My response to a Twitter colleague wondering how to improve a wiki-based critical examination of history in his classes at an international school.
http://education.change.org/blog/view/more_on_fighting_bias_in_history_textbooks
Clay,
I come more from the "applied" philosophical side of curriculum planning. It seems many of the comments here touch on but don't explicitly note that students can easily confuse different modes of expression/purposes of activity in developing skills around critique and interpretation.
Students may think they are exerting their opinion when invited to wiki, or they may think they are blogging, mixing their stories with analytical critique in an attempt to express and highlight a point of view. If this is the purpose, collecting a lot of balancing views, then it may be successful instructionally to open their minds about possible interpretations, but it might not help them distinguish between modes of analysis, critique, opinion, etc.
Maybe a bird's-eye review of the different modes of investigating and interpreting human history might be helpful, so students begin to know what types of skills they are developing. There are many types, and many of them are distinct, even apparently contradictory, so THEY (various modes of interpreting and assessing history and the human condition), if learned, end up adding another level of expansion and balance to learning.
Story, especially good fiction, is an excellent way to bring forth a truth about the human condition, but, of course, this does not mean the story empirically happened. Being able to distinguish and understand the importance/value of empirical verification AND other forms/mode of assessing, communicating, and describing human reality in all its facets requires knowing that there are different modes, what they look like, and what their purposes are. John Cheever's fiction is an excellent example. Much of his rich text and illuminating struggle in his writing was generated out of his own closeted bisexuality and the tensions it caused within him between personal desire and social approval.
I found this confusion over what I call "modes of interpretation" (including evaluation) all the time in teaching teachers at a university. Often conversation would veer from "Those are the facts" to "It's my opinion; it can't be right or wrong." To this I typically responded, "Facts come from human interpretation and as such are prone to error and revision" and "If you hold a racist opinion and it restricts how you teach and honor a student of color, from a learning perspective, it IS wrong."
The key here is understanding the fullest range of interactive effects that occur both within and outside of one's own thinking and person. If there is one major practical barrier to developing a vital public intellectualism it is unwitting egoism, the extension of a (necessarily constructed and provisional) "self" on to society and on to eternity.
Anything that can be done to perturb that and challenge students to contrast and create beyond a simple association of self with world will likely be quite beneficial.
