Page 108 - Balancing between the present and the past

Chapter 5
Students should not only reconstruct the historical context of a historical phenomenon, but this context should be used to construct or evaluate a historical reasoning (Van Drie & Van Boxtel, 2008). Historical contextualization becomes meaningful when it helps to explain historical phenomena, make comparisons, or understand processes of change and continuity (Van Boxtel & Van Drie, 2016). Students should therefore be engaged in tasks in which historical contextualization is needed to explain, compare, or evaluate historical phenomena and historical agents’ actions.
A final component of historical contextualization is raising awareness of students’ present-oriented perspectives or presentism. Viewing the past from a present-oriented perspective leads to the misunderstanding of historical phenomena and agents’ actions (Lévesque, 2008; Wineburg, 2001). Students therefore have to become aware of the differences between the past and present and evaluate the past on its own terms (Seixas & Morton, 2013).
5.2.2 Students’ ability to perform historical contextualization
Compared to adults, elementary and secondary school students experience difficulty adopting a perspective that is different from their own, especially when this perspective is not consistent with the knowledge they have (Birch & Bloom, 2007). In history education, where students must be aware that people in the past may not have had the same information that the students possess now, this may lead to a misunderstanding of historical events (Seixas & Peck, 2004). For example, this could result in viewing historical agents as “stupid” or “that they did not know any better” (cf. Lee & Ashby, 2001).
Different studies have focused on how students perform historical contextualization. Hartmann and Hasselhorn (2008) examined how 170 German 10th graders performed historical contextualization to explain a historical agent’s decision. Most students (66%) in their sample obtained a moderate score on the ability to explain a historical agent’s decision, 24% obtained a very high score, and 10% obtained a very low score. Huijgen et al. (2014) used the same task to examine how 1,270 Dutch upper elementary and secondary school students (ranging in age from 10 to 17 years) performed historical contextualization. They concluded that older students achieved higher scores than younger students. This finding also appeared in a study by Berti, Baldin, & Toneatti (2009), who interviewed a total of 150 students (8 to 25 years old) to examine the concept of ordeals among children and young adults. Recently, studies
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