­ate and animated. Students were anxious toshare their ideas. Presenters respectfullychallenged one another's arguments, andstudents were exposed to a rich array ofideas and beliefs.

INTERACTIVE WRmNG

To write forcefully and in detail abouthistory, students need interactive experi­ences about which to write. Mary, a highschool U.S. history teacher, taught her stu­dents to write about Chinese immigration

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to the United States at the turn of the cen­tury. The activity taps into students' mul­tiple intelligences so that alliearners-eventhose with less developed linguistic skills­are able to perform the activity because itincludes visuals, movement, intrapersonalreflection and empathy, and interpersonalcommunication.

Mary began the lesson by telling herstudents they would write a poem about theChinese immigrant experience. The poemwould focus on the long wait many had atthe detention center on Angel Island in SanFrancisco Bay.Predictably, students greetedthis request with statements such as "I can'twrite poetry," or "How are we supposed toknow what it was like for Chinese immi­grants way back then?" Mary designed alesson to overcome their resistance.

To begin the activity, students stoodin pairs next to a wall covered with pieces ofbutcher paper. The students viewed slidesof Chinese immigration, while listening toMary detail the history of the immigrants inCalifornia. While looking at a slide of theChinese being processed on Angel Island,they heard primary source accounts of lifein the detention center. Mary asked herstudents to place themselves in the shoes ofthe immigrants and try to reflect their feel­ings in the poetry they would write. Afterhearing each account, they wrote severallines of poetry on the butcher paper, muchas the Chinese themselves wrote on thewalls of Angel Island's barracks.

Mary encouraged students to sharetheir poetry with the rest of the class. Afterstudents read their own verses, Mary read

poetry that was written by Chinese immi­grants who were on Angel Island. Studentssaw several more slides of life on the islandand wrote lines of poetry for each scene.After viewing and writing about the slides,students walked past the poem-coveredwalls, reading the completed poems of theirclassmates.

The students were then ready to cre­ate a more refined poem based on the slidesthey had seen and the poems of the Chineseimmigrants, as well as their own poetry andthat of their peers. Students often wroteinsightful, moving poems such as this stanzacomposed by a middle-school student:

I came to America tofind hope.But I am now in afog covered prison,unsureofwhat tomorrow will bring.Who can pity my loneliness?

STRATEGIES ENGAGl MORE LEARNERS

The six strategies presented here pro­vide innovative,practical alternatives to con­ventional history teaching. Most teachersusing the HistoryAlive! approach have dis­covered that conventional teaching reachesfewer and fewer students each year. Theyreport that changes among their students­shortened attention spans, lack of parentalinvolvement, time-consuming jobs, teenpregnancy, substance abuse, and negativepeer pressure-are making it increasinglydifficult to teach all their students. But bycreating curricular materials that focus onthe multiple intelligences, cooperative in­teraction, and careful spiraling of learningobjectives, teachers are able to actively en­gage a much wider group of students.

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REFERENCES

Bower, B., J. Lobdell, and L. Swenson. 1994. Historyalive! Engagingall learners in the diverse classroom.New York: Addison-Wesley PublishingCompany.

Bower, B.1990.Theeffect ofamultiple ability treatment onstatus and learning in the cooperative social studiesclassroom. Ann Arbor: University MicrofilmsInternational.

Bruner, J. 1960. The process of education. Cambridge,Mass. : Harvard University Press .

Cohen, E. 1986. Designing groupwork: Strategies for theheterogeneous classroom. New York: TeachersCollege Press .

Gardner, H. 1985.Framesofmind:Thetheory ofmultipleintelligences. New York: Basic Books.

Johnson, D.,and RJohnson.1981.Effectsofcooperativeand individualistic learning experiences oninterethnic interaction. Journal of EducationalPsychology 73(3): 444-49.

Johnson, D., and R Johnson.1975. Learning together andalone. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall .

Kagan, S.1989.Cooperative learning resourcesforteachers.San Juan Capistrano, Calif. : Resources forTeachers, Inc.

Newmann, F.,J. Onosko, and R Stevenson. 1990.Staffdevelopment for higher-order thinking: Asynthesis of practical wisdom. Journal of StaffDevelopment 11(3): 48-55.

Slavin, R 1983. Cooperative learning. New York:Longman Inc.

Since 1989 Teachers' Curriculum Institute has conductedhundreds of workshops and 20 week-long summer institutes totrain teachers in these six strategies, as well as in other innovativeteaching methods, such as using interactive student notebooks,creating a tolerant, cooperative classroom, and assessing withperformance-based activities. Over 200 districts throughout Cali­fornia and other states have adopted the program. For more infor­mation, write to TCI, 201 San Antonio Circle, Suite #105, MountainView, CA 94040.

© KappaDelta PI

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