Have you been following the American Historical Association’s Tuning Project? The AHA teamed up with Lumina Foundation to conduct a nationwide, faculty-led project to “articulate the disciplinary core of historical study” and to “define what a student should understand and be able to do at the completion of a history degree program.”
They’ve recently released a new version of its Discipline Core – a statement of “the central habits of mind, skills, and understanding that students achieve when they major in history.” This is the second version created by the faculty director of the project, Anne F. Hyde (Colorado College), who incorporated feedback from last year’s publication.
They have listed six core competencies with 5 or 6 learning outcomes under each competency (http://www.historians.org/teaching-and-learning/current-projects/tuning/history-discipline-core). According to the AHA Tuning Project faculty, history students can:
- Engage in historical inquiry, research, and analysis.
- Practice historical empathy.
- Understand the complex nature of the historical record.
- Generate significant, open-ended questions about the past and devise research strategies to answer them.
- Craft historical narrative and argument.
- Practice historical thinking as central to engaged citizenship.
If you are teaching a historical methods class this year, take a look at your syllabus and see if your assignments have aligned with the core competencies laid out in the AHA Tuning document.
There is an excellent critique of the document in EdWired – check out “Getting History in Tune” by Mills Kelly (aka @EdWiredMills on Twitter), historian at George Mason University.
If you’ve got some ideas you’d like to share for other Kentucky history educators about the AHA Tuning History Discipline Core, please reply to this post.
For more information, see the project webpage at http://www.historians.org/tuning.
Kentucky Association of Teachers of History 