The Pedagogy of Abundance

Alongside the pedagogies that are often discussed—inquiry based, problem based, case based and project based—there is yet another pedagogy that deserves far more attention than it typically receives: the pedagogy of abundance.

When I was an undergraduate, source material was largely limited to published books and anthologies, supplemented by blue-colored mimeos. Today, thanks to the internet and a wide range of open and proprietary databases, source material is virtually unlimited.

To be sure, the trustworthiness of online material is often uncertain. Even seemingly reliable information often lacks the scholarly apparatus that helps ensure reliability: citations and contextualization.

Still, the sheer abundance of sources allows us to transform the way we teach. We can treat our students not merely as passive recipients of information but as partners and creators of knowledge.

They can curate, annotate, interpret and remix and repurpose source materials.

Let me suggest a variety of ways that instructors and students can embrace the pedagogy of abundance in my own field: U.S. history.

Advertisements

Advertisements are much more than mere mechanisms for selling products. They also provide insights into the growth of a consumer economy and American society’s shifting conceptions of masculinity and femininity and its changing attitudes toward sex. In addition, advertising played a crucial role in the transformation of the American economy from one in which most goods were produced and sold locally to one dominated by brand names and products distributed nationally.

Before the 1880s, most advertisements consisted largely of print and generic images. The print itself was primarily informational: it described the product and where it could be obtained. The few images that ads contained were highly stylized and rarely illustrated the specific product for sale. Very few ads featured slogans or brand names. Beginning in the 1890s, however, advertisements underwent a profound transformation. They began to resemble advertising today, emphasizing visual images, slogans, catchphrases and appeals to an individual’s health and psychological well-being.

Advertisements helped transform American values. They made Americans aware of such “problems” as halitosis and body odor. More seriously, they helped promote a shift from an emphasis on savings toward consumption and helped to shift a culture oriented toward words toward visual images.

Domestic Architecture

Houses do not simply provide shelter. They offer valuable clues into the nature of the values that people held in the past and to the way that household members interacted. Between the early colonial period and the Civil War, American architecture underwent far-reaching changes—transformations that tell us a great deal about shifting ideas about personal and familial privacy and shifting standards of refinement.

Among the topics that students can study: changes in spatial organization; the shift from a porous, permeable household membership to a more bounded nuclear family; regional differences in design and building materials; the mimicking of British styles during the 18th century followed by the postrevolutionary embrace of Greek Revival designs; the late impact of the balloon frame on the division of household space; and the reasons for the shift toward Gothic Revival, Italianate and Victorian styles.

Art

Works of art are not simply “illustrations”; rather, these works actively shape meanings, values and attitudes and construct and deconstruct cultural myths.

The very first self-portrait in New England, by Thomas Smith and dated around 1680, is striking in the artist’s refusal to embellish or beautify his appearance, and the symbols chosen to surround him, including a skull, a grim reminder of the specter of death, and a naval battle waged outside a window that seems to suggest inner turmoil. All in all, this self-portrait offers revealing insights into those values we call Puritan.

Students might also study the legitimation of art in early America, a difficult task given the lack of patrons and art schools; the shortage of brushes and canvases; the association of art with luxury, decadence and sensual appetite; and taboos surrounding nudity and a reluctance to portray cities.

Students might examine the nonartistic functions art was to serve as an instrument of moral uplift, education and character formation. They might also look closely at the strategies artists adopted to legitimate art: mimicking the art of classical Greece and Rome, visually representing the great events of the American Revolution and the leaders of the early republic, genre paintings that supposedly depicted everyday life, and landscape paintings that gave viewers opportunities to commune with the divine while defining a distinct postcolonial American identity.

Cemeteries

Graveyards provide a great deal of useful information about people’s lives in the past. Students might ask why early Americans call places for the dead “burying grounds” or “graveyards,” not “cemeteries,” and why they didn’t treat these spaces as sacred or spooky. Students can also explore how common death was in early America and who was most likely to die prematurely. In addition, students can examine how the iconography of tombstones changed over time and explain what these shifts tell us about the evolution of cultural ideas about death.

Fashion

Clothing is not simply bodily covering, adornment or decoration. Clothing can signify an occupation or a status and emphasize or de-emphasize social rank. It is often associated with particular age ranges. Fashion is also a form of communication. During the 1960s, many young people signaled their identification with the working class and rejection of middle-class values by donning blue jeans, overalls or blue work shirts.

Fashion can also give outward expression to deeply held values. For enslaved African Americans, who often had to fashion clothing out of hand-me-downs and discarded fabric, brightly colored clothing and headscarves often served as a form of resistance and as a way to express a distinctive personal identity.

In addition, fashion is a barometer of social and cultural change. Contact across geographical and cultural boundaries has had a profound effect on dress.

Some of the most far-reaching changes in dress took place during the Age of Revolution, as younger men discarded wigs, stopped powdering their hair and faces, and dumped knee breeches and calf-length stockings for looser-fitting ankle-length trousers. Young women, inspired by the classical ideals of democratic Greece and republican Rome, favored high-waisted dresses, a natural figure and light, flowing gowns.

Feature Film

Popular films are cultural artifacts that contain messages about class, ethnicity and gender; sociological documents that record the look and mood of a period; and psychological texts that speak to social anxieties and tensions. Much more than mere entertainment, feature films are also power educators that express political ideas and moral values, construct cultural myths, disseminate ethnic and racial stereotypes, reflect and shape ideas about femininity and masculinity, and shape our view of history and America’s role in the world.

Historical films take diverse forms, ranging from costume dramas that place modern people in a carefully recreated simulation of the past to docudramas that blend real historical figures and events with fictional characters, dialogues and incidents. There are also those that are ethnocentric, which tell a historical story from a very narrow point of view, or presentist, which use the past as a screen on which to dramatize current issues and concerns.

Then there are revisionist films, like Oliver Stone’s JFK, which question a dominant interpretation of history, and the most sophisticated, which grapple with the meaning of historical change. Thus, Oprah Winfrey’s film version of Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved seeks to show how traumatic memories of slavery haunted the postemancipation generation, while Forrest Gump follows a savant through the many of the most troubling events of the 1960s, 1970s, and early 1980s to prompt reflection on those events’ meaning.

Food

Food is much more than a mere means of subsistence. It is filled with cultural, psychological, emotional and even religious significance. It defines shared identities, serves as a class marker, embodies religious and group traditions, and serves as a defining symbol of national identity.

Students might examine the regional food traditions of early America, including a Southern tradition, with its high seasonings and emphasis on frying and simmering that grew out of an amalgam of African, English, French, Spanish and Indian foodways. Students might also examine the impact of immigration on the American diet, for example, looking at how German immigrant foodways, with their emphasis on beer, marinaded meats, sour flavors, wursts and pastries, were gradually assimilated into the mainstream American diet in the form of barbecue, coleslaw, hot dogs, doughnuts and hamburgers, and also encouraged other Americans to make meals the centerpiece of holiday festivities.

Students might also examine how food became a major cultural and political battleground, with the efforts of settlement-house workers, food nutritionists and domestic scientists to “Americanize” immigrants’ diets, and of muckraking journalists and reformers raising questions about food’s healthfulness, purity and wholesomeness. Finally, students must look at the reasons why the American diet became more cosmopolitan following World War II and how it nevertheless remains a class marker and a symbol of identity and taste.

Hair

Hair is much more than a filament growing out of skin follicles. It carries important symbolic, cultural and even political significance and is associated with status, breeding and identity. Whole lifestyles are symbolized by hair: hippies, punk, Rastafarians or skinheads.

Hair can be styled in extraordinarily diverse ways and can be worn short, long or in between, Thus, hairstyles are ideal for expressing a person’s individual or group identity, whether as a potent symbol of defiance, like the duck-billed white working-class haircuts of the 1950s, or as a symbol of racial pride, like the Afro hairstyle or West Indian dreadlocks.

Hair has also been a marker of age and of gender. Short hair can be childlike, tomboyish, serious or rebellious. Wearing one’s hair up can be connected to elegance or conversely to dowdiness. Wearing it down is often considered carefree but also unprofessional. In a society that values youth, hair loss was, in the 1960s and 1970s, a sign that a man was over the hill. But since the 1980s, many men have shaved their heads as an alternate symbol of masculinity and virility.

Language

Each generation coins its own distinctive words. The 1920s brought “attaboy,” “bootleg” and “skedaddle.” World War II brought us “swell” and “gung ho.” The 1960s popularized “cool,” “groovy” and “psychedelic.” The 1970s and 1980s brought “slacker” and “grunge.” As conditions of life shift, so does the vocabulary. Some new words are technology driven, like “networking” or “selfie.” Some result from shifts in demography, like “blended family,” which arose as rates of divorce and remarriage became increasingly common.

Dictionaries of etymology, readily available online, provide a way for students to trace the introduction of and shifting meaning of words that both express and shape the ways we perceive the world.

Maps

In addition to offering a visual representation of an area of land or water, historical maps can do much more. They can illustrate the growth of geographical knowledge, show exploration and trade routes, and identify changes over time in political boundaries. Students can use maps as a starting point for discussion of how they have been used historically to solidify claims over territory. They can also overlay various kinds of information or data on maps—for example, transportation networks, election returns or church membership

Names

Naming practices offer a window into how values and tastes have shifted over time. Students might examine the names of the first English colonies, which were drawn from a very small pool or resonated with religious values, such as Charity and Patience, and then look at how names diversified as growing numbers of German, Scottish and Scots-Irish immigrants arrived. They might also look at the persistence of African (or of anglicized African names) and the use of surnames as first names among many white Southerners, reflecting a concern with family. Other trends include the embrace of classical names, the introduction of middle names and the proliferation of less formal names (such as Nancy, Sally and Betsy) during the late 18th and early 19th centuries.

Students might ask why the parents of baby boomers were especially likely to give their children informal names (like Tom or Jeff or Judy) or diminutives (like Stevie or Tommy or Suzy) and to confine their names to a relatively small pool of conventional options, while their children often gave more formal, exotic or idiosyncratic names (such as Jonathan instead of John or Elizabeth instead of Beth) to their offspring. Student might also explore the complex relationship between naming patterns and ethnicity and class and the impact of social movements, like feminism, on children’s names, with girls now more likely to receive cross-gender or androgynous names.

Popular Music

Today, Americans use music to pass time, to relax, to set a mood and, in religious services, to express spiritual beliefs. In the past, music served other functions. Immigrant groups passed down traditions through song. Work songs helped laborers to cope with the hardship of their tasks and synchronize their movements. Many social movements created a repertoire of protest songs.

Students might explore how American popular music has been the product of a mixture of diverse elements, including Native American, African, English, Scottish and Irish, German, Latin American, and Hawaiian musical cultures, and how technology, economics, shifting tastes and cross-cultural contact and borrowings and appropriation have shaped American popular music.

Photography

In today’s image-saturated society, it is important for students to learn how to read photographs as complex texts that need to be interpreted and not treat them simply as objective reproductions of the external world. A photograph is a selective recording and interpretation of a visual scene. Understanding the degree of photographic manipulation—through framing, cropping, color, emphasis, enhancement and perspective—is necessary to evaluate any particular image.

Photographs have the power to freeze time and evoke emotions even more powerfully than words. During the Vietnam War, a handful of photographic images were indelibly etched into Americans’ collective imagination. More recently, a single photograph of the Iraq prisoner abuse scandal illustrated the power of photographic images to sway public opinion.

Political Cartoons

Students can examine how political cartoons use caricature, symbols, humor, ridicule and exaggeration to make arguments and comment on political events. Even before the American Revolution, political cartoons had the power to shape public opinion. Some political cartoons are funny. Others are satirical or biting, frequently sparking outrage. It’s noteworthy that many newspapers today that lack a book reviewer or film critic have a political cartoonist.

Political cartoons’ power to influence public opinion became vividly apparent after the Civil War, when Thomas Nast, cartoonist for Harper’s Weekly, helped bring down “Boss” William Marcy Tweed, who headed New York City’s corrupt Tammany Hall political machine from 1866 to 1871. Nast reportedly turned down a $500,000 bribe if he would stop attacking Tweed. Tweed didn’t mind written attacks, but political cartoons were another matter. “My constituents can’t read,” fulminated Tweed, “but dammit, they can see pictures.”

Propaganda Posters

Throughout the 20th century, posters were intended to rouse the nation’s spirit and convey a sense of common purpose. They promoted patriotism, productivity and sacrifice. Some demonized the enemy, appealing to hatred and bigotry. Propaganda posters use visual symbols and such techniques as sentimentality and appeals to patriotism, fear, duty and sacrifice to whip up public emotions. During the world wars, posters helped convince Americans to put up with shortages, obey rationing rules and maintain wartime secrecy.

Propaganda posters used bold colors, dramatic designs and evocative symbols to communicate wartime messages simply and quickly. While some posters drew on traditional symbols of nationalism (such as the finger-waving figure of Uncle Sam in James Montgomery Flagg’s “I Want You” poster), others use gritty or gory realism, some appeal to sentimentality and nostalgia, and still others draw on the latest currents of avant-garde art, using stylized or geometric imagery to stir passions and evoke visceral reactions.

Statistics

Statistics transforms data into information, and history provides an ideal vehicle for teaching statistics. History provides not only a wealth of accessible data sets but also a host of problems to solve. Examples abound. Were the wealthy or women and children more likely to survive the sinking of the Titanic? When did life expectancies rise most rapidly and what were the likely contributors?

We’ve long known that deep learning and conceptual understanding require students to actively process information, alone or with peers, rather than merely absorbing information passively.

The pedagogy of abundance holds out the prospect of transforming students into active and engaged researchers, investigators, detectives—and creators of knowledge. By giving them access to a wide range of source materials, they are positioned to create meaningful projects: plan virtual tours, record gallery talks, design virtual museum exhibitions and produce video stories.

At a moment when all too many students feel disconnected and detached, active learning is more important than ever. It sparks students’ imagination, spurs their creativity and treats them as true partners in learning.

Steven Mintz is professor of history at the University of Texas at Austin.