Page 123 - Balancing between the present and the past

History teachers and historical contextualization
and historical agents’ actions from a present-oriented perspective decreases because the students interpret and examine phenomena in their own time and circumstances.
Moreover, an important FAT-HC item of this category is “The teacher uses historical tension.” A teacher could present a problem or case that students find difficult to explain due to their possible present-oriented perspectives. It was striking that none of the teachers in the sample explicitly used historical tension to trigger possible present- oriented perspectives among the students. There were often missed opportunities to do so. For example, when Mark discussed the rise of Hitler in Germany in the 1930s, he could have asked his students to explain why so many Germans voted for his political party. This gave him the opportunity to evaluate their answers: could they explain the rise of Hitler (using historical context knowledge) or were they not able to explain this because they viewed the past from a present oriented-perspective (e.g., Hitler killed millions of people)?
5.6 Conclusions and discussion 5
The aim of this study was to explore how history teachers promoted historical contextualization in their classrooms. Using the Framework for Analyzing the Teaching of Historical Contextualization (FAT-HC), two lessons from eight history teachers were observed by trained raters, yielding 16 different lessons in total. Our first hypothesis was that teachers demonstrate historical contextualization in their lessons because an important aim of the Dutch history curriculum is for students to be able to use their acquired historical overview knowledge to perform historical contextualization (Board of Tests and Examinations, 2017). In contrast to our expectations, the overall results indicated that most teachers did not often demonstrate historical contextualization in their classrooms. None of the teachers in the sample obtained a mean FAT-HC score > 2.00. The highest scores could be found in the categories focusing on not using anachronisms and presenting the past as progress (mean score = 3.59) and the category focusing on reconstructing the historical context (mean score = 2.18). All other categories obtained mean scores < 2.00, with the category focusing on promoting the use of historical empathy among students (mean score = 1.25) and the category on promoting the use of the historical context (mean score = 1.24) displaying the lowest scores.
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