Page 131 - Balancing between the present and the past

6.1 Introduction
Scholars such as Seixas (2015), VanSledright (2011), and Wineburg (2001) emphasize that history education should not only focus on learning historical facts but also include promoting students’ historical thinking and reasoning. Historical reasoning competencies have therefore become increasingly important in western history education (Erdmann & Hasberg, 2011). A key component of historical reasoning is the ability to perform historical contextualization (Lévesque, 2008; Seixas & Morton, 2013; Van Drie & Van Boxtel, 2008), which is the ability to situate phenomena and actions by people in the context of time, historical location, long-term developments, or particular events to give meaning to these phenomena and actions (Van Boxtel & Van Drie, 2012). Without this ability, for example, historical agents’ actions cannot be explained and historical events cannot adequately be interpreted (Barton & Levstik, 2004; VanSledright, 2002).
Despite the importance of historical contextualization, research indicates that many
students struggle when asked to perform historical contextualization tasks because
they view the past from a present-oriented perspective (Foster, Ashby, & Lee, 2008; 6 Hartmann & Hasselhorn, 2008; Huijgen, Van Boxtel, Van de Grift, & Holthuis, 2014;
Shemilt, 2009). As Reisman and Wineburg (2008) noted: “Contextualized historical
thinking runs counter to the narratives and frameworks that many students bring
to class” (p. 203). Teachers should therefore explicitly teach students historical contextualization to help them overcome possible present-oriented perspectives.
Research on historical contextualization has focused on, for example, how students performed historical contextualization (e.g., Berti, Baldin, & Toneatti, 2009; Wooden, 2008) and how it can be observed (Huijgen, Van de Grift, Van Boxtel, & Holthuis, 2017), or promoted (e.g., Baron, 2016; Boerman-Cornell, 2015). However, experimental studies testing pedagogies on historical contextualization are scarce. This is unfortunate since teachers seem to struggle with developing instructional tools to engage students in historical reasoning processes (e.g., Achinstein & Fogo, 2015; Reisman, 2015; Saye & Social Studies Inquiry Research Collaborative, 2013). More examples of effective and practical instructional tools are therefore desired within the field of history education (e.g., Fogo, 2014; Grant & Gradwell, 2010; Reisman & Fogo, 2016).
A historical contextualization pedagogy
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