Page 112 - Balancing between the present and the past

Chapter 5
age twelve, children transition from elementary education to secondary education. There are three educational tracks in secondary education. Approximately 60% of the students continue on to pre-vocational schools (duration of 4 years), 20% receive a senior general secondary education (duration of 5 years), and 20% receive a pre- university education (duration of 6 years). The determination is based on the advice of the elementary school and is supported by a mandatory standardized test. For our research, we focus on senior general secondary education and pre-university education since the ability to perform historical contextualization is not explicitly mentioned in the pre-vocational history exam program. History is a mandatory subject in the first three years of senior general secondary education and pre-university education. After 3 years, history becomes an elective subject. Generally, in senior general secondary education, approximately 65% of the students take the final history exam, and in pre- university education, approximately 50% of the students take the exam (Netherlands Institute for Curriculum Development, 2016). The educational quality of all elementary and secondary schools is monitored by the Dutch Inspection of Education.
5.4.3 Sample
We asked eight history teachers from our professional network to participate in our study. To explore the possible differences between teachers, we wanted the sample to be as varied as possible with respect to gender, age, and work experience as a history teacher. The teachers participated voluntary in the study, and all had Dutch nationality. The teachers were not informed of the purpose of the research but were only asked for permission to videotape two of their lessons. The gender distribution in the Netherlands of teachers is 48% female and 52% male (Statistics Netherlands, 2014). Each teacher was from a different school (six schools are in the northern part of the Netherlands, and two schools are in the central part of the Netherlands). Table 15 presents an overview of the teachers’ characteristics.
5.4.4 Observation instrument
For each teacher, two lessons were videotaped, yielding a total of 16 different lessons. We used videotaped records because this allowed for stop-and-go coding and repeated viewing of key scenes (Yoder & Symons, 2010). All lessons were given in the two highest educational tracks of the Dutch educational system. We chose to use the Framework for Analyzing the Teaching of Historical Contextualization (FAT-HC) to observe the videotaped lessons. The FAT-HC is developed and tested for reliability by Huijgen, Van de Grift, et al. (2017) and focuses on observing how history teachers
110