Page 133 - Balancing between the present and the past

6.2.2 Teaching historical contextualization
Building on Wineburg’s (1991) work, most intervention studies that provide insight
into the teaching of historical contextualization consider contextualization to be
one heuristic to be used (besides sourcing and corroboration) to examine historical
documents. For example, Nokes, Dole, and Hacker (2007) tested the effect of heuristic
instruction among 16- and 17-year-old students that explicitly taught sourcing, corroboration, and contextualization. Contextualization was taught by discussing
the use and importance of contextualization, modeling contextualization, and asking
students to create a historical context of a document to interpret the documents.
In the pre- and post-test, the authors found that only 7% of the students used contextualization and therefore conducted no further analyses. Reisman (2012b)
examined the effect of a curriculum intervention (focusing on sourcing, corroboration,
close reading, and contextualization) in disciplinary reading among 11th-grade
students. Contextualization was taught by cognitive modeling, guided practice, or
independent practice. A historical reading strategy chart with guiding questions (e.g.,
What else was happening at the time this was written?) helped students perform contextualization. However, no significant intervention effect for contextualization
was found, and Reisman (2012b) concluded that the question of how to teach 6 contextualization remains unanswered. De La Paz et al. (2014) tested a curriculum
intervention, including explicitly promoting contextualization, among eight-grade students to test their disciplinary writing skills. To promote contextualization, the students were provided a handout with questions focusing on the type of document (e.g., What type of document is this and where did it appear?) and the time period and setting of the document (e.g., What else was happening at the time?). The students’ disciplinary writing skills improved, but no specific information is given on their improvement in contextualization.
In other studies, historical contextualization was the main dependent variable, and the focus was less on contextualization as a component of the critical examination of historical sources but more on the contextualization of particular events, situations, or the actions of people in the past. For example, Van Boxtel and Van Drie (2012) asked students aged 14–17 to interpret and date situations or events that are described in a historical document or shown in a historical image (“What is it about?”). They found that instruction focusing on the development of a rich associative network of historical knowledge and knowledge of landmarks helps students to interpret the historical situation described or depicted because they are better able to reconstruct a historical
A historical contextualization pedagogy
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