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to Spring Innovator Faculty Spotlight: Bob Bain
Why do adults flock to the History Channel and devour biographies of John Adams
and Ben Franklin, while high schoolers complain that the subject is not only
dull but unrelated to their lives? What does it take to get high school students
excited about history? U-M School of Education professor Bob
Bain has devoted
his career to answering those questions. He’s in a unique position to
do so, having taught high school history in Cleveland for 26 years--where seven
times he received an award for teaching excellence-- before joining the U-M
faculty in 1998. His rapport with students is such that in 2000 he received
the Class of ‘23 Award for Undergraduate Teaching.
Learning the skills of a professional historian while working on his doctorate at Case Western Reserve University caused him to examine more critically his own teaching style. “I went from being a scholar of history to being a scholar of history teaching,” he reflects. In the process, he became troubled by a discrepancy. “There was a huge gap between what I was doing as a historian, and the way kids [learning history] were functioning in the classroom. Historians don’t memorize facts; they use facts to make meaning of the world. Typically, what a history student does is start with a textbook that has all the facts in it. There’s no problem for them to solve, just the questions at the end of the book.”
Bain found that framing a history topic as a question or problem made his high school students more enthusiastic about their work. Teaching a unit on the great plague of the fourteenth century, he framed it under the larger question, “What explains the change in power between Europe, China, and Africa over the course of the last 500 years?” He had his students read and compare original sources, such as the writings of a fourteenth-century Roman Catholic pope. Then he gave students what he calls "tools” -- guidelines to help them set priorities while sifting through information. He posted questions prominently on posters, such as “How many people did this affect? Did it affect many areas of life?” Eventually, he noted, “they were asking the sophisticated questions an adult reader would ask.”
He used a similar approach to his work with the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan. The museum wanted to pique students’ interest before they visited the museum. Focusing on a particular house, a sharecropper’s cabin, Bain helped design a website whose pivotal question was “Why would somebody living in this house in the rural South in 1940 want to move to Detroit?” Features of the website include census data from the 1940’s and a photo of a Detroit housing project that blacks migrating from the South moved into.
Today, Bain instructs potential teachers, both elementary and secondary. One of only two Carnegie Scholars at U-M, he received funding to do research on his own teaching. He juggles several research projects, including one intended to improve the quality of young students’ experiences at museums. He also consults on history and technology for the California History and Social Science Project, charged with improving social studies teaching throughout that state. Says the Project’s executive director Jana Flores, “Very rarely do you find someone like Bob, who has that grounding in teaching high school history and a Ph..D in history.” Teachers respond immediately to Bain, she adds, noting, “He just walks into the room and lights it with challenging questions.”
