Page 114 - Balancing between the present and the past

Chapter 5
To examine our hypothesis that history teachers might not engage students in the process of contextualization, we made a distinction for the “Reconstructing the historical context,” “Enhancing historical empathy,” and “Using the historical context to explain historical events” strategies between items that demonstrate historical contextualization and items that engages students in historical contextualization processes. This distinction can be seen in the FAT-HC of Huijgen, Van de Grift, et al. (2017) because the items starting with “The teacher...” demonstrate historical contextualization, while items starting with “The students...” implies that students are engaged in historical contextualization. An example of an item that demonstrates historical contextualization is “The teacher discusses the economic circumstances at the time of the phenomena.” This item only includes the explaining of the economic circumstances by the teacher, but there is no classroom interaction with the students. An example of an item that engages students in historical contextualization is “The students explain the economic circumstances at the time of the phenomena.” This item does include an interaction between the teacher and students because the teacher, for example, asks students to describe or research the economic circumstances.
We created a separate category for the items “The teacher does not use anachronisms” (FAT-HC Item 36) and “The teacher does not present the past as progress” (FAT- HC Item 37) since the mean scores of these items were very high (indicating that teachers almost never used anachronisms and presented the past as progress) and therefore did not display a representative and nuanced image of the category “Raising awareness of present-oriented perspectives.” The categories “Not using anachronism and presenting the past as progress” and “Raising awareness of present-oriented perspectives” only focus on demonstrating historical contextualization according to the FAT-HC (all these items start with “The teacher...”). No distinction could therefore be made for these categories between items that demonstrate historical contextualization and items that engage students in historical contextualization.
5.4.5 Observers
We trained five observers (three male and two female history teachers ranging in age from 29 to 33 years and having 7 to 8 years of work experience as history teachers) to each observe the videotaped history lessons. We used multiple observers because research indicates increased reliability when using two or more observers for the same lesson when using the FAT-HC (Huijgen, Van de Grift, et al., 2017). The observers were selected from the professional network of the authors and participated
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