Page 90 - Balancing between the present and the past
P. 90

                                Chapter 4
that much of the information that they know was not available to people in the past. Students’ present-oriented thinking or presentism is considered one of the main reasons why they fail to achieve historical contextualization and could cause misconceptions among students, leading them to reach incorrect conclusions about historical phenomena (Huijgen et al., 2014; Lee & Ashby, 2001; VanSledright & Afflerbach, 2000).
Although we can never be perfectly non-presentist (e.g., Pendry & Husbands, 2000; Wineburg, 2001), teachers should foster students’ awareness of their own contemporary values and beliefs and the consequences of this perspective when explaining the past. To achieve this goal, teachers could present the past as tension for students (e.g., Savenije, Van Boxtel, & Grever, 2014; Seixas & Morton, 2013), present conflicting historical sources (Ashby, 2004), not present the past as progress (Wilschut, 2012), and promote intellectual conflict regarding historical phenomena that might be difficult for students to understand and explain (Foster, 2001; Huijgen & Holthuis, 2015). Furthermore, to prevent students from viewing the past from a present-oriented perspective, teachers should explicitly model or scaffold how historical contextualization can be performed successfully, for example, by providing learning strategies. Explicit teaching of domain-specific strategies, such as how to perform historical contextualization, could promote students’ ability to explain historical events (Stoel et al., 2015). Reisman and Wineburg (2008) stressed the importance of explicitly providing students with an illustration of contextualized thinking, for example, by providing videos of good examples of professional historians who scaffold their contextualization processes.
4.3 Research questions
A subject-specific observation instrument could provide insight into the instructions and methods that history teachers employ to promote students’ ability to perform historical contextualization. Therefore, we aimed to construct a reliable subject- specific observation instrument and scoring design that measures how history teachers promote historical contextualization in classrooms. To address this central aim, we specify the following three research questions:
88





























































































   88   89   90   91   92