Without visual evidence of the past how would you write history?
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Answer:
As in traditional historical scholarship, our individual work became part of a larger scholarly discourse about fundamental questions–in this case, about how students learn history in our classrooms, how the use of visual sources shapes and disrupts historical narratives, and how new media can provide innovative opportunities for the expression of historical understanding. Because we based our inquiries on evidence rather than intuition, we could examine our separate projects together to understand crucial issues better. We have attempted to go beyond the anecdotal, beyond the teacher-centered narrative, to analyze evidence rigorously and to engage theoretical aspects of the related scholarship. We apply to all of these strategies what the SoTL theorist Mariolina Rizzi Salvatori has called “unprecedented attentiveness to students’ work.” For us, this significant move has converted our classrooms into places where, as Salvatori envisions, evidence of student learning becomes “a litmus test for the theories that inform a teacher’s approach.”5 Three core factors characterized our effort to undertake research in the scholarship of teaching and learning: