Pedagogy Column

Teaching the History of Childhood: Postmodernism and Practicality in the Classroom

Moira Hinderer

Experienced teachers assure me that classroom teaching remains interesting because instructors never know what the alchemy of the classroom will produce.  As a relatively new teacher, it is this unknown quality of the classroom that fills me with trepidation.  So when I had the opportunity this past spring to design and teach a course in the history of childhood, I was both excited and wary.  Like many graduate student instructors many of my fears were of the "what if they ask me a really easy factual question and I don't know the answer" variety; however, the major problem I dealt with throughout the course was much more difficult to address. In this column, I will address two questions/problems to which I hope to find some solutions.

As I began teaching, I had not considered that these questions would form my major pedagogical problem for the quarter; however, during the teaching roundtable at the recent SHCY meeting other instructors agreed that these issues are quite common for instructors of childhood/children's history.  I came to the class feeling a responsibility to encourage students to questions the conventional wisdom about what childhood is and what it means in society.  In particular, this goal meant critically examining progressive narratives of child experience and ideas about childhood. My goal was no so much to disabuse students of the idea that the history of childhood has been one of continual enlightenment about child needs and continually better treatment of children (although I admit it is not a narrative that I find particularly convincing), as to encourage them consider the historicity of ideas about childhood and to see history as the sight of multiple possible narratives, rather than one correct answer.  One of the major ideas I was trying to work through as I designed the syllabus was, what is the relationship between the rise of liberalism and the growing acceptance of childhood as a sentimental category strictly set apart from adult experience? Because this question is one to which I have not yet found a satisfactory answer, I entered the classroom with many questions of my own.

As a student of African American history I have been in many classrooms where discussion of race left students feeling discomforted or frustrated.  I would expect issues and class and gender to incite similar feelings.  But I was unprepared for how strongly some of my students held certain ideals of childhood.  One student spoke to me at the end of the first week of classes.  She told me she had been raised in a Christian family and she had concerns about the content and goals of the class, specifically that it seemed to her that the class was designed to find fault with families of the past. I sought to reassure her, but, I suspect the reading for the next class, Philippe Aries' essay "From Immodesty to Innocence," with its discussion of the changing role of sexuality in parent/child relationships, spoke much louder (and perhaps more honestly) than I did.  The student did not choose to remain in the class.

Other students who enrolled the class became aware of their personal and political attachments to specific ideas about childhood and children more slowly. Many found examining the historically specific nature of childhood an interesting intellectual project, but for others it seemed like an attack on their own beliefs and experiences, perhaps even on their narratives of their own lives.  Heightening these feeling were the groups of children I chose to focus on in our class readings, including young slaves, working children, working-class children, and African American children.  A few students wondered where the "regular children" were on the syllabus, the white middle-class children, frontier children, and puritan children, the children with whom many of my students could imagine a shared lineage. 

Another area of discomfort arose in our classroom as I asked the student to imagine what society would look like if we took seriously the idea that children are agents both in history and in their own lives and that they are beings endowed with rights.  These ideas seemed more comfortable for the history majors in the room who were happy to deconstruct and to view ideas about children and childhood, including those we hold in the present day, as historically specific.  For future teachers, social workers, policy experts, and scientists; however, these questions proved to be the very sort of hypothetical post-modernism from which they sought refuge as they signed on to study the history of childhood.  For these students, child is not a cultural category; instead it is a biological reality.  This reality meant that I was considered wrong on two fronts, first I was asking them to deny what was clearly real and second, I was questioning the good works of educators, reformers and parents of the past.  A few students seemed to feel that I was asking them to be jaded, to substitute postmodern confusion for good intentions based on quantitative science. They wanted further answers and tools for their future work and I gave them questions and problems. 

I think most instructors would agree that it is important for students to encounter difficult questions and problems.  As well, for student going into child professions it is a good thing to understand the unintended consequences of helping.  However, I also think that that it is a valuable for students to consider what they want and need from their education and seek to get those things.  I think some of my students were frustrated because the felt ineffectual at refuting arguments with which they disagreed.  Perhaps that is why the class felt most successful when we focused on historical research.  The research portion of the class seemed to provide space for both my goals for the class and the student's individual goals.  The major project of the class was a research paper based on primary sources of the students' choosing.  The class spent several sessions in our University's Special Collections looking at archival materials, the students completed several small research assignments, and we spent time talking about finding sources and developing arguments for history writing.  I encouraged my students to choose research topics that they found interesting and useful, with the caveat that they had to develop working thesis statement and a find a body of sources that were subject to my approval.  Overall, the quality of the student's final papers was very high, and in some cases the students developed a good deal of expert knowledge on their subjects.  It was in their specialized areas of research that students understandably felt most confident.  They felt better able to articulate their concerns about questioning the category of child while learning information that they found valuable.   The students growing expert knowledge made for more serious engagement with ideas and less frustration in the classroom.

While I found a partial solution to the problems I faced in the classroom, I do not think I was fully able to address the question of what students need to know when they take history of childhood courses and how instructors can facilitate that learning.  I am curious to hear what problems readers encounter specific to teaching history of childhood and what strategies the have found most helpful.

Syllabus for "Colloquium: Childhood in America"

Eds. Note: We invite readers to address Moira's call for discussion of problems encountered in history of childhood classrooms .FYI, the next issue of the "Newsletter" will focus on film -- articles concerned with use of film your history of childhood courses are welcome. Contact Sean Martin (seanmartin1@juno.edu) for more information.