Page 163 - Balancing between the present and the past

(e.g., Johnson & Johnson, 2009), different scholars argue that historical tension might contribute to encouraging students’ ability to perform historical contextualization (Havekes, Coppen, Luttenberg, & Van Boxtel, 2012; Huijgen & Holthuis, 2015). Historical tension is created when students are not able to explain a historical event or a historical agent’s action because of their present-oriented perspectives. For example, the teachers might present a case about a 20-year-old man living in 1930 in Germany and ask the students if they can explain why this man might have voted for the Nazi Party (Hartmann & Hasselhorn, 2008). Students are often inclined to view and judge these types of historical events based on their own values, knowledge, and beliefs (Wineburg, 2001). For the lesson unit of this study, we therefore designed historical cases that encouraged historical tension to provide opportunities for teachers to discuss the consequences and limitations of viewing the past from present-oriented perspectives.
The second component of the framework is teaching students how to reconstruct
a historical context successfully. The students therefore need explicit guidelines
(Havekes et al., 2012; Reisman & Wineburg, 2008). For the lesson unit of this study, we
used a chronological, spatial, political, economic, and cultural frame of reference as
guidelines for students to reconstruct a historical context for a phenomenon or source
(De Keyser & Vandepitte, 1998). These guidelines also function as a checklist since they
provide students with the opportunity to review what they do and do not know about
a historical event. For example, when students are asked to reconstruct the historical 7 context of the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, they might forget the geographical
context, which is essential to understanding and explaining this crisis. Considering all frames of reference reduces the chances of students missing important and relevant historical context knowledge. The guiding questions can be found in Appendix G.
A historical contextualization framework
161