Using the Senses to Engage History

As learning is lifelong and continuous, reading the Roundtable Articles has allowed me to focus on the senses and connect them to thinking about how I can engage my students in the classroom.  Specifically, how can I create activities, lessons, and channels of learning that teach history as well as provide cognitive connections that facilitate motivated learning?  Even though our time as teachers is short, I feel implementing strategies that allow students to use all of their senses will certainly imprint their minds and  nurture skill sets vital to not only succeed in life, but to enjoy it.  Additionally, this will foster an anthropologic sense of thinking about culture, identity, and different ways of learning, living, and being that may be far different from the identity of the student themselves. 

I agree with Mark Smith in his explanation that that the senses are “communicators of knowledge and, especially, as expressions of power and identity” (2008, p. 379).  In my view, the restricting societal consciousness of purveying hegemony to the visual has reduced artistic expression, creativity, and methods of writing, learning, and teaching, especially in the Western Hemisphere.  While learning about Descartes in an Anthropology class as UNC Chapel Hill a few years ago, I became fascinated with the difference in cultures across the world and how they treat and view nature.  While the West maintains a strict left/right spatial notion of thinking, many other cultures labeled as ‘animalistic,’ ‘inferior,’ are scrutinized and labeled in this way because they transfuse nature and the interconnectedness of the “other” senses throughout their daily lives.   Upon reading Rath’s “Hearing American History,” I concluded that the societal shift to print culture drastically changed the way Westerners viewed and processed the world around them.  I want to liken back to World War II, when Franklin D. Roosevelt would give his famous “Fireside Chats” that were a staple in almost every American household at the time.  In today’s time, not many people have a radio in their house, since IPods, computers, and television has laid this once dominant form of communication to the wayside.  Now, political campaigns are being won through new information networks such as Facebook and YouTube. 

I also agree with Rath in his statement that “perhaps the biggest obstacle to implementing such a historically grounded approach to orality is the difficulty of decentering and denaturalizing one’s own sensory world” (2008, p. 426).  As vision has been associated with higher levels of thinking dating back to ancient philosophers, I know this struggle to disengage the mind from the dominant modes of thinking and learning about the world will be an uphill battle.  However, from reading these articles focusing on sensory learning, it only makes sense (pun intended!). 

In wrapping up the articles, I agreed with Howes’ article “An Anthropological Approach to the History of the Senses.”  Without using all of our senses, especially we as teachers, the world will become static.  Teaching in this way will continue to mold students who do not appreciate the world around us.  Rath speaks to the fact that the senses are a “zero-sum game.”  I agree with this statement wholeheartedly.  Now, I am certainly not an anti-technology guy who wishes our society to revert back to the Stone Age; however, I do feel that too many of the younger generation are not using their senses to see and experience the world around them.  Instead of meeting their friends in the woods for some classic war games building forts and experiencing the fullness of nature, kids are staying inside communicating through third-party avenues that are impersonalistic and disconnected from the Mother Earth.  One cannot visualize the past unless they experience how, where, and why people lived.  Smith (2008) wrote about the shift in societal consciousness and how they perceive the world around them through the use or disuse of various senses.   He wrote in his article “Getting in Touch with Slavery and Freedom,” “Seeing is believing, but feeling’s the truth.”  Let’s get back to that!

Teaching history by employing the senses has all kinds of creative and imaginative ways to get our students to learn through this mode of seeking knowledge.  I am fascinated with America’s recent historiography and the lack of scholarship, course objectives, content, etc. in our middle and high schools.  We seem to stop after the Vietnam War as if 40+ years of history hasn’t occurred.  To employ sensory history in this aspect would be awesome.  As a teacher, I could plan units that brought foods from nations such as Afghanistan or Iraq and have the students break down the food sensorially.  Students could learn about the atrocities of war, new technology in war by using primary source videos and audio to feel the intensity of the moment that a battle brings with it.  A unit could be created that focused on deconstructing stereotypes of Muslim culture and religion through sensory-learning methods.  The list goes on and on.

Finally, one question/concern I want to pose in the context of the “sensorial revolution.”  While this movement to expose students to explore the world, learn, research history, and make history by using all their senses has risen, the movement of standardized testing has also taken to the forefront of national dictum.  Thus, there seems to be a contradiction in the eyes of a teacher.  Standardized tests cannot and probably will never ask a student about the smell of the slave ships or the sounds of the Liberty Bell, so one has to be mindful that these tests are purely visual in content.  Balancing these two will certainly be the challenge.  Yet, we as teachers have to enforce, implement, and ignite the flames of this resurgence of the senses to describe history in order for these skills to themselves become the dominant mode of how the next generation characterizes the past, present, and future.

One way to engage the senses in a social studies class is to create a lesson on food and culture.  Students could relate geography and culture to what type of food cultures eat.  This lesson can also incorporate economics and how some countries specialize and export food to create wealth.  Students could have an open dialogue on the food that they eat at home.  Then, students can research a country and the food they predominantly eat.  If approved, students could bring in foods, especially is the class is from a diverse culture.