Journal Response #5: History and the Social Science Teacher

Journal response to:  History and the Social Science Teacher.  (Fall 1988).

I opened the great omnibus of History and the Social Science Teacher with fear and trepidation.  The other journals I had read were of magazine size, shape, and appearance.  This was a huge hardcover text with several issues of the journal inside, and I wasn't sure where to begin.  Start from the first issue?  No, that would leave me studying the turn of the century.  At least I had been born by 1988.

Like The Social Sciences, History and the Social Science Teacher is a recognizable academic journal.  All the formal trappings are there: the white pages, the organized layout, the polysyllabic jargon, the shamelessly self-explanatory titles, the scholarly references upon scholarly references upon scholarly references.  It was unbelievable how many texts it had taken to produce five pages of a single essay.  There were sometimes more than three pages of secondary sources filed neatly into two columns per page.  Even though I'm somewhat of an academic journal connoisseur now having spent over five years at university in an English program (where if your essay doesn't have at least ten secondary sources, six from scholarly journals, you're not going to graduate.  Honestly, the only department to require more secondary source research that serious students of literature are Philosophy, which is gradually becoming English, and History), I was spoiled by Teaching History somewhat, and I was dismayed to see that I was in for another long period of silent study, pouring through pages of some dated academic writing.

There were more pictures and charts provided in History and the Social Science Teacher, and they were all as plain, simple, and formal as the writing that accompanied them.  There were also case studies, which were a pleasant surprise, no matter how dated they were.  The other two journals I examined this week didn't contain case studies, and it was nice to see some official research instead of just lesson plans that happened to provide starting points for articles.  Again though, these case studies provided more reflection that suggestion.  Most were cautionary tales for teachers, lessons to avoid or improve upon rather than to implement.  Worse, their datedness made some inappropriate for contemporary classrooms.

I do appreciate the return to academic writing; truly, I do.  The summaries and side-comments are too informal for my tastes, drawing comparisons between youth magazines instead of journals.  Nevertheless, those very side-comments assisted in my understanding of the article as a whole, meaning that I didn't have to spend precious time pouring through pages of study.  I knew what the point was, and I was prepared for it.  More importantly, as I write this response, I'm starting to confront my academic snobbery even more.  In English, I advocate that there is no such thing as high literature or capital-L Literature.  It's a matter of the reader's preference and the way they respond to the text.  But formal writing does provide a certain amount of information that informal colloquialisms can't.  It accommodates  case studies and statistics, quantifiable evidence instead of personal responses.  While emotions are important to consider in being a teacher, they do not make for a great journal overall.  Neither does something published in 1988, but I suppose that can't be helped.