Teaching History in Higher Education

What are the distinctive characteristics of the discipline of history? How do we teach those characteristics effectively, and what benefits do they offer students? How can history instructors engage an increasingly diverse student body? Teaching History in Higher Education offers instructors an innovative and coherent approach to their discipline, addressing the specific advantages that studying history can bring. Edward Ross Dickinson examines the evolution of methods and concepts in the discipline over the past two hundred years, showing how instructors can harness its complexity to aid the intellectual engagement of their students. This book explores the potential of history to teach us how to ask questions in unique and powerful ways, and how to pursue answers that are open and generative. Building on a coherent ethical foundation for the discipline, Teaching History in Higher Education presents a range of concrete techniques for making history instruction fruitful for students and teachers alike.

'Using multiple lenses, Teaching History in Higher Education helps history teachers see the discipline's epistemological, cognitive, and ethical characteristics. Working with extensive historiographic, philosophic, psychological, and educational scholarship, Edward Ross Dickinson illuminates History's enduring debates and unique features. Situating history education in this larger context makes the book's pedagogical guidance more valuable for postsecondary teachers.' Bob Bain, University of Michigan
'Dickinson has penned a love-letter to History. It is passionate, playful, personal, and coy. It is also a workman-like 'how to', which will be incredibly useful to people who teach history as well as to their students. Teaching History in Higher Education is a highly original text, displaying great erudition and wit.' Joanna Bourke, Birkbeck, University of London
'Teaching History in Higher Education is a very wise and useful introduction to the teaching of history, one that new and old teachers will find helpful and challenging. Edward Ross Dickinson demonstrates that historians need to teach students the fundamental assumptions and practices of the discipline, help them understand how historians think and at the same time push them to think like a historian.' Gaines M. Foster, Louisiana State University

Edward Ross Dickinson is Professor of History at the University of California, Davis, and an historian of modern Europe and the world. He is author of The World in the Long Twentieth Century (2018), Dancing in the Blood: Modern Dance and European Culture on the Eve of the First World War (Cambridge, 2017), and Sex Freedom and Power in Imperial Germany (Cambridge, 2014).

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