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Contribution short abstract:

The materiality inherent in environmental history’s attention to place is well-suited to teaching historical thinking skills, such as change over time. A skills-based approach to history instruction and course design offers a useful response to current pressures in higher education.

Contribution long abstract:

As higher education focuses increasingly on learning outcomes, societal pressures call on us to justify the practical aspects of our academic programs. A skills-focused approach to teaching and designing history courses and programs of study is one response to those exigencies.

Being explicit about teaching skills clarifies the transferable and practical aspects of humanities education, including: critical thinking and analytic reasoning, complex problem solving, ethical judgment, social perceptiveness, and written communication. History education imparts those proficiencies through discipline-specific historical thinking skills including causation, contingency, perspective-taking, and change over time.

My proposed contribution to this roundtable discussion centers on my current work on historical thinking pedagogy, specifically a co-authored book, Modern Latin American History: A Skills-Based Approach, under contract with Oxford University Press. A capstone chapter centers environmental history, turning attention to a place, the Amazon, to teach the fundamental historical thinking skill, change over time. The chapter includes material on changing understandings of pre-Columbian Amazonia, the region's history as a refuge from the state and a site of rebellion, shifting visions from “green hell” to “green cathedral,” and contemporary issues of conflict and environmental degradation.

Environmental history’s attention to physical place makes the field well-suited to teaching change over time. That concept is not only fundamental to the discipline of history, but valuable to students, better equipping them to understand how change happens and what change causes. That knowledge helps prepare them to navigate a changing world in whatever path they choose after graduation.