The Reciprocal Influences of Teaching and Learning

“I came into teaching through the back door,” says David Widenhofer, who chairs the social studies department at North Catholic High School in Butler County, Pennsylvania. Instead of earning a teaching credential while an undergraduate, Widenhofer earned a history degree, and then traveled with the Peace Corps to Lesotho, where he taught English and European history. This first teaching experience awakened a sense of vocation. He earned a Montana teaching credential, but decided to take it abroad, to the American International School in Ecuador. Affiliated with the Department of State, such schools teach an American curriculum to students from around the globe. Widenhofer covered world history (ancient and modern), and American history. After this, he taught at the American International School in Kiev, Ukraine, covering world history, Advanced Placement US History, government, and economics.

Returning home, he wanted to understand his own country better. He earned a Masters in History at Slippery Rock University, basing his thesis on firsthand accounts of the Korean War he collected from seven American veterans of the conflict. He published this oral history in 2010.

Meanwhile, he spent a dozen years in industry in Pennsylvania. He took pride in work involving environmental restoration of land affected by coal mining. Yet he still missed the “fulfilled sense of purpose” teaching had given him. When a struggling Catholic high school in Pittsburgh decided to relocate to the suburbs north of the city, closer to where he and his wife lived, Widenhofer saw an opportunity to reclaim his calling. During his five years at the relocated school, North Catholic High has doubled in size. It now serves about 580 students.

Study Feeds Teaching, and Teaching Pushes One to Learn

The pattern of Widenhofer’s career demonstrates the reciprocal influences of teaching and learning. Anyone who works abroad will not only learn the habits of a foreign culture; he’ll likely gain a new perspective on his own country, becoming more aware of what distinguishes the American way of life. Moreover, teaching US history while living abroad may well arouse questions that would not have arisen at home. Widenhofer experienced this perspective shift on three continents, and it led him to further study. This study renewed his interest in teaching.

Today, Widenhofer continues to build his content knowledge and to share this knowledge with students. For several years he has attended Teaching American History seminars. His first was a one-day seminar at the Heinz History Center in Pittsburgh on “The Indispensable Leadership of George Washington,” taught by Professor Christopher Burkett. “We did a lot of preparatory reading in very interesting primary documents,” Widenhofer recalls. “At the seminar, as everybody discussed this material together as colleagues, I thought to myself, ‘this is thoroughly good stuff.’ I used the readings with my AP kids that year, and they jumped right on it.”

Just as at the TAH seminar, Widenhofer asked his students to read Washington’s entire Farewell Address. Students read passages not usually quoted in textbooks, including one emphasizing the key role of religion in a democracy. Washington had asserted his commitment to the free exercise of religion in letters also discussed during the TAH seminar—such as one addressed to the Hebrew Congregation in Newport, Rhode Island and another to the Roman Catholics of America. The Farewell Address shows that Washington did not think this guarantee in the First Amendment, or its prohibition of religious establishment, barred government from encouraging “religion and morality” as “indispensable supports” to self-government. “What is said today about the separation of church and state differs from what Washington had in mind,” Widenhofer noted. “It’s important for students to see that.”

Primary Documents Show History Reflects Human Choices

He brought to class more of the primary documents available at TeachingAmericanHistory.org. Students started to see Americans making their own history in a sense that textbooks don’t convey. For example, a textbook account of slavery might imply that Southern slaveholders cynically expanded an inhumane labor system simply because the invention of the cotton gin enabled huge profits. Yet primary documents reveal a need to justify the practice. Many Southerners “used the Bible to defend slavery, while others used the Bible to attack it.” Similarly, at the close of the 19^th century, “some would quote the Declaration of Independence to defend seizing the Philippines and others to condemn it.” Primary documents show history unfolding not in the direction of “historical forces,” but as the consequence of choices people make, often justifying their choices with arguments based on the principles they claim.

Moreover, the schematic accounts in textbooks leave some sequences in American history unexplained. “Take the usual portrayal of the Progressive Era as a time of idealism and social improvement. Textbooks describe the Clayton Anti-Trust Act and Wilson’s Fourteen Points. Then: the Red Scare! The Ku Klux Klan! Wait, where did those come from?” Widenhofer prompts students to consider how progressivism could coexist with bigotry by handing them documents from Ashbrook’s new two-volume collection, Documents and Debates in American History.  

One chapter covers an enthusiasm for eugenics that arose during the Progressive Era. Some states passed laws to “improve” society by sterilizing “defective” adults so they would not have “defective” children. Students read part of the Supreme Court decision in Buck v. Bell, ruling that a Virginia woman deemed “feeble-minded” could be sterilized. They also read a Pennsylvania governor’s veto of a state law authorizing sterilization. While Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes’ dismissed the young woman’s rights with the comment, “Three generations of idiots is enough,” Governor Samuel J. Pennypacker condemned forced sterilization. “To permit such an operation would be to inflict cruelty upon a helpless class in the community which the state has undertaken to protect,” Pennypacker wrote.

Primary documents like these illuminate moments of decision, demonstrating the importance of principle and reasoned argument in a nation’s political life. Other evidence from the past shows what our ancestors enjoyed or endured. Each year, Widenhofer looks forward to a lesson facilitated by the National Museum of World War II. “They lend us a footlocker full of WWII artifacts for a whole week, for a fee of only $75. Wearing gloves, the students examine the objects, trying to figure out what they are and were used for.” During this week, Widenhofer recreates the atmosphere of the era, with the music of Glen Miller and Benny Goodman playing softly and a slideshow showing war photos and artwork of LIFE correspondent Tom Lea on continuous loop. The weekends with students learning what each item in the trunk actually was. “Many are very surprised”—yet they remember their discoveries.

We Remember What We Talk About

When students work together to analyze primary documents, trading conjectures and arguing about conclusions, they remember what they learn—much more than if they simply read a historian’s account. Widenhofer notes that his students’ APUSH scores, which were good before, have now risen. More important, his students are engaged.

Teachers, too, learn in this way. Widenhofer values seminar conversation so much that he has embarked on a second Masters degree, this time in Ashbrook’s Master of Arts in American History and Government. He sampled the program in the summer of 2018, taking a course on “The Rise of Modern America” taught by Professor Jennifer Keene. “It was such a great atmosphere—kind of like a fantasy camp for history nerds. You’re living the topic for the whole week, bouncing ideas off each other.” Then you take home great resources so that your own students can share the experience, Widenhofer added.