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I teach writing through the framework of helping students build their writing "practices" (see book in Twitter avatar). This suggests that history students benefits from a similar frame, where they're allowed to "practice" history. ed.stanford.edu/news/college-s…
It's not super complicated. To learn to do something, one must do it. For writing, that means reading and writing while also engaging in reflective practice that helps the practitioner understand and integrate what they've been learning into the larger practice.
History requires knowledge, but it also involves ways of thinking, methods of observation, inference, contextualization that can only be developed through actual practice, very similar to writing.
The big benefit of framing around a "practice (IMO) is the practice provides a framework on which to attach new knowledge. It's not a bunch of unbundled bits. It's a matter of seeing how the new information fits in with the existing organism. It makes acquiring knowledge easier.
In both Why They Can't Write, and The Writer's Practice, I draw a lot of analogies between the writing practice and other practices (particularly cooking). None are perfect, but once you start thinking about what you do as a practice, it's hard to not see practices everywhere.
I'm teaching a FYE course on humor writing in the fall and the focus will be on developing the kinds of practices that humorous writing requires. It's a combination of doing, critical study of how humor works, and investigating the practices of working humor producers.
Students will know what it's like to try to write funny stuff. They will consider the ethics and theory of writing funny stuff (how humor works + how humor intersects with culture to create effects). And they will study the practices of other humor creators to see how they do it.
The end goal is not to produce funny writing as artifacts of the course, but to leave the course with an appreciation of all of the dimensions of practice that go into trying to write humor.
Odds are none of the students will go on to a career writing humor or comedy, but I feel like giving them this framework of a "practice" will pay dividends if they can then apply it to whatever other pursuits they engage in during and after college. That's the goal, anyway.
I think I just Tweeted a first draft of a chunk of my course syllabus. Better bookmark this for myself.
