Can “Traditional” Historical Thinking Promote Social Responsibility?

This presentation considers the strengths and weaknesses of attempting to foster civic engagement in the classroom through an upper-division course in British History.  The course, entitled “Social Responses to Poverty,” was designed to introduce students to British, generally English, responses to poverty from the 17^th century to the 21^st century.   Yet rather than being solely a historical introduction to the changing construction of poverty and responses to alleviating suffering, the course highlighted civic engagement as students worked collectively to apply practical reasoning skills as they developed an interpretation of a historical problem and shared their interpretation with the public.  

Challenges within the course included designing projects that were aimed at an audience “outside the academy,” encouraging non-history majors to take the course (and then finding reading assignments and avenues to bring them up to speed on the topics), and encouraging students, not yet enrolled in the course, that poverty, and not just “the war on terror,” is a subject worth considering in the 21^st century.  Strengths of the course included working to cultivate the intellectual skills and habits of mind necessary for positive engagement in a civil society, and giving the students the opportunity to consider and share the applicability of history beyond the classroom.