Call for Proposals: NCHE 2012 Conference, Reading the Past: Literature and Literacy in History

The National Council for History Education has issued a Call for Proposals for the 2012 Annual Conference.

The deadline for submitting a proposal is September 26, 2011. Hawaii history teachers, historians and others are strongly urged to submit proposal ideas.

Next year’s conference will be held in Kansas City, Missouri. The 2012 theme is Reading the Past: Literature and Literacy in History:

Because history is narrative and story, not simply a string of facts, the best works in our field are part of a proud literary tradition. From the accounts of the Ancient Greeks and Hebrews to those written by scholars of the American Revolution and World War II, the appeal of history lies in the power of the storyteller to capture our imagination and carry us back to another moment in time. The worlds they reconstruct are inhabited by heroes and villains, women and men of great wisdom and great foolishness, brilliant leaders and fatally flawed ones—and ordinary men and women whose experiences enrich our understanding of the past.

The past is read through art and fiction as well as through the work of historians. From Longfellow and Washington Irving to Charles Dickens and Harriet Beecher Stowe, to Leo Tolstoy and Jane Austin, to E.L. Doctorow and Margaret Atwood , novelists and poets have drawn their inspiration from history, creating a literature that also ‘reads the past.’ And artists from the cave painters to Michelangelo, to Louis David and Charles Wilson Peale, to Goya and Picasso have captured and interpreted critical events and key figures in history. Even in dance choreography like Alvin Ailey’s “Revelations,” history has been the stuff that art is made of.

Who, then, should read the past? Is literacy in history critical for every citizen? Can the argument be made that no generation can secure its future without first knowing its past? Does reading the past help develop the analytic skills, critical judgment, and empathy, needed in our modern, complex world—and if so, how best can these goals be pursued? Questions such as these arise from the conference theme for 2012 and wait to be answered.

The NCHE invites proposals for presentations and poster sessions on this conference theme, but we welcome as well proposals on any other topic of broad interest to teachers. All proposals will be evaluated on the basis of their intellectual content – that is, whether they are historically accurate and ask interesting questions appropriate to historical inquiry – as well as their ability to engage the audience and their overall contribution to the teaching of history.