The Discursive Negotiation of Narratives and Identities in Learning History (original) (raw)

2012, History Education and the Construction of Identities

What role do values and emotions play in the development of historical understanding by youth? Do they hinder good understanding? Do they foster meaningful learning? These are fundamental questions for the advancement of both research and practice. However, with few exceptions, they have received remarkably little attention in the field of research on history education. In this paper I analyze excerpts of an online discussion among high school students about a historical controversy, which illustrates how the management of values and emotions shapes students’ historical thinking, and more in particular, their use of core historical concepts such as change and continuity, perspective coordination or causality. I examine the data drawing upon two different theoretical perspectives. The first line of inquiry, influenced by a constructivist paradigm, focuses on the individual process of developing historical thinking capacities, that is, how students learn increasingly sophisticated cognitive or logical operations that underlie the development of historical understanding. A second line of inquiry, influenced by socio-cultural perspectives, focuses on the narrative structure of historical knowledge, and key discursive processes that connect our knowledge of the past with the construction of identities in the present. I argue that this dual approach is necessary to capture the interplay between historical thinking, values, and emotions; as well as the interaction between historical understanding and socio-cultural contexts.

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