Like all successful American history teachers, Robin Hornberger has learned to pace herself so as to cover a large amount of history in a year’s time. Preparing students for all the material that may appear on an advanced placement or end of course exam can feel like a marathon effort. Hornberger embraces the long-distance run. For many years, she left her working day of “flying” with students through the rush of American history to don running shoes and train for marathon races. In 2018, she resolved to run one marathon a month for the entire year. She did it to raise scholarship funds for students at her school, West Clermont High, which is located about 25 miles east of Cincinnati, Ohio.

A Marathon Run for Scholarships

Hornberger wanted to give curious students the opportunity to dream. She had noticed that few graduates of the school left the local area for college. Many opted for the community college associated with the University of Cincinnati. Hornberger herself grew up in the Cincinnati area, but travelled to the University of Virginia for college, majoring in history and minoring in foreign affairs. “I loved it,” she said. She knew that not everyone wants the heady intellectual experience of a four-year liberal arts program, or needs it in order to pursue their chosen career. Still, she worried that some students abandoned the college ambition regretfully, having heard a discouraging message: “if what you want to do in life requires college, forget that; find something that doesn’t.” She wanted to open doors for such students.

A West Clermont student’s project to provide Thanksgiving dinner for community members in need inspired further thought. The student “had realized that ‘some of my friends don’t get to celebrate Thanksgiving.’ I really admired what she did. But I also thought, ‘That dinner will be a moment. A college degree could change the trajectory of a life.’” How could she leverage her own strengths to give students a life-changing opportunity? By running marathons, backed by sponsors, she thought.

Challenge, Setback, and Achievement

Her first challenge was to recruit sponsors. Becoming active in the West Clermont Education Foundation (she is now a board member there), she worked through them to recruit donor pledges. The foundation would collect, invest, and disburse the money her project raised. Then she created a website to promote her effort, allowing her to update her monthly progress.  She learned how to boost fundraising through social media. Hoping for corporate sponsors, she found some; but she also found that small donations from many individuals add up to a significant amount. She also invited the help of other runners. A group joined her for Cincinnati’s “Flying Pig” marathon, each runner earning a contribution to the scholarship project from a corporate sponsor. That event “ended up being a really good fundraiser, “ Hornberger said.

Training for the marathons presented less of a challenge. She developed a rhythm that worked: running a marathon, resting for a week, then resuming short runs, with a 10-mile run at mid-month. “It actually was working out fairly well,” she said. She completed five marathons between New Year’s Day of 2018 and the end of the school year. Then, while running with a friend at the beginning of summer vacation, Hornberger tore the plantar fascia on her left foot away from her heel. Her year of marathons abruptly ended.

Even so, the scholarship fund Hornberger founded has raised about $40,000. It began awarding $1000 scholarships, each renewable to cover all four years of a college education, in 2021.

A New Marathon: The MAHG Degree

Hornberger’s injury required her to spend much of the summer of 2018 resting her injured foot.  In 2020, she realized she needed surgery for a congenital hip problem. This would entail another period of rest and recovery. She would resume teaching soon after the surgery, but how would she channel her energy outside of work? Investigating options for continuing education, she discovered the Master of Arts in American History and Government (MAHG) program at Ashland University.

It offered interactive online seminars which she could take while at home. She enrolled, somewhat experimentally, for two successive courses: “Religious Liberty” and “The Fourteenth Amendment.” Once again, she paced herself for a marathon, since the assigned readings encompassed dozens of Supreme Court cases. Working through these was mentally challenging yet rewarding. Thinking she would take enough credits to qualify to teach College Credit Plus courses, she continued in the program. In 2022, she took her first summer residential MAHG course. “After that, I was all in,” she said. She would go for the Masters’ degree.

Documents that Help Shape the Story of America

Courses in the MAHG program are conversations.  Teachers, led by scholar specialists, analyze primary documents and discuss what they reveal about American history or government institutions. Hornberger had always used primary documents in her own teaching, but MAHG introduced her to documents she’d never before encountered, along with their authors’ perspectives and stories. “I like to tell stories,” Hornberger said. “When I introduce a unit of history, I tell a story to illustrate its theme. Although MAHG hasn’t changed the way I teach, it’s given me a lot more documents to shape the story around.”

In her general-level history course, one of the most exciting days of the school year occurs as Hornberger steps into the role of the investigative journalist Ida Tarbell. Impersonating Tarbell, she tells her life story to the class, from her childhood memory of watching her father’s independent oil refining business fail to the story of how she later documented what ruined him: the unfair business dealings of John D. Rockefeller. She recounts how she traced, in her History of the Standard Oil Company , the collusion Rockefeller engineered between railroad companies, bankers and his own refinery business, so as to assure a steady high price for his product.

More confident in her story-telling because of MAHG, Hornberger can use stories more effectively to “elicit empathy,” she says. Her stories help students visualize and understand the problems earlier generations dealt with. She sees the proof: after the day she spends impersonating Ida Tarbell, her general level history students write impassioned summaries of Tarbell’s life and work.

Answering and Inspiring Student Questions

MAHG studies have also given Hornberger readier answers for student questions. When a student in her AP Government class asked, “What would John Locke think about women’s rights?” she could reply, “Well, I’ve read his Second Treatise on Government, and I can tell you what he thinks about the rights of women.”

MAHG seminars support Hornberger’s efforts to teach historical thinking skills. As she reads the documents in preparation for each 90-minute MAHG seminar session, she thinks about “focus questions” listed on the syllabus. Gathering with other teachers in the seminar, she compares her answers to the questions with their ideas. In her own teaching, Hornberger—when the schedule allows—uses a similar method, structuring units around what she calls “essential questions.” Like the MAHG focus questions, these point students toward productive areas for inquiry, without suggesting that everyone will arrive at the same answers.

Teaching the mid-twentieth century civil rights movement, for example, Hornberger asks students to read Martin Luther King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” Then she poses an essential question: “How are civil rights reforms achieved?” Some students, after reading King’s letter, conclude as King did that self-governing people generally must be made morally uncomfortable before they will accept reforms. They must be reminded of their failures to live up to their ideals. Other students conclude that Congressional legislation drives change, or that Supreme Court rulings do so. Some, after discussing the possibilities, conclude that both social activism and political leadership are needed.

Empathy, the Corollary of Critical Thinking

“The point of education is to learn to think for yourself,” Hornberger says. She hopes that in posing “essential questions” she models an open-minded attitude.  “I want students to become confident enough to ask questions”—whether these are big questions about how justice is achieved, or smaller questions about particular policy proposals. At the same time, she wants to help students develop their listening ability—hence the stories she tells to develop empathy.

Empathy and critical thinking are two sides of the same coin. When citizens find themselves in conflict, logical arguments may persuade some to change their minds. Just as often, understanding “where others are coming from” helps citizens discover solutions neither side had before considered. It is not the case, Hornberger maintains, that our divided political climate has made compromise impossible. “Take a deep dive into any congressional session, and you discover that a lot of laws were passed. The competing sides reached agreement, but did it quietly.”

Hornberger would like to spend more class time helping students develop the capacity for critical thinking and empathy. But these goals form just one part of the marathon she runs during each school year. Given that she teaches tested subjects, “we spend a lot of time on plug and chug memorization. But I don’t apologize for that,” she says cheerfully. “We’re memorizing things”—about how our constitutional system works, and about challenges Americans have faced before and will likely face again—”that every American citizen should know.”