12/16/2023 0 Comments A reflective essay![]() One could complain that the Mexicas "lacked writing skills," but that would be to misunderstand the nature of the text as an oral history. In translating from a nineteenth century Spanish version of the codex, I also came to appreciate the reality of the text as an oral history, the attempt to capture the story "told" not written by the Mexicas hence, the many repetitions of phrases, the lack of clear sentence or paragraph structure, and so forth. Hernán Cortés's letters, published early in the sixteenth century, do not differ dramatically from one version to the next, whereas the various versions of the Florentine Codex, the primary Nahuatl source on the conquest, vary a lot from version to version. What printing did was fix a version of the text and standardize it. It was relatively easy to fabricate a codex, change it, include original illustrations, copy them, or redraw them. The manuscripts remained in private hands until they sometimes ended up in libraries. Most important, codices were copied over and over again. However, my work in verifying that copyright laws did not cover specific texts soon revealed some of the differences between codices and printed books. They are so similar in form to printed books that it became easy to publish them as such. Partly because the indigenous populations of the Americas wrote histories as pictorial texts and partly because the various Franciscan and Dominican friars were used to copying codices rather than producing books, most of the indigenous accounts of the conquest appeared as codices rather than printed books. The codex or manuscript form of the pre-printing press book was linear like the book, but was much more likely than early books to be illustrated. Working with the primary sources I digitized on the conquest of Mexico, I began to understand how different the world of writing, thinking, and knowing shifted with the development of the printing press. ![]() Trask and others have compared this moment in history with the dramatic change in communication and education that followed the invention of Johannes Gutenberg's movable type printing press in the fifteenth century. The implication of Trask's argument is that faculty are stuck in an old paradigm of education, while the world has become something we do not entirely understand. Trask's argument, and I tend to agree with him, is that what we may think are "poor" skills, in fact, demonstrate the new student's capacity for negotiating in his and her world, a world very different from the one we grew up in. Raised on the hypermedia of the Internet and MTV, our students have learned to expect information to be provided in brief chunks of text interspersed with multimedia-images, sounds, even videos. I was particularly taken by David Trask's argument that we (faculty) often complain about the poor skills students have reading books, listening to lectures, and taking notes without reflecting on the relevance of books, lectures, and notes to their world and how they make sense of their world. In January 2000, I was a commentator on a session that focused on the American Historical Association Teaching and Learning Project at the organization's annual meeting. They must also grapple with the particular set of study skills students bring to their classes. ![]() History professors must do everything they can to keep students' interest. The overall result is that few students take more than the minimum survey requirements necessary for graduation.īecause students take so little history, enormous burdens are placed on the few history classes they take. History and the other liberal arts are relegated to "General Education," a category of classes that many professors in the professional schools dismiss as "useless" requirements that impede progress towards career goals. Mass media and, in many cases, the California State University, Fullerton's own publicity brochures and web presence emphasize the role of a college education in preparing students for specific vocations or careers. Unfortunately, this student's attitude is all too common. Only a real faculty member would admit to being in the History Department." She proceeded to explain that she somehow had survived the University's history requirement and had graduated, so she never had to take any more history classes. When I said I was in the History Department, the student responded, "Oh, you must be a faculty member. ![]() The student employee said it did not matter, then asked me what department I was in. Last week, I had just asked for my faculty discount at the University Bookstore when I remembered that I did not have my faculty I.D. ![]()
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