Teaching Thursday: History and Threshold Concepts

Next semester, for the first time in years, I won’t be teaching History 240: The Historians’ Craft. This is our required course for all majors and minors. Ideally, it communicates some basic skills including citation practice, outlining, and some basic rules of historical writing. We hope that these skills transfer to other classes in the curriculum and help students to feel more comfortable with our departmental expectations.

We also want to introduce students to key threshold concepts in the discipline. Threshold concepts describes key ideas or approaches that are necessary for students to gain access to the disciplinary knowledge. Algebra, for example, is a threshold concept for learning calculus or even geometry. Grammar is a threshold concept for learning languages. 

For history, I’d contend, understanding that how we understand the past requires us to understand how people understood their past in the past. We sometimes call this “historiography.” Understanding historiography, unfortunately, requires that we understand the history of our discipline. This is tricky, of course, because to understand the history of our discipline, we have to understand how to do history and the threshold concept of doing history is understanding how history developed over time. Because this is tricky to do — and because students generally don’t love learning the history of the discipline — we often either focus on the historical development of subfields or ignore this aspect of the discipline entirely. In many cases, we are satisfied enough to graduate a handful of students who have a disciplinary conception of history and a major of students who know something about the past.

The greatest challenge in my teaching experience has been introducing big picture “historiography” to students at the 200 level. In particular, students want to see what we do now in history as the “right way to do things” as compared to what we did in the past. This results in students assuming that obsolete approaches produce a less true views of the past whereas contemporary approaches provide more true views of the past. Of course, we like to imagine that what we do now is at least no worse than what we did in the past as historians. We also know that while truth is important, it is often assumed and in some ways secondary to the utility of the knowledge that we produce.

This means that students have to not only understand that how historians view the past changes, but also that these changes aren’t always revisions of earlier ideas about the past. In fact, in many (if not most) cases, we’re simply adding to what we know about the past in ways that makes the past more relevant for the present. This means that the trajectory of history isn’t toward the (endless?) refinement of what we know about the past — indeed, there’s no concept of progress here — but rather whether we’re producing perspectives on the past that are relevant to our society today (or at very least relevant to ongoing conversations in the discipline of history).

Taking a semester off from teaching this class will give me a bit of brain space to think about how I can introduce these concepts in a more effective way in the fall of 2025 than I have over the last decade. Part of me feels like introducing a particular case study and showing how historical interpretations of something specific have changed. My colleague who will teach History 240 in the spring will use Michael Vann and Liz Clarke’s The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt: Empire, Disease, and Modernity in French Colonial Vietnam (2018). It’s a great book that introduces French colonial history, but also primarily sources and a discussion of historical approaches and methods (as well as ways to teach this book in the classroom). This book is particularly appropriate since my colleague is a French historian with a deep knowledge of French colonial history. 

I’m not sure that I know a similar book that would look like in my field. I’m open to suggestions! I’m also not entirely sure whether it will be possible to extrapolate from a book like this to the history of the larger discipline (beyond, perhaps the modern period) and whether students can extrapolate from this narrow case study to their specialties or the broader discipline more broadly. I’ll be eager to hear her experiences and give my own class some serious thought over the next six or so months!