The Role of Emotion in Teaching and Learning History: A Scholarship of Teaching Exploration

I T IS I R O N I C that visuals are so integrated into postmodern American culture, and yet history instructors still seem so tincomfortable with them, evidently preferring written texts over visual ones. ' Today there exists what historian Louis P. Masur has called a "ubiquitous visual culture" where image and reality and authenticity are difficult to decipher.Perhaps this is the reason students often want to believe that photographs capture things the way they really are. The great American photographer Lewis Hine famously cautioned, "while photographs may not lie, liars may photograph," an admonition to the scholar and the layperson alike to take the time to leam to "read" a photograph.' Throughout the past century, society has been transformed by the democratization of the film and video camera, the popularity of tnovie and television cameras, and the development of the computer's digital tnedia. Because all images offer both a representation and an interpretation of reality, as such, they are impoitant^—indeed, crucial—glimpses into the past. As historians Joshua Brown and Lou Masur and other scholars such as Katherine Martinez have been reminding their colleagues for some time, historians and others in the humanities must become more comfortable teaching with images and engaging students in the art of visual literacy. Images must be processed, integrated, and interpreted by students as much as history professors."" Recent evidence suggests this is