Page 126 - Balancing between the present and the past

Chapter 5
To engage students more in historical contextualization, teachers have to remember not to “showcase” their own knowledge and skills. It is important to let the students do the work and make mistakes and to help them in the processes of historical contextualization. For example, it is suggested to not only display a timeline but also instruct students to create (different) timelines themselves. It is also important to provide historical sources that address the different frames of reference and ask students to reconstruct a context on their own to answer evaluative and explanatory questions. The History Assessments of Thinking on historical contextualization, which are developed by the Stanford History Education Group, are promising tools to engage students more in historical contextualization and can be used for formative assessment and feedback on this historical reasoning competency (Breakstone, Smith, & Wineburg, 2013). Discussing historical sources in classroom discussions might also be an effective strategy since we found that this often engaged students in historical contextualization processes. Moreover, teachers could focus more on triggering possible present-oriented perspectives among students. Presenting the past as strange (e.g., child labor and the poor working conditions in the 18th century compared to the daily life of a child currently) could promote awareness of the differences and connections between the past and present (Huijgen & Holthuis, 2015; Seixas & Morton, 2013).
Furthermore, the teachers in our sample did not explicitly teach students how to perform historical contextualization. To improve in this area, teachers could use the scaffolds developed by Reisman and Wineburg (2008) and Havekes et al. (2012). To help history teachers promote historical contextualization, teachers could participate in professional development programs, including pre- and post-observation interviews and opportunities to collaboratively develop lesson activities guided by experts. Lesson study, including the use of the FAT-HC, which focuses on collaborative planning, teaching, observing, and discussion of lessons (cf. Lewis, Perry, & Murata, 2006), could help teachers design effective learning tasks. Recently, Korthagen (2017) described an interesting approach called “Professionalization development 3.0,” which might help to overcome the problem of enactment. This is a bottom-up approach that centralizes the teachers’ potential where the teacher sets relevant (personal) learning goals instead of dealing solely with expert knowledge (top-down approach). As the results of this study show, the teaching of historical contextualization is a complex process, but if teachers, teacher educators, and researchers work together to design
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