Using Religion to Teach History Teachers

The teaching of religion and religious history is something that few teachers are prepared to do in the secondary schools.  This presentation will attempt to address how one professor bridges that gap by working with a group of history majors, pre-service social studies teachers, and high school history teachers on a project in which they are examining the development of perspective and contextualization (or empathy as the British scholars call it) using primary sources.  While there is nothing unique about examining primary sources or "sourcing" history and establishing historical thinking, the twist on this is that these students are using reports of visions and cures from a nineteenth century Irish pilgrimage as their common collection of sources.  By working with such tentative and subjective evidence, the researchers (in this case students, future teachers, and current teachers) are forced not only to uncover the context and the biases of the cured person, the editor, or other "filters" of the cure story (such as the parish priest), but also serves to teach the aspiring
historian/history teacher the roles that their own contexts and biases play
in their ability to interpret sources.  Thus religion is the foundation for teaching them how to inform their own students about being critical readers and thoughtful historians.