Page 124 - Balancing between the present and the past

Chapter 5
The second hypothesis was that the teachers did not often engage students in historical contextualization processes. As expected, we found a mean score of 1.35 in the categories focusing on engaging students in historical contextualization compared to a mean score of 1.86 in the categories focusing on demonstrating historical contextualization. This finding is in line with research, which illustrates that history teachers focus on covering content knowledge and less on creating opportunities to promote historical thinking and reasoning (Barton & Levstik, 2003; Saye & Social Studies Inquiry Research Collaborative, 2013).
Research suggests three possible reasons for the differences between the desired instruction methods (i.e., engaging students in historical reasoning competencies) and daily classroom practice (i.e., focusing on the transfer of historical content knowledge). Scholars such as Grant and Gradwell (2010) and Meuwissen (2017) argue that the first reason may be contextual factors, such as state tests and history textbooks. A second reason may be an ineffective classroom climate (Martell, 2013; Virta, 2002), and a final reason may be the problem of enactment (Kennedy, 2016) since research indicates that (student) teachers want to teach historical reasoning competencies but do not know how to transfer their beliefs into classroom action (Wansink, Akkerman, & Wubbels, 2016). Since contextualization plays an important role in the Dutch formal exam program and since most teachers in the sample had an effective pedagogical classroom climate, the problem of enactment appears the most relevant.
If our findings also appear in studies with more participants, future research should focus on helping teachers overcome the problem of enactment, for example, by developing and testing effective and activating instructional tools to teach historical contextualization. To examine the problem of enactment in more detail, future research should also include the relationship between teachers’ beliefs and their historical contextualization practices. Using belief interviews (e.g., Richardson, Anders, Tidwell, & Lloyd, 1991; Tuithof, 2017) or surveys (e.g., Stipek, Givvin, Salmon, & MacGyvers, 2001) in combination with FAT-HC observations can provide useful insights for developing teacher professionalization programs for historical contextualization.
An important limitation of our study is that we conducted exploratory research among only eight history teachers and observed only two lessons from each teacher. Future research should therefore examine whether the findings of this study also
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