In this session, we begin by exploring what it means to teach history methods. In particular, we discuss what “history methods” means beyond the mechanics of essay writing, pointing to some core historical thinking skills historians deploy in doing the analytical and narrative work of history. While historians have traditionally seen essay writing as the key vehicle for communicating historical analysis, increasingly scholars have embraced a variety of forms of scholarly communication. These new forms of research force the question that education scholars have been asking for many years—what does it mean to do history and how can we teach it? In other words, what are the methods of history? In this panel, we discuss some of the current debates and models around the question of “historical thinking skills” and identify a range of strategies that history instructors have utilized in the classroom to make our methods more explicit and to cultivate these skills among our students in ways that help them move from consumers to producers of history.

Following the 20-minute panel discussion, facilitators invite participants to join the conversation about history methods – what we do and how we do it? Informed by education research and the scholarship of teaching and learning, the workshop will focus on identifying the key historical thinking skills that historians deploy in doing the analytical and narrative work of our discipline. In particular, we are interested in thinking beyond the traditional essay to capture and make explicit the practical methods that we utilize in collecting data and the analytical tools that historians deploy in interpreting that data. Participants will work with and through one model of history methods, providing feedback and critiques, while also working together to generate sample classroom exercises and thinking about what it would look like to integrate these methods in an explicit way that shapes a syllabus or a curriculum.