Page 134 - Balancing between the present and the past

Chapter 6
context. Building upon the research literature on historical contextualization, Huijgen, Van de Grift, et al. (2017) suggested four teacher strategies that might improve students’ ability to perform historical contextualization: (1) making students aware of the consequences of a present-oriented perspective when examining the past; (2) enhancing the reconstruction of a historical context; (3) enhancing the use of a historical context to explain historical phenomena, and (4) enhancing historical empathy.
These strategies can help students perform historical contextualization, not only when they have to contextualize historical sources but also when historical events and historical agents’ actions are discussed in classrooms. In this study, these four teaching strategies were therefore used to develop and test a pedagogy for teaching historical contextualization. The following section describes a translation from the teachers’ strategies into pedagogical design principles.
6.2.3 Pedagogical design principles of historical contextualization
6.2.3.1 Making students aware of present-oriented perspectives
Presentism, or viewing the past from a present-oriented perspective, is a bias in which people assume that the same values, intentions, attitudes, and beliefs existed in the past as they exist today (Barton & Levstik, 2004). We can never be perfectly non- presentist (e.g., Pendry & Husbands, 2000; VanSledright, 2001), but teachers should make students aware of their own values and beliefs and the consequences of this perspective when explaining the past (Seixas & Peck, 2004). Students will otherwise not succeed in explaining historical phenomena and historical agents’ actions (e.g., Barton, 2008; Lee, 2005; Wineburg, 2001).
To make students in history classrooms aware of their presentism, Havekes et al. (2012) argued that creating cognitive incongruity that is aimed at testing students’ assumptions or creating a conflict with their prior knowledge can promote historical contextualization. In previous research, we therefore explored the use of cognitive conflicts to trigger and prevent presentism among students (Huijgen & Holthuis, 2015). In this approach, possible present-oriented perspectives among students become “visible” by presenting a historical event that students find difficult to explain. When students display present-oriented perspectives when answering accompanying explanatory questions, the teacher would explain the consequences
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