Page 198 - Balancing between the present and the past
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                                Chapter 8
might be “blocked” by their present-oriented perspectives. Students need therefore to be alerted explicitly to possible present-oriented perspectives when examining the past. Moreover, we agree with, for example, Endacott and Brooks (2013) that not only a cognitive form but also an affective form of historical empathy might promote historical contextualization since students in the second study used, for instance, recognizable emotions to explain historical agents’ actions.
A fourth contribution of this thesis is the focus on teachers’ instructions. Various scholars have argued that teachers might struggle with teaching historical reasoning competencies (e.g., Reisman, 2015; Saye & Social Studies Inquiry Research Collaborative, 2013), but observation studies on this topic have been scarce, resulting in a lack of insight into history teachers’ instructions and specific professionalization needs (Van Hover, Hicks, & Cotton, 2012). This thesis included a domain-specific observation study whose results indicate that the teachers included in our sample did not engage students much in historical contextualization processes.
A final contribution is that a theoretical framework for teaching historical contextualization has been missing. By integrating previous research on historical contextualization, we developed a framework containing four interrelated components (see also Figure 1 in the first chapter), which can be used by researchers and teachers to design and test practical tools to promote students’ ability to perform historical contextualization. The fifth and sixth studies illustrated that this framework could very well be used to develop such tools. This contribution is especially important since there might be a lack of practical and effective tools to promote students’ historical reasoning competencies (e.g., Fogo, 2014; Grant & Gradwell, 2010; Reisman & Fogo, 2016).
8.5 Practical implications
What are the practical implications for the field of history education? First, the developed measure instruments, such as the Nazi Party instrument, could easily be implemented by teachers in classrooms to test students’ ability to perform historical contextualization. Which students view the past from a present-oriented perspective, and who performs historical contextualization successfully? If teachers have this information, they can adapt their teaching to the specific needs of individual students.
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