Military welfare history in the classroom: converting research passions into lesson plans

Abstract

Military welfare history as a scholarly project is both well developed and still evolving. We now have a substantive community of scholars who have produced a robust body of literature. But what about the teaching project? How can we ‘translate’ military welfare scholarship into lesson plans? How can we share scholarly findings and questions with new generations of students – and, indeed, with public audiences of all kinds? This article reflects on military welfare history as a pedagogy project, offering some reflections on how we can rethink our approaches to teaching academic research in our classrooms – wherever they may be.

Keywords:

• Wartime
• post-war
• teaching
• pedagogy
• learning

Acknowledgements

The author wishes to thank Paul Huddie for inviting her into a broader, international community of thinkers on military welfare issues, and thanks both Paul and Amy Carney for their support and editorial suggestions on this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 John David Southard, ‘Beyond “A Company, B Company” History: A Military History State of the Field’, in Organization of American Historians, The American Historian, <https://www.oah.org/tah/issues/2014/august/beyond-a-company-b-company-history-a-military-history-state-of-the-field/> [Accessed 20 November 2021]. One of the earliest works in the ‘new’ military history that focused on military welfare was Davis R. B. Ross’ Preparing for Ulysses: Politics and Veterans During World War II (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969). Ross’ ideas on veterans’ welfare are still being engaged by contemporary scholars. For further description and analysis of what constituted the ‘new’ military history: Joanna Bourke, ‘New Military History’, in Palgrave Advances in Modern Military History, ed. by Matthew Hughes and William J. Philpott (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2006), 258–80.

2 This quotation is taken from the website of the Military Welfare History Network (MWHN), <https://militarywelfarehistory.wordpress.com/> [accessed 15 May 2023].

3 Elizabeth Alsop, ‘Who’s Teaching the Teachers?’ Chronicle of Higher Education, 11 February 2018, <https://www.chronicle.com/article/whos-teaching-the-teachers/>, [Accessed 29 June 2023]. This is an observation one can find in many columns and articles on teaching, and this lament can be found at the high school level as well, even for teachers trained in credential programmes. Nancy McTygue, the Executive Director of the California History-Social Science Project, noted that ‘the greatest challenge for social science and history educators is that too few teachers are trained in inquiry-driven, active pedagogies’: quoted in Nancy Quam-Wickham, ‘Reimagining the Introductory U.S. History Survey Course’, The History Teacher 49 (2016), n. 23, 544. On the value of faculty development for teaching in higher education: Catherine Haras, Steven C. Taylor, Mary Deane Sorcinelli, and Linda von Hoene, eds, Institutional Commitment to Teaching Excellence: Assessing the Impacts and Outcomes of Faculty Development (Washington, D.C.: American Council on Education, 2017), esp. 37–45. Many historians – mostly untrained in educational theory but determined innovators – have been researching and experimenting with their pedagogy, and some have made noteworthy contributions to the growing scholarship on teaching and learning: Lendol Calder, ‘Uncoverage: Toward a Signature Pedagogy for the History Survey’, Journal of American History 92 (2006), 1358–70; Joel M. Sipress and David J. Voelker, ‘The End of the History Survey Course: The Rise and Fall of the Coverage Model’, Journal of American History 97 (2011), 1050–66.

4 The term ‘community of practice’ comes from educational theorists who posit that learning is not the act of receiving and accepting someone else’s facts, but a deeply social process in which learners themselves are constructing knowledge through community interaction and engagement: Étienne Wenger, Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Jean Lave and Étienne Wenger, Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).

5 Sam Wineburg, Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts: Charting the Future of Teaching the Past (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001), 7.

6 Pete Burkholder and Dana Schaffer, ‘A Snapshot of the Public’s Views on History’, American Historical Association, Perspectives on History 59, (2021), <https://www.historians.org/publications-and-directories/perspectives-on-history/september-2021/a-snapshot-of-the-publics-views-on-history-national-poll-offers-valuable-insights-for-historians-and-advocates> [Accessed 23 November 2021]. The survey was conducted by the American Historical Association and Fairleigh Dickinson University.

7 Joshua R. Eyler, How Humans Learn: The Science and Stories Behind Effective College Teaching (Morgantown: West Virginia University Press, 2018), 35. High school textbooks are beginning to improve their treatment of war, as evidenced by a study that found textbooks published between 1970 and 2009 focused more on a soldier’s combat trauma rather than on the glorification of battle. Still, we can guess that these texts are not covering in any depth the military welfare history of the care required to address that trauma: Richard Lachmann and Lacy Mitchell, ‘The Changing Face of War in Textbooks: Depictions of World War II and Vietnam, 1970–2009’, Sociology of Education 87 (2014), 188–203.

8 The top three visual sources were defined in the survey as ‘documentary film/TV’, ‘fictional film/TV’, and ‘TV news.’ The study’s authors issue a cautionary, however, on how we should read this data. Although video constituted the top three sources for history, respondents’ ‘views were mixed on their reliability to convey accurate information.’: Burkholder and Schaffer.

9 Susan Engel, quoted in Eyler, 37. On curiosity as foundational in human learning: Eyler, chapter one.

10 Donald L. Finkel, Teaching With Your Mouth Shut (Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook-Heinemann, 2000), 2–5.

11 For a helpful overview of the cognitive science on lecturing versus other teaching modes: Christine Harrington and Todd Zakrajsek, Dynamic Lecturing: Research-Based Strategies to Enhance Lecture Effectiveness (Sterling, VA: Stylus Publishing, 2017).

12 Mary L. Dudziak, War Time: An Idea, Its History, Its Consequences (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 3, 5.

13 Drew Gilpin Faust, ‘“We Should Grow Too Fond of It”: Why We Love the Civil War’, Civil War History 50 (2004), 380–2.

14 Laura McEnaney, Postwar: Waging Peace in Chicago (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Laura McEnaney

Laura McEnaney is Vice President for Research and Education at the Newberry Library in Chicago. She is the author of Civil Defense Begins at Home: Militarization Meets Everyday Life in the Fifties (Princeton University Press, 2000) and Postwar: Waging Peace in Chicago (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018). Prior to her appointment at the Newberry, she was a history professor at Whittier College for over two decades, where she also served as associate dean for Whittier’s first teaching and learning program. She was the Vice President of the Teaching Division for the American Historical Association from 2019–2022.