Consultants in the Classroom:
Student/Teacher Collaborations
in Community History
Peter Knupfer
In the spring of 2011, students in my advanced seminar for history majors at Michigan
State University () discovered that nearby Lansing had spent more than a decade
fighting over the desegregation of the city’s schools. “I do not think I have ever really
thought about who makes up the population of Lansing or how foreign the idea of
desegregated schools would be during the time period,” one of them wrote in her class
blog, “but it is all becoming much more clear now.” She did not arrive at this conclusion
after hearing a lecture or reading a text. She came to it while immersed in the minutes of
the Lansing School Board (“I am addicted to school board minutes”), which chronicled
a divisive and emotional struggle from the mid-1960s through the late 1970s by the city
to shape the direction of its schools, a struggle highlighted by a special election that
replaced the board’s busing proponents with opponents of busing and by a series of
losing court battles with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored
People () that went all the way to the Supreme Court.1
The struggle over busing and desegregation is an important chapter in the nation’s
history of civil rights that college students can study in the conventional way, through a
course of lectures, readings, and writing assignments. The students in my seminar entered the story from a different door, however, by conducting research and preparing work
product in a community setting. Public historians are familiar with this approach to research; project-centered study is a staple of public history course design. What made this experience different was that the instructor had had no formal training in public history, the
students’ projects originated outside rather than inside the classroom, the course was not
explicitly or formally one on public history, and the method of instruction put the teacher
in the role of consultant rather than professor. The common denominator in these experiences was the audience-driven nature of the course work, like that of a consultant’s work.
Peter Knupfer is an associate professor of history at Michigan State University and executive director of H-Net:
Humanities and Social Sciences Online.
Readers may contact Knupfer at [email protected].
1
Student blog entry for  480, March 30, 2011 (in Peter Knupfer’s possession). Student blogs and the
Web sites for both courses I discuss in this essay have since been archived. Copies of blog entries and other Web
content are in my possession and available upon request. The blogs were constructed in a WordPress multiuser
Web platform, available at http://www.wordpress.com. For the second iteration of the course, in the spring of
2011, I added the BuddyPress social media plug-in to the site, which enabled online forums, individual blogs, and
personal messaging among members. See http://buddypress.org. I am grateful to Matrix: Center for the Humane
Arts, Letters, and Social Sciences Online for its technical support of the class’s networking and archiving tools. See
http://www.matrix.msu.edu. Lansing Board of Education v. , 438 U.S. 907 (1978).
doi: 10.1093/jahist/jas602
© The Author 2013. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Organization of American Historians.
All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: [email protected].
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The students discovered that the learning and sharing of history need not be confined to
classrooms and formal works of scholarship, that it need not arise from cutting-edge
research into a recently opened gap in the literature, and that it can instead be taken into a
community to serve a community’s needs.
This approach to teaching history majors hardly originated with me. As with any “discovery,” it emerged from my experience and my exposure to the experiences and research
of others, especially public school teachers. And rethinking the history major is an old
issue for academic historians; the debate over “what to do about the major” goes back
decades through a substantial literature and many proposals for curricular reform.2 My
work as a consultant on a Teaching American History () grant reinforced my observation that just as public school teachers tended to teach history the way their history
professors had taught it, so had those history professors taught as they had learned to
teach in their graduate training. This self-perpetuating cycle of conventional pedagogy
based on intensive content immersion had demonstrated to my disappointment that I was
part of the problem that teachers were having when teaching history to my own children.3
My experience with  led me to rethink my teaching. If these public school teachers were going to retrain, so should I (especially if I was helping instruct them and I was
part of the problem the grant was trying to solve). As a result, I changed the way I taught
my content-intensive course on the Civil War and the way I approached the training of
history majors.
What I decided to do was, therefore, less an application of current research into learning theory, classroom pedagogy, or assessment metrics than it was the product of my
experiences as a consultant who used history to make a living both outside and inside a
classroom. Alongside my regular teaching schedule during stints at Arizona State University and Kansas State University, I was engaged in public history as a researcher, consultant, and educator, roles that presented me with historical narratives in professional
settings in and outside the classroom. Few of those experiences prescribed a predictable
course of instruction or syllabus of teaching and learning. As a researcher and consultant
I had conducted background research on water rights for a firm hired by the White
Mountain Apaches, and I helped develop narratives for museum exhibits being drawn up
by American History Workshop. For three years I organized training programs in South
Africa for professionals in oral history, museum education, and heritage studies; that
country was in the throes of replacing a colonial educational and museum system with a
new heritage sector where the museum, the community, and the public were partners in
2
See, for example, Gilbert C. Fite, “The Historian as Teacher: Professional Challenge and Opportunity,”
Journal of Southern History, 41 (Feb. 1975), 3–18; Michael J. Galgano, Liberal Learning and the History Major
(n.p., 2007), http://www.historians.org/pubs/free/LiberalLearning.htm; and Robert Brent Toplin et al., “Reconsidering the History Major: A Discussion of Liberal Learning and the History Major,” History Teacher, 25 (Nov.
1991), 63–85. Liberal Learning and the History Major was originally prepared in 1990 and was revised and produced by the teaching division of the American Historical Association in 2007. The program of the Association of
American Colleges and the American Historical Association to reform the history major treated public history as a
separate career field rather than as a method of learning that could be applied in any history course and in multiple
preprofessional settings. See, for example, Linda J. Borish, “Re-Forming the History Major at Western Michigan
University,” ibid., 28 (Nov. 1994), 72–78. Must one be trained as a business historian to learn how to apply
historical thinking skills to managing a bank?
3
I elaborate on that experience in Peter B. Knupfer, “A New Focus for the History Professoriate: Professional
Development for History Teachers as Professional Development for Historians,” in The Teaching American History
Project: Lessons for History Educators and Historians, ed. Rachel G. Ragland and Kelly A. Woestman (New York,
2009), 29–46.
Textbooks and Teaching
1163
recalling and contesting a painful yet inspiring national narrative.4 As an educator I enlisted
undergraduates from a seminar course at Kansas State University to complete educational
and research projects derived from a wish list provided by the local historical society. As
the executive director of H-Net, a large scholarly society that communicates with a vast
public audience through moderated communications media, I interacted with audiences of
independent scholars, journalists, professional writers, and historians outside of the university who were using history every day in imaginative and innovative ways, many of them
without formal training or credentials.
I rarely thought of these activities as public history in a formal sense; to me, they were
all part of history as a livelihood, and the common element in those experiences was
their audience-driven nature. Traditional scholarship surely informed all of these efforts,
but it was not the centerpiece of the training or the consulting I engaged in for the simple
reason that the audiences I was reaching had no expectation to join a scholarly conversation. It was my job to determine what kinds of knowledge would be useful to the
historical projects I participated in or to the clients I was advising and then to help my
partners learn and contextualize what they needed to know to achieve their objectives.5
These experiences, along with the discoveries I made while working with K–12 social
studies and history teachers in Battle Creek, Michigan, and especially given the dreary
state of the state’s economy (which was clearly influencing students to abandon history
for what they believed to be more marketable majors), reframed how I train history
majors. At , history majors sojourn through a conventional sequence of contentintensive surveys and advanced courses that are bracketed by an introductory course on
methods and skills and a capstone pair of senior seminars. The gateway and exit courses
inevitably produce a research paper, giving the department a way to evaluate a student’s
progress from the beginning to the end of her involvement in the major. Many of the
intervening field-intensive courses incorporate a strong writing component, normally a
short research paper or series of reviews and essays punctuated, perhaps, by a classroom
presentation.
The Senior Seminar in American History became the focus of my effort because of the
wide latitude given the instructor and the small class size of twenty student veterans of our
curriculum. The seminar provides majors with a professionally mature experience in
research and writing as they finish their undergraduate university studies and move on to
their choice of career. Typically, the seminar involves an intensive research exercise using
a set of primary sources collected by the instructor around a historical issue or problem.
4
Several sources were particularly influential on my outlook, including the work of Dr. Sean Field of the
Centre for Popular Memory at the University of Cape Town, http://www.popularmemory.org.za/; and Ciraj
Rassool and Sandra Prosalendis, eds., Recalling Community in Cape Town: Creating and Curating the District Six
Museum (Cape Town, 2001). On public memory, museum transformation, and community-based historical
research, I was influenced by Leslie Witz, Apartheid’s Festivals: Contesting South Africa’s National Pasts (Bloomington, 2003). On American History Workshop, see http://www.americanhistoryworkshop.com/.
5
The idea that there is both a content shaped by audience and a method for reaching that audience is familiar
to practitioners of pedagogical content knowledge—that there is a content unique to teaching—now regnant in
social studies education and which owes much to the work of the education scholar Lee Shulman. For a recent
discussion, see Lauren McArthur Harris and Robert B. Bain, “Pedagogical Content Knowledge for World History
Teachers: What Is It? How Might Prospective Teachers Develop It?,” Social Studies, 102 (Dec. 2010), 9–17. For
an explanation of discipline-based teaching, see Elizabeth Green, “Building a Better Teacher,” New York Times
Magazine, March 2, 2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/07/magazine/07Teachers-t.html?_r=1. How to appeal
to a general, nonacademic audience is an old issue for professional historians. For a review, see Ian Tyrrell, Historians
in Public: The Practice of American History, 1890–1970 (Chicago, 2005).
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Some seminars are tightly scripted, partly because the materials under investigation may
be in translation or could concern highly complex issues requiring much advanced preparation and ongoing guidance by the instructor. In other cases, the instructor conducts a
plain-vanilla seminar structured around a series of distributed readings, presentations,
research discussions, and guided steps toward the production of a major research paper. Invariably, the focus of the seminar is on an aspect of the instructor’s ongoing research so
that the students benefit from exposure to a field expert’s discoveries and sources. Perhaps
a third to a half of the students in these seminars are from teacher education, having enrolled in the course to finish their history major while beginning their capstone methods
and field experiences. Very few of them go on to careers as professors of history, but those
who do have built a strong undergraduate foundation for that objective.
My iteration of the seminar was not about my research, however. Indeed, it was deliberately oriented toward a different object, asking a different question: “whether,” as
Gilbert C. Fite has asked, “as teaching scholars we are trying to train professional historians or attempting to increase the general level of historical understanding in our society.”
I centered the seminar on two problems: How does history serve the public? and How
do historians select and communicate with disparate audiences? The seminar’s work
products were keyed to the answers to those questions and took the students into the
community. The first question is predicated upon the beliefs that history is useless if it is
not shared, that it has a public purpose beyond the interests of a close circle of friends or
family, and that it seeks to improve the world at large. That is why the projects in this
course were explicitly not family histories or explorations of a student’s particular past.6
The second question pushed the students to develop their own historical questions and
to define their intended audience; this was a learner-centered task that cast the instructor
in the role of consultant, not of sage on the stage.
Although this approach owes a great deal to public history, it does not purport to
train seminarians for careers in public history. Instead, the seminar phrased its questions
as practical problems—who is my audience and what story do I want to tell it?—that
every historian, and indeed everyone interested in interpreting the past, must resolve.
From the first day of this seminar it was clear that students had never asked themselves
those questions, nor had any instructor posed those queries to them. The students’ previous work in history had been for an audience of one, their instructor, and once that
client had been satisfied the students had moved on. When I asked what had happened
to those previous papers and projects, in every case the students told me that the materials were either now discarded, or tucked in the recesses of a hard drive or in a professor’s
file cabinet. Yet the students were extremely proud of this work, expressing a strong sense
of ownership and intellectual investment in what they had done. The knowledge they had
gained from the experience was still available to them, waiting another opportunity for
expression, but under what conditions and how that might occur was very difficult for
them to say. Some indicated that they planned to use an old paper as a writing sample for
a graduate school application. No one had thought of self-publishing it, recasting it as a
6
Fite, “Historian as Teacher,” 13. “History is for all, heritage for ourselves alone,” writes David Lowenthal.
See David Lowenthal, The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History (New York, 1998), 128. Lowenthal also
discusses the distinction between the “past” and “history.” See ibid., 112–15. For a work that largely uses those
terms interchangeably, see Roy Rosenzweig and David P. Thelen, The Presence of the Past: Popular Uses of History in
American Life (New York, 1998).
Textbooks and Teaching
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project for a different audience, or condensing it into a piece to submit as an op-ed, blog
post, or other form of publication. Once confronted with that problem, many students began
to think differently about their history training, and I felt as though we had established a
common framework for our research: For whom are we communicating history and how
will we do it? One student concluded, “I think it is very important that we are taking ‘old’
history and helping it apply to many different audiences in many different places. Before
this class when I wrote a paper or did a project I never thought, who am I doing this for
and for what purpose? . . . I now realize that the audience we are writing and researching for
is as key as the research itself, because if the information is not aimed at the correct group,
then what’s the point?”7
Although any history teacher can ask students such questions, she or he still must
work within the limitations of a single academic semester and the particular needs of a
curriculum. In my case, this meant that I had to provide a road map and lay out groundwork for content, work product, and method so that we could get as close as possible to
understanding those questions within a relatively short time. I chose local history as the
setting for the seminar’s content; the seminar’s method would employ student projects
and all-class projects for the work products along with networked, team-based collaboration where the seminar leader was consultant rather than lecturer. Each of these elements
presented serious challenges for me as an educator.
I chose local history for this seminar for several reasons. Students are curious about
the stories and pasts embedded in nearby locales, especially their hometowns. Without
fail, students in these classes became deeply engaged and curious about local history
when given the opportunity to investigate and report on their findings. Local history also
pulled us out of the classroom and off the campus, away from the venues commonly denominated as official academic research centers and into places where the traces of history
are gathered, interpreted, and displayed for the public in myriad formal and informal
ways.8 But as practitioners of local history know well, the sources are scattered or poorly
organized by amateur collectors and budget-strapped nonprofit organizations, or simply
gone. Here would be an opportunity for students to think on their feet and try to resolve
practical problems with identifying and interpreting evidence.
For the versions of the course that I have so far offered at , I selected the basic
subject for the all-class project so that I could organize the required outside partnership
in advance, determine whether resources were available, and establish a working relationship with professional staff at outside agencies where necessary. It is important to understand that the topics for the seminar did not emerge from or seek to address a gap in the
literature, or the instructor’s research agenda, or an ongoing debate among scholars. Instead,
the topic emerged from a local historical agency’s particular need or from the headlines
of a daily newspaper. If students were to see how history engages the public and provides
the essential scaffolding for understanding public issues, and if they were to see how historical thinking informs a variety of occupations outside the academy, it was necessary
7
The Department of History at Michigan State University () sponsors an undergraduate journal, the 
Undergraduate Historian, where majors can publish their work. Student blog entry for  480, April 28, 2011 (in
Knupfer’s possession).
8
The advantages of locality are reinforced in David E. Kyvig and Myron A. Marty, Nearby History: Exploring
the Past around You (Walnut Creek, 2010).
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March 2013
for them to make research respond to and in turn instruct an audience. A bedrock of accessible sources was also important so that the students could make reasonable progress
during a normal semester without having to start entirely from scratch.
For example, the topic for the seminar in the spring of 2010 sprang from local reporting on the anniversary of the construction of Interstate 496 in the 1960s through the
heart of Lansing’s largest black neighborhood. I asked local historian David Votta at
Lansing’s Capital Area District Library () if he had collections in need of processing,
development, or publication that a group of advanced undergraduates could help him
with. He revealed that he had acquired a number of boxes of local school records that he
had added to an existing collection of photographs, school board minutes, microfilm of
the local newspaper, and official records of the city council. When we found a vertical
file of newspaper clippings on busing that his librarians had been accumulating over the
years, along with an unpublished history of the Lansing public schools commissioned by
the school board that included a synoptic chronology of the district’s legal battles over
the issue, we decided that we had found a focus for the students: the struggle over busing
and desegregation in Lansing. All of this material provided a rich, useful foundation for
student research.9
Urban renewal, highway building, and school desegregation are not directly in my research field of nineteenth-century American political history. But in some respects, that was
the point: it was primarily my teaching and consulting experience—and only secondarily
my research portfolio—that had prepared me for this project, and it also dictated the pedagogical strategy I would use for the seminar. I had already prepared and taught many collegelevel courses covering the length of the country’s history through 1980. A good working
knowledge of the country’s history along with background in writing and research in my
field equipped me to act as a consultant, who would not only learn Lansing’s story along
with these students but also help them avoid serious pitfalls, interpret sources, identify
and read specialized works, check their facts and corroborate accounts they encountered,
untangle difficult legal and ethical issues, work with fellow professionals at outside agencies,
and place the students’ work within the larger context of American history. Although I
was still the instructor of record tasked with assessing and guiding their learning, I was in
effect advising them as preprofessionals as well as instructing them as pupils, with the ultimate objective of helping them make the transition from the university classroom to their
future white-collar professional environment where teamwork, effective communication,
project development, and historical thinking would be critical and marketable skills. Most
important, I was able to make my thinking about history more visible to them: as I attempted to work through problems the students brought to class, they could see and begin
to understand how historians devise, ask, and answer questions about the past in settings
outside the classroom.
9
On Interstate 496, see Matthew Miller, “Looking Back: I-496 Construction; A Troubled Legacy,” Lansing
State Journal, Feb. 22, 2009, p. A1. Matthew Miller shared his background research with the class: he had interviewed former residents of the area, dusted off several master’s and doctoral theses from ’s former Department
of Urban Planning that contained statistics and interviews with residents relocated from the path of the highway,
reviewed sample records from a huge repository of real estate prospect cards that documented redlining and residential segregation in the affected area, and uncovered photographs of construction and demolition in the newspaper
archives. All of this supplied the seminar with a working basis for its research. Capital Area District Library, http
://cadl.org/answers/local-history/.
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What form would the busing project take? This decision emerged from my consultations with the partner agency. A series of meetings before the semester permitted us to
make a quick survey of available resources on the subject and decide what kind of product
would be useful to the agency. The  expressed a need for a finding aid to help researchers with its new collection of school records. We settled on a busing-related “resource
packet” that would include an inventory of sources at the library and, where possible, in the
community; a synoptic chronology of major events; a character list for future oral historians seeking interviews; maps of the affected school districts; a brief narrative of the controversy; and a bibliography of secondary and primary sources. If acceptable to the library,
the package would be printed, bound, placed in the library’s local history room, and made
available in digital form on the library’s Web site.10
I divided the course’s work into three sections: a brief overview of history and historical issues in public spaces (largely case studies and works on museums, heritage sites, and
the problem of distinguishing heritage from history); the large all-class project; and individual student projects for which they would identify an audience, define an issue in
local history (either their hometown, or the area near , or some other locality), and
develop a project plan in the format of their choice. Projects needed to be based on
original research in primary sources, incorporate historical narrative and analysis, pose significant questions about the past, and be keyed to the intended audience. Each of the
course segments highlighted the instructor’s role as consultant; I tried to detect, identify,
and exploit teachable moments as the class encountered problems unique to their projects.
The students collaborated in several ways. Twice-weekly class sessions almost invariably became discussion sections devoted to particular problems and questions. The students were also required to publish individual blogs with their reflections about their
research, the problems they faced with the course’s tasks and assignments, and their attitudes about history as a discipline and as a career. The blogs were public—the students
knew they were writing for a bigger audience than their instructor or one another. The
busing project also collaborated through a wiki (a Web space where users can post, edit,
and view successive revisions of their work) where pieces of the project were assembled,
reviewed, and revised.11
The daily use of computers and networked resources in this course reflected the
working conditions of our profession and of the occupations that most if not all of
the students were likely to enter. I instructed students who were equipped with portable
computers to bring them to class and use them there. Once a computer came to class, it
became a public resource insofar as we might need it to conduct research, display and
share objects, take notes, and trade ideas with classmates who did not have portable
machines. Having the computers available made all of us learn how to use them as a
professional research and networking resource. When necessary, we delegated two students
to act as scribes; their notes of class activities were posted to our wiki at the end of each
10
Students in the spring 2010 semester created a detailed design proposal for a museum exhibit at the Michigan Historical Museum on the construction of Interstate 496. They created an inventory of objects, designed the
exhibit space, wrote a background narrative, selected signature objects, and proposed visitor activities.
11
For the wiki the class used a dedicated site at Wikispaces that included an embedded Google calendar to
record appointments and due dates for group projects and meetings with partners. See http://wikispaces.com. I am
particularly grateful to Lawrence Bruce, a middle school history teacher from Union City, Michigan, for ideas and
instruction on the use of Wikispaces for history instruction. For a sample, see http://mrbruceshistory-2010
.wikispaces.com/.
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meeting and helped us stay on task. All projects and assignments were born or became
digital: book reviews and summaries, project reports, oral testimonies, primary sources,
and texts were either scanned or acquired already in digital form, and stored online in an
Omeka archive (Omeka is an open-source repository program).12
The seminar prescribed a general, flexible method for research and project development. For the first three to four weeks the students engaged in background reading and
discussion about the methods and sources of local history, history for audiences outside
the world of scholars and scholarship, and the problem of distinguishing heritage from
history. They analyzed examples of historians’ attempts to convey history to popular
audiences in various media (for example, they reviewed and discussed an episode of Ken
Burns’s The War and examined examples of state social studies curricula that embed
various historical narratives in K–12 history instruction).13
The class then turned to the task of preparing for its project on the Lansing busing
controversy through two weeks of background readings, discussion, and blog postings.
Choosing these readings and creating a working bibliography were my first order of business in the content-development phase. The issue of busing for school desegregation
convulsed Michigan’s politics through the mid-1970s. It energized the candidacy of the
Alabama segregationist George C. Wallace in the Democratic presidential primaries in
1968 and 1972, sparked a brief resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan in Michigan, and
prompted the state’s most prominent politicians, including its governor, senators, and
members of the House of Representatives, to support an antibusing amendment to the
U.S. Constitution. The students were unaware of this recent history and of its local manifestations in clashes between parents, school boards, police, and students (including the
fire-bombing of school buses in Pontiac in 1971 and a march on Washington organized
by the opponents of busing the following year).14 The class therefore had to grasp the
political and legal context of the busing controversy to be able to appreciate the stakes in
the conflict, create a timeline of events to frame their research, select the major turning
points that defined the struggle in Lansing, compile a cast of characters for potential
interviews and documentation, and list the significant secondary and primary sources
needed to address the issues that it had chosen.
In the most recent seminar the students were assigned studies of school desegregation
at the national and local levels in the 1960s and 1970s (including pertinent court cases)
12
My practice is founded in the belief that if historians cannot conduct research without a computer then
neither should students while they learn the craft. Of course, this remains sharply contested territory in the profession and poses reasonable concerns about maintaining a productive learning atmosphere. For a high-profile case
with a different perspective, see Daniel de Vise, “Wide Web of Diversions Gets Laptops Evicted from Lecture
Halls,” Washington Post, March 9, 2010, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/03/08/
AR2010030804915.html. Omeka is a program designed by the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New
Media for small organizations and history classes to store, organize, and present digital museum collections. See
http://www.omeka.org.
13
These readings included Tyrrell, Historians in Public; Lowenthal, Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History;
and selections from Kyvig and Marty, Nearby History. The last book also served as the students’ manual of practice
during the rest of the course. The War, dir. Ken Burns and Lynn Novick (Florentine Films and -, 2007). In
the case of the Ken Burns film, students had to ponder not only how Burns tried to construct a metanarrative of
World War II out of disparate community histories but also what Burns did to his sources (such as overlay sound
effects on silent archival film and use stock photographs of combat in one battle to illustrate combat in a completely
different campaign) to accomplish that objective.
14
No scholarly survey exists yet of the busing controversy in Michigan, but the files of local newspapers are
filled with reports about it. See, for an example, Patricia Zacharias, “Irene McCabe and Her Battle against Busing,”
Detroit News, May 4, 1997, http://apps.detnews.com/apps/history/index.php?id=161.
Textbooks and Teaching
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from a reading list that I prepared.15 They created summaries of the assigned works,
which were posted to the course wiki and which all students were required to read. The
audience for the summaries was their peers: the digest of a reading briefed class members
on the work’s thesis, evidence, and structure, and discussed how its story might or might
not be related to Lansing’s busing drama. The group then examined the few local secondary accounts of Lansing’s conflict over busing, especially chronicles of the school board’s
extensive litigation over busing in the 1970s. Finally, I distributed a scanned copy of the
 reference librarians’ vertical file on busing, covering over a fourteen-year span from
1964 to 1978, that included two dozen newspaper articles and reports of school board
meetings and events related to the attempts to create and implement a desegregation plan.
This material gave students a small unstructured sampling of primary sources and a
bedrock of secondary readings from which they could construct the defining questions
and turning points that would focus their research.
As the subject and the sources expanded before their eyes, complexities started to
cloud the students’ initial casting of heroes and villains in the controversy. They discovered that although race was a powerful theme in the conflict, it did not explain the motivations of all key participants, including African Americans who criticized the school
board’s pattern of ignoring needed improvements in the nearby schools where they still
wanted to send their children.16 Based on this information, the group constructed a detailed and evolving timeline that combined local, national, and legal events.
The class then used the timeline and background readings first to debate and select
several common background issues in the national struggle over busing that would contextualize their local investigation, and second to identify particularly significant local
turning points that would focus their research. Background issues (for example, race and
education; state and federal relations; neighborhood schooling and civil rights) would provide a generalizable problem that their local research would illuminate. Turning points
would help them focus on local events, characters, and ideas in the story that highlighted
significant change. This process of sifting and selecting issues and turning points became
the most contested, difficult, and revealing challenge of the semester. The selection of
major issues was deeply influenced by the students’ background reading; those who had
read court cases, for instance, gravitated toward legal and constitutional issues involved
with busing, while those who had read local case studies of busing in other cities tended
to select issues revolving around racial conflict, local control of the schools, and patterns
of residential segregation. One problem they encountered was that some issues—crossdistrict busing for example—did not apply well to Lansing’s situation. Yet the students
15
In addition to contemporary technical reports and studies, the students reviewed Jody Carlson, George
C. Wallace and the Politics of Powerlessness: The Wallace Campaigns for the Presidency, 1964–1976 (New Brunswick,
1981); Louis P. Masur, The Soiling of Old Glory: The Story of a Photograph That Shocked America (New York,
2008); Ronald P. Formisano, Boston against Busing: Race, Class, and Ethnicity in the 1960s and 1970s (Chapel Hill,
2004); Ione Malloy, Southie Won’t Go: A Teacher’s Diary of the Desegregation of South Boston High School (Urbana,
1986); Bernard Schwartz, Swann’s Way: The School Busing Case and the Supreme Court (New York, 1986); and
Davison M. Douglas, ed., School Busing: Constitutional and Political Developments (New York, 1994).
16
After working through months of school board minutes, one student observed, “I also realized many minority parents would approach the school board wanting to control their neighborhood schools because they did not
feel like their children were receiving the best education possible. This would be parents from Chicano neighborhoods and African American neighborhoods. I find it troubling that a school board would just ignore these parents’
pleas for a better education for their children.” Student blog entry for  480, March 17, 2011 (in Knupfer’s
possession).
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March 2013
also saw that racial conflict and concerns about the quality of local schools were evident
in every case they studied. They also discovered new issues—such as the financial costs of
long-term busing programs—that had not occurred to them previously.
I found myself repeatedly consulting with the students as they grappled with selecting
the issues that would drive their work. My challenge was to help them order and prioritize
the many conflicts they uncovered. Rather than lecture about the history of education, or
race in twentieth-century America, or civil rights, I had them use their summaries of the
literature to connect sets of issues into patterns of conflict spanning time and place, and
then gauge the intensity of the struggle in each instance. Their research would try to
address the issues they identified. After much debate, they selected as their keystone contextual issues the conflict between the demand for equal access to educational facilities
versus the public’s preference for neighborhood schools; the requirements of federal legislation as interpreted by the courts versus the tradition of local control over schools; and
the problem of whether desegregation would or would not improve the education of kids.
These issues described essential questions that the research needed to address, but how
were the students to track the course of debate and conflict over those problems, especially when the evidence was scattered across the community in the memories, attics,
libraries, and archives of the participants? Confronting a mass of undigested and barely
organized material would require applying the historian’s skill of identifying significant
points of change and resistance through time: locating turning points in the conflict that
would concentrate the students’ work. The concept of a turning point in history is
common in everyday discourse about past events, but a turning point as a historical
construct was new to them. We discussed how one defines a turning point, how turning
points help us sift the significant from the insignificant, and how the selection itself
determines subsequent directions for research and analysis. For our purposes this concept
was a form of pedagogical or discipline-based content knowledge unique to history that
would benefit from much closer analysis by scholars of teaching and learning because it
bridges the worlds of historical scholarship and the classroom.
The class used the following as its definition of turning point: a “change of such
magnitude that the course of individual experiences and societal development begins to
follow a new trajectory, shaped by a new set of possibilities and constraints.”17 As we
discussed in class, a turning point need not be revolutionary in size or scope; it may
involve the foreclosing of some options and the opening of others, and its characteristics
may include many elements of the unexpected. And the scope of the event is relative to
the frame of historical events being studied: whereas students taking a survey course will
learn that the emancipation of slaves was a major turning point in the history of the
United States, students studying the conflict over busing in Lansing might assess a
school board decision or a protest march as a major turning point in that story.
The students’ explorations of this concept led them to greater understanding of contingency in interpreting the past. They realized that the concept is a tool that can be used to
order and focus on events as a way to isolate significant and influential causes, effects, motivations, and larger consequences. We needed to return to this question on a number of
occasions because the students’ inclination to select a particular turning point changed
17
Nikki Mandell and Bobbie Malone, Thinking like a Historian: Rethinking History Instruction (Madison,
2008), 26. This useful guide provides practical applications of the concept as a category of historical inquiry.
Textbooks and Teaching
1171
every time they read a new source. For instance, just as had happened when identifying
the main issues in the country’s busing controversy, students who read in the legal history
of school desegregation inclined toward designating as major turning points federal cases such
as Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (1954), Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of
Education (1971), Keyes v. School District No. 1 (1973), and Milliken v. Bradley (1974). But
as the students engaged with the local materials on busing, they discovered that although
these federal cases set vital legal preconditions for change, the first desegregation plans put
forward by the Lansing Public Schools only briefly recognized the legal framework for
school integration and did not directly respond to Brown or any other court decision.
Indeed, the city’s 1960 comprehensive master plan—created six years after Brown and five
years after the Supreme Court’s warning in Brown II (Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka,
1955) that schools needed to proceed “with all deliberate speed” toward desegregation—
ignored clear evidence of residential segregation, inequities in the schools, and the influx of
African Americans into the area in the immediate aftermath of World War II.18 No local
court case had intervened to awaken the school board to that situation; instead, the black
community began to demand attention to the needs of its neighborhood schools, while the
general climate in the state (especially in Detroit) made school desegregation a major issue.19
The more that students learned about the area’s history the more they appreciated how local
citizens and politicians were responding to circumstances in their own backyard rather than
to distant court decisions, no matter how significant those may have been. Looking for local
turning points forced them to examine local history more carefully, a tricky task given the
very small amount of secondary material, especially compared with the trove of works on
busing across the country.
Once again I found myself largely using the skills of a consultant on behalf of history
instruction. The class’s debate over local issues pulled the students into primary sources
in search of moments where crisis forced the community to confront and decide critical
issues. I asked the students to consider looking for events that crystallized a range of
opinion and local interests about busing and desegregation; through a series of classroom
discussions they listed, debated, and reordered important events from their timeline so
that they could differentiate background events (such as federal court decisions) from
activities that directly engaged the community in deciding the issue. In the end, they
chose three turning points. First, the students selected the proposals by the Citizens
Advisory Committee on Educational Opportunity in 1972 to bus kids at the K–8 levels
18
Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 347 U.S. 483 (1954); Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of
Education, 402 U.S. 1 (1971); Keyes v. School District No. 1, 413 U.S. 189 (1973); Milliken v. Bradley, 418 U.S.
717 (1974). Lansing Board of Education, “Official Report of the Citizens Advisory Committee on Educational
Opportunity,” Lansing State Journal, April 23, 1972, sec. G. City Planning Board, Comprehensive Master Plan:
Lansing and Environs (Lansing, 1958), 130–31. The plan’s chapter on the public schools, illustrated with maps of
neighborhoods and plans for new schools, emphasized the need to improve schools in the outlying neighborhoods,
rather than in the central city, where blacks were concentrated. Brown v. Board of Education (Brown II), 349 U.S.
294 (1955). On black migration into Lansing, see Douglas K. Meyer, “The Changing Negro Residential Patterns
in Lansing, Michigan, 1850–1969” (Ph.D. diss., Michigan State University, 1970); Rose Turner Brunson, “A
Study of the Migrant Negro Population in Lansing, Michigan, during and since World War II” (M.A. thesis,
Michigan State University, 1955); and Benjamin G. Dennis, “The Level of Formal and Informal Integration of
Negroes in the External Community of Lansing, Michigan” (Ph.D. diss., Michigan State University, 1964).
19
The story of Lansing’s attempts to desegregate its schools may be followed in the pages of the Lansing State
Journal from 1964 to 1978. A key summary of the background, along with demographic profiles of the schools
and details of several proposed plans to desegregate the elementary schools, is in Lansing Board of Education,
“Official Report of the Citizens Advisory Committee on Educational Opportunity.”
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March 2013
(the high schools had begun desegregating in 1966), which marked a major recognition
that the city’s elementary schools were indeed segregated and in need of a plan to remedy
the situation. Their second turning point was a divisive recall election in 1972 that
replaced the school board’s busing proponents with busing opponents from a local group
called Citizens for Neighborhood Schools. The new board then reversed its busing decision, putting it on a collision course with the local chapter of the . Finally, the students chose a 1976 decision by federal district judge Noel P. Fox that the board’s actions
were unconstitutional and that it had willfully maintained a segregated school system.
Although the board appealed the decision for the next two years, until the Supreme
Court refused to hear the case, this decision effectively reversed the course of the controversy again and finally led to the implementation of a busing plan for Lansing’s elementary schools.20
Armed now with its background issues, timeline, and local turning points, the class
could launch its formal research. It divided into teams to examine government documents, newspaper accounts, unpublished and unprocessed records from local schools,
biographical material on important individuals in the story, and maps, photographs, or
other visual traces. Teams spent hours combing through microfilm of the local newspaper from the critical year of 1972–1973; reading minutes of school board meetings that
detailed often emotional and tense confrontations over busing; poring over boxes of
records from schools looking for photographs, student journals and artwork, and attendance records; scanning census maps and creating maps of neighborhoods and district
boundaries from the period. One group discovered that a school board member who had
been recalled during the election in 1972 still worked as a docent at the Capital Area
District Library, so they arranged an interview with him that they transcribed and
inserted into the resource packet. Another team researched the characters supplied to
them by other groups, hoping to dig up personal papers or make contacts for possible
oral histories. The students occasionally reported on their progress in their blogs, and
class periods for several weeks were given over to group consultations and writing up of
results. This entire primary-source investigation portion of the course was compressed
into about six weeks (including spring break).
Collaborative, community-centered research was definitely not the kind of historical
research to which the students were accustomed. As one student put it, research for the
typical history paper involved going to the library to “look for quotes to support my
thesis.” The research in this class completely upended that model. Students had to share
their notes, rely upon each other for accuracy and clarity in transcription and presentation,
recast their findings in response to those of their classmates, and consult with each other
and me about the seemingly endless questions that arose when they tackled the sources.
For example, the class spent several hours discussing how to record their findings. It was
a particularly powerful learning experience for students to have to take notes not for themselves but for others. They had to make their historical thinking visible in their notes because
20
Judge Noel P. Fox later expanded that decision in National Association for the Advancement of Colored People
v. Lansing Board of Education, 429 F. Supp. 583 (W.D. Mich., 1976). This decision required the board to institute
a court-supervised desegregation plan. It was one of a dozen decisions by local and federal courts in the Lansing
controversy. A helpful chronology of this litigation is in the privately published work, Georgia Mead and David
Schulert, The History and Growth of the Lansing Public Schools, vol. IV: With Special Emphasis on Years 1967–1982
(Lansing, [1983?]), 93–98, available at Local Reading Room, Capital Area District Library.
Textbooks and Teaching
1173
future researchers were going to depend upon those notes to lead them to sources. This
meant being precise, clear, consistent, and comprehensive in ways they never felt were necessary when writing a research paper for an instructor. Although some instructors have students
turn in their research notes, none of the students in this class had ever experienced that
requirement. “The importance of this was hammered home every time I would go to find a
needed source, and discover it was either mislabeled or out of order,” a student noted, “This
was in no way the result of a negligent classmate, but instead another miscommunication
that offered me a very interesting vantage point to view historical research. I truly have a new
appreciation for the teams of researchers that are employed by authors, as the stakes are much
higher for their miscommunications.” The class decided upon a common research note
format (itself another subject of class discussion: what information goes into a research note?)
that everyone was to follow.21
Old barriers and habits yielded to new patterns of learning as this experience took the
students out of their expected paths of research and reporting. As one put it in his blog,
“Normally when you research for something, the goal or final intent is to make an argument
about the issue you are researching. In this project, however, the goal was to create a finding
aid, not to create a[n] argumentative academic document. This put me out of my comfort
zone and I was forced to learn to sift through and record all of the sources, rather than
focusing on a few that back up my argument.” Others became fascinated with their sources:
“Every time I read the [school board] minutes I am just amazed at what was going on during
this time period. The way people thought, acted, said—it is amazing to me.” Students accustomed to working alone, almost in isolation, now sought collaboration. “For most of the
research,” said one, “we should [have] tried to advise group members to make sure they go in
pairs at least, not alone. The only reason I say this is because it is difficult, and almost intimidating, to go into the books and newspapers on your own.”22 Working in groups of two or
three enabled them to focus, divide the labor, and talk through important decisions.
One of the students’ most important findings confirmed my own experience as a consultant: that the absence of evidence is evidence and that one must work with what one
finds when one finds it. In case after case, students hunted for material that “wasn’t
there” but then began to consider why it was not there and what its absence tells us about
historical events. Students were astonished that such an emotional and transformative
conflict as busing left practically nothing behind in the school records.
My group members and I were left with the very real conclusion that few visual
resources of the Lansing Desegregation Battle existed. . . . After digging through box
after box of school “records,” which were a treasure trove of random papers, scrapbooks, and yearbooks that had little to do with our topic, it became clear that a
visual record was not adequately left behind by the schools—which was a major
disappointment, but a learning experience. The resources that you hope exist may
not exist, and to follow Knupfer’s Rule “work with what you have, when you have
21
Student blog entry for  480, May 3, 2011 (in Knupfer’s possession). Many research manuals discuss
note taking, but the classic that informed our efforts was Jacques Barzun and Henry F. Graff, The Modern
Researcher (Forth Worth, 1992), 21–34.
22
For the “Normally when you research . . .” quotation, see student blog entry for  480, May 3, 2011(in
Knupfer’s possession). For the “Every time I read . . .” quotation, see student blog entry for  480, March 29,
2011, ibid. For elaboration, see also student blog entry for  480, March 31, 2011, ibid. For the “For most of
the research . . .” quotation, see student blog entry for  480, April 21, 2011, ibid.
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March 2013
it;” our group had to work with “what we had,” which was demographic information and street addresses of schools.23
The usual advice from an instructor in this situation would be to direct students away
from working on a topic for which little evidence seemed to exist. I took a different tack:
framing the absence of evidence as an invitation to conduct research and urging that
whatever one finds can become useful in imaginative and important ways.
After six weeks of research and discussion, the students reconvened and created new
teams to prepare the final product. One group wrote the background narrative; another
assembled the maps and visuals and polished the timeline; another managed the digital
objects uploaded to the Omeka archive; another created the final bibliography; and a
final group sorted through and arranged all of the class note files. I assembled the pieces
into the packet and reformatted it for presentation to the  librarian at a class session
where he could review and discuss the work with us.24
The final product fell short of our hopes and exceeded our expectations. It reflected
the students’ inexperience with handling primary sources, their unfamiliarity with professional conventions when presenting and interpreting public issues, their natural inclination to shun teamwork and press on alone, the pressures of the semester clock, and their
struggles with software, networking, and digital resources.25 While our partner at the
library expressed great satisfaction with the resource guide and mounted it at the library’s
Web site for others to use, the students thought that it did not go nearly far enough. In
our final drafting sessions students often expressed a wish that subsequent classes would
pick up their work and improve it. Many wondered if the library’s researchers and patrons
would ever use it. Others were concerned that the sources the class had found were but the
tip of the iceberg, that the issue was so large and the community sources for chronicling the
story so vast and scattered, that its true dimensions would never really be known. (The class
had discovered to its shock and surprise that the city’s major newspaper, the Lansing State
Journal, along with the local television stations, had destroyed their pre-1960s archives of
stock photos, videotape, and back issues, with very little left behind beyond microfilm at
the state’s historical library.)
I take all of these observations as signs of progress. Historical research is never really
finished; professionals always see room for improvement in their work. The students
emerged with a much stronger appreciation of the fragility of the historical record, of the
gap between a community’s need to preserve its past and its actual efforts to do so, of the
deep material interests and personal emotions that raise the stakes of seemingly small, local
events, and of the value of accuracy, fairness, and clarity in reconstructing and interpreting
23
Student blog entry for  480, May 5, 2011, ibid. This student’s group constructed chronological maps of
the district and hunted for photographs, student artwork, or other visual traces of the conflict at the local schools.
The apparently simple task of locating the schools to plot the desegregation plan on a map turned out to be quite
difficult: “many of the school buildings had either been demolished or changed names,” she recalled. Student blog
entry for  480, March 28, 2011, ibid. A series of school directories inside one of the record boxes yielded a list
of school addresses.
24
For the final packet, see Kari Boyd et al., “Lansing’s Controversy over Busing Students for Desegregation,
1966–1978: A Resource Package for Students, Teachers, Researchers, and the Public,” http://cadl.org/answers/
local-history/Lansing%20Schools%20Desegregation%20Finding%20Aid.pdf.
25
I have found repeatedly that the current generation of college students in my classes are barely computer
literate and have a great deal of difficulty managing and organizing digital information beyond clicking, dragging,
and dropping files. They spent much time figuring out how to share documents and images, and using the wiki
and Omeka proved a significant learning challenge.
Textbooks and Teaching
1175
events. And future researchers will find nuggets in this guide that would have taken them
many laborious hours to uncover or create: the names of key as well as lesser participants;
an enhanced timeline of critical events; census tract maps of school district boundaries by
race; dozens of notes and summaries of school records, newspaper articles, and visual materials with a keyword index for finding them in the document.
Finally, students came away having developed a powerful connection to nearby history.
While poring over the materials at the library, they learned that the  possesses huge,
untapped resources on Lansing’s automobile past, the evolution of its neighborhoods, and
visual treasures documenting the history of its schools, nonprofit organizations, and architecture. The future teachers in our group will begin their first teaching assignments much
more aware of the wonderful possibilities outside the school walls, while those who enter
business, government, or the nonprofit sector will be more sensitive to how, as well as
where, records are stored. It is my hope that having discovered these things in a town almost
all of them had never lived in would inspire them as future teachers, bankers, lawyers, professors, doctors, and owners of businesses, to step out into their communities to “increase
the general level of historical understanding in our society.”