Page 106 - Balancing between the present and the past
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                                Chapter 5
& Hasselhorn, 2008) or why forced marriages took place in the 15th century (Angvik & Von Borries, 1997) due to a present-oriented perspective. History teachers should therefore explicitly teach students historical contextualization (Lévesque, 2008).
However, little is known about the extent to which history teachers demonstrate historical contextualization themselves in their history lessons and how they engage students in historical contextualization processes. Previous observational studies focused more on general history teachers’ classroom behavior. For example, Van Hover, Hicks, and Cotton (2012) included general history teachers’ instructional practices, such as writing, simulations, and discussion, in their developed observation instrument. Nokes (2010) developed and used an observation instrument to examine history teachers’ practices but focused on their literacy-related decisions, such as the texts they used as well as activities and instruction they provided in association with various types of texts. Huijgen, Van de Grift, Van Boxtel, and Holthuis (2017) developed the Framework for Analyzing the Teaching of Historical Contextualization (FAT-HC), which is a more specific observation instrument. However, they focused on the reliability of the instrument and did not present any results on how history teachers promoted historical contextualization in classrooms. The aim of this study is therefore to build upon the work of Huijgen, Van de Grift, et al. (2017) and to explore how teachers promote historical contextualization in their classrooms using the FAT- HC.
5.2 Theoretical framework
5.2.1 Historical contextualization
The ability to perform historical contextualization has become important in Dutch history education (Van Boxtel & Van Drie, 2012). Since the implementation of a framework of overview knowledge (consisting of 10 historical periods with associated key features) in the Netherlands in 2007, students have to use this framework to contextualize historical events, agents’ actions, and sources to explain, compare, or evaluate them (Board of Tests and Examinations, 2017; Wilschut, 2012).
Some studies define historical contextualization as one heuristic that can be applied (in addition to corroboration and sourcing) to examine historical sources (e.g., Britt & Aglinskas, 2002; Wineburg, 1998). However, in history education, it is possible
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