Chapman, A. and Wilschut, A. (eds.) (2015) Joined-up History: New Directions in History Education Research (original) (raw)
Related papers
A Vision of History Teaching and Learning: Thoughts on History Education in Secondary Schools
The High School Journal, 2008
This article presents a vision of effective and pedagogically meaningful history teaching and learning in schools. Bringing to the fore the lack of attention to the philosophy of history, the article first explains the philosophical and epistemological underpinnings of history or the perspectives on the nature of historical knowledge on which the vision is based. It then elucidates what goals history education should strive for, what history should be taught, how history curriculum should be developed, what is expected of teachers in implementing history curriculum, and what qualifications history teachers should possess to effectively practice their profession. It advocates constructivist pedagogy and the disciplinary approach to school history, calling for collaboration between education faculty and historians in the preparation of history teachers.
Education 3-13
I am delighted to edit this issue of Education 3-13, which focuses on the implementation of the English National Curriculum for history at Key Stages 1 and 2 (5-11 years old) (DfE 2013). It is discussed through the lens of recommendations, which apply specifically to history, in Children, Their Lives, Their Education: Final Report and Recommendations of the Cambridge Primary Review (Alexander 2010). This is the most extensive report on primary education in England for 40 years, based on the findings of 28 research surveys, analysing and basing arguments on data collected from an extensive range of sources, including educational organisations, teachers, parents and children from all over England. It combines evidence on recent developments with a vision of how primary education should be. The Cambridge Primary Review Trust (CPRT) which supported schools and promoted a vision for primary education after the publication of the report has now sadly closed down. Nonetheless, the influence of the Cambridge Primary Review remains seminal in the field. Using it as a focus for examining the History curriculum continues its influence and status. In structuring this issue of Education 3-13, contributors were invited to write with a focus on one of the key concepts in the review which are relevant to teaching history in ways which are transforming, and to the National Curriculum for history (DfE 2013). The concepts selected were: oracy, creativity, curiosity, excellence, locality, local, national and global links, chronology and cross-curricularity. The following articles discuss recent research in history education, linked to one of these concepts. The National Curriculum for History (2013) is an endangered curriculum. It can be marginalised because of the accountability invested in English and mathematics and so interpreted merely as a transmission of facts. However, the Cambridge Primary Review (CPR) presented pressing arguments for a pedagogy in which history is amongst those subjects regarded as central to the curriculum. It is a powerful reminder that history remains in need of public, professional and political recognition.
HISTORY’S CHILDREN: PERSPECTIVES FROM THE CLASSROOM
Questions over what history to teach in school, and how to teach it, have generated heated arguments among historians, politicians and public commentators alike. Yet the glaringly absent voices in this debate have been the students and teachers who engage with this subject every day. Despite mounting anxiety about the state of Australian history teaching, there has been little discussion about what actually goes on in the thousands of history classrooms around the nation.
Historical Encounters, 2022
Epistemic beliefs about history can have a profound impact on the way students understand and approach this discipline in the classroom. During the last decades, significant efforts have been made in order to conceptualise different epistemic stances, which can be linked with historical thinking concepts such as the use of evidence. Recent research indicates that epistemic beliefs in history are not only connected to an understanding about the nature of the discipline and the debate about objectivity, but also to the conception of evidence and interpretation in history. This study makes use of a qualitative design in order to examine the conceptions and ideas regarding history of 107 fourth-year secondary education students from three different regions in Spain. Participants were asked to discuss and analyse recent and contrasting interpretations of sources linked to the Spanish transition to democracy (1975-1982), a recent and controversial period. Information was obtained using a structured questionnaire, and responses were transcribed, codified and qualitatively analysed using emerging categories with ATLAS.ti. Results indicate that a majority of students argued that all testimonies can be equally valid in history, even if they show different interpretations or contradictory visions. Only a reduced number of participants focused on the notion of evidence as a determining factor that can indicate whether a testimony is believable, in line with a criterialist epistemic stance. Spontaneous and implicit references to the notions of objectivity and subjectivity in history were also analysed. Results also show diverse conceptions about the aims of history: many secondary education students explicitly indicated that history can be a useful tool to avoid the mistakes of the past, and argued that it should not be imitated. Some participants argued that history can help understand our present, while only a minority of students explicitly argued that each particular historical context should always be taken into account before drawing any lesson from the past. Finally, a discussion is provided about the possibility of examining students' epistemic beliefs by allowing them to address history firsthand. The study concludes that some of the conceptual shortfalls that were detected in secondary education students could be addressed by fostering historical thinking and understanding, and by allowing students to work with sources and testimonies.
Common trends in Contemporary Debates on History Education
Popp S. (ed.), Yearbook of International Society for History Didactics, 2008
In the frame of this paper, I claim that controversies –even if it is only a matter of one- in History Education is not a local phenomenon that could be explained only in relation to social and political national, or regional conditions. Globalization does not only organize everyday life. It demands that we enlarge the explanatory framework by taking into consideration the interdependence of historical phenomena on a global scale. Globalization moreover constitutes the key concept to understand humanity in its third millennium. Controversies on History Education is a typical global case, as they have acquired more and more common aspects so that they can be read overall as battles in the same war which is being waged in different parts of the world. We consequently have probably to extend the vertical and even the horizontal way to think of them in favor of the global one. What is at stake surpasses the frontiers of the nation-state in question and finally concerns future global developments and the formation of the citizenry in the contemporary world.
This study sought to examine students' and teachers' perceptions of history to determine the different conceptual paradigms that exist in students' thinking about history. The study employed a mixed-method research design aimed at triangulating quantitative and qualitative data obtained from questionnaires and focus group interviews. Four hundred and thirty-two participants were randomly drawn from selected secondary schools in Tobago and the east/west corridor of Trinidad. Findings of this research revealed a general weakness in student understanding of such concepts as historical evidence, causation, and historical explanation. This is largely because history concepts were taught only incidentally, if at all, at the upper secondary school level.
On historical thinking and the history educational challenge
Educational Philosophy and Theory, 2020
The notion of historical thinking has in recent years become popular in research on history education, particularly so in North America, the UK and Australia. The aim of this paper is to discuss the cognitive competencies related to historical thinking, as expressed by some influential Canadian researchers, as an history educational notion from two aspects: what is historical thinking and what does it mean in an educational context, and what are the consequences of historical thinking for history education? Our discussion will focus on possible implications of this approach to history education regarding what should be taught in history classrooms and why. By focusing on the notion of historicity, we want to argue that while a focus on a more disciplinary approach to history education is welcome, we think that more attention should be given to what could qualify as a disciplinary approach. We further argue historical thinking and the history educational challenge should be understood as wider and more complex than what history education informed by historical thinking entails.
Theory & Research in Social Education, 2020
is a collection of 24 chapters written by leading international scholars in history education. The book itself is a tour de force as it aims to synthesize in a comprehensive manner "the growth of history education as its own research field" (p. 1). The rationale behind such an endeavor, as suggested in Peter Seixas's foreword, is the growing preoccupation over recent political and social events and the need for history education specialists to take a stance and move the discipline "towards the central place that it deserves" (p. xviii). There is a sense of urgency to take action that transcends the 24 chapters that compose the edited collection, as well as a collective astonishment toward the speed in which the field has grown from a side consideration shared by some historians to a fully fledge academic discipline in less than 20 years. This growth is explored through five different lenses that compose the five sections of the book. The first section considers the policy, research, and societal contexts of history education. Its chapters propose an overview of the field from its beginning to today, identifying gaps that research still needs to address. The second section is centered on the different conceptual constructs found within the discipline such as historical thinking, historical consciousness, historical reasoning, historical empathy, historical agency, and global history education. The third section explores the ties between history education, identity, and ideology. The authors question the narratives proposed in classrooms and their influence on students' agency and growing sense of identity. The fourth section is more pragmatic and includes a vast array of teaching and assessment practices. From professional development to addressing controversial issues in the classroom, the authors look at the complexity of K-12 history instruction. Finally, the fifth section's theme is historical literacies, which encompasses working with evidence, as well as teaching with alternative media such as films, games, and museums. Learning history is not limited to the walls of a classroom, and students build their understanding of the discipline through family history, films, videogames, and museum visits. Teachers have rapidly integrated these alternative media into their teaching, but their effect on students' learning is not always well known. This last section underlines how certain scholarships, such as teaching history using film, are well established, while others, such as teaching using digital simulation gaming, are still emerging fields of study. It would be impossible, due to the length requirements of this review, to summarize each of the 24 chapters individually. Instead, three general ideas that bind the chapters together will be used to give an overall sense of the book. Keeping with historical fashion, these three ideas will be, in essence, chronological as they will look at the past of the discipline, the current preoccupations in research, and the questions that should be addressed in the future.
The purpose of this paper is to analyse and compare four high school history curriculum documents with regard to how they select, sequence and make clear the progression of history knowledge. Thereafter the aim is to establish if there are any recontextualising principles that can be drawn from the comparison. The paper analyses secondary school curriculum documents from South Africa, Canada (British Columbia), Singapore and Kenya. A review of the history education literature indicates that the following concepts are productive when analysing history curriculum documents: the purpose of school history, the knowledge structure of the discipline and the distinction between substantive and procedural knowledge (or first and second order concepts) in history. These concepts thus informed a content analysis of the curriculum documents. The findings show that a memory history approach informs the Kenyan curriculum, while South Africa, Singapore and British Columbia take a disciplinary history approach. This informs the depth and breadth of the substantive knowledge that is selected, and highlights the first recontextualising principle, which is space. Curriculum designers make selections about the extent to which the history content is local, regional, national or international. The second principle is chronology, which is the key organising principle for the sequencing of content in all four curricula. The third principle relates to the conceptual progression of the substantive concepts, which is the extent to which there is progression from generic concepts, to unique, contextualised historical concepts to universal decontextualised historical concepts. The fourth principle is the extent to which the curricula choose to develop procedural knowledge in the discipline. It is not clear how disciplinary procedural knowledge finds progression in these four curricula. Research has been done on progression in historical thinking in classrooms, but this is not reflected in these curriculum documents, which do not map progression in procedural knowledge clearly.