Page 162 - Balancing between the present and the past

Chapter 7
students examine the past with their own knowledge, values, and beliefs, which often results in misunderstanding historical phenomena and agents’ actions (e.g., Hartmann & Hasselhorn, 2008; Seixas & Peck, 2004). Wineburg (2001) argues that many students naturally view the past from their own present-oriented perspectives and that historical thinking is therefore an “unnatural act” that needs to be learned in history classrooms. Teaching students historical contextualization could prevent viewing the past from a present-oriented perspective because an important component of historical contextualization is considering the specific circumstances of a historical period when examining the past (Endacott & Brooks, 2013; Reisman & Wineburg, 2008).
7.2.3 Engaging students in historical contextualization
To help teachers develop teaching and learning activities that engage students in historical contextualization processes, we developed four design principles of historical contextualization in previous research: (1) raising awareness of present- oriented perspectives, (2) reconstructing a historical context, (3) creating opportunities to practice historical contextualization to explain historical phenomena or agents’ actions, and (4) enhancing historical empathy (Huijgen, Van de Grift, et al., 2018). For this study, we used the first three design principles to develop a three-stage framework in which the teacher (1) presents a historical case that triggers possible present-oriented perspectives, (2) instructs students to reconstruct a historical context for the historical case, and (3) instructs students to use historical context knowledge to interpret the historical case again.
We chose not to use the design principle of historical empathy because this principle can be incorporated in the different stages of the framework. For example, students can be asked to imagine the thoughts and feelings of individual historical agents using their own “similar” life experiences to reconstruct a historical context. The three- stage historical contextualization framework is visualized in Figure 4. First, awareness is raised concerning possible present-oriented perspectives by presenting a historical case that students find difficult to explain. Next, the historical context of the particular case is reconstructed. Finally, students and the teachers interpret the historical case again with their newly acquired historical context knowledge.
The first component of the framework is raising students’ awareness of their possible present-oriented perspectives. Building upon work in the field of cognitive conflicts
160