Page 135 - Balancing between the present and the past

(i.e., not being able to explain and understand the historical event under study) of viewing the past from this perspective. For example, students could be shown a 1932 election poster of Hitler’s political party and be asked to explain whether a German person could have voted for this political party. This approach appears promising but has never been tested in an experimental study. In our pedagogy, we therefore aim to make students aware of the consequences of a present-oriented perspective when examining the past by creating cognitive incongruity.
6.2.3.2 Enhancing the reconstruction of a historical context
Different studies stress the importance of historical content knowledge (including chronological and spatial knowledge) to perform historical contextualization
successfully (e.g., Van Boxtel & Van Drie, 2012; Wineburg, 2001). To reconstruct the
historical context, students and teachers can use different frames of reference (De
Keyser & Vandepitte, 1998): a chronological frame of reference, a spatial frame of
reference, and a social frame of reference comprising socio-economic, socio-political,
and socio-cultural knowledge. To examine the frames of reference and reconstruct a
historical context, students can use different primary and secondary sources, such as
movies (e.g., Metzger, 2012), visual images (e.g., Baron, 2016; Boerman-Cornell, 2015; 6 Wilschut, 2012), and written documents (e.g., Fasulo, Girardet, & Pontecorvo, 1998).
In previous research, we found indicators that students who combine different frames of reference are more successful in reconstructing the historical context to explain historical agents’ actions (Huijgen, Van Boxtel, Van de Grift, & Holthuis, 2017). To reconstruct a context successfully, it is important to provide good examples and scaffolds of contextualized thinking (Havekes et al., 2012; Huijgen & Holthuis, 2015; Reisman & Wineburg, 2008). For example, teachers could provide students with scaffolds that focus on examining the different frames of reference before students formulate arguments and present conclusions. In our pedagogy, we therefore use the different frames of reference to teach students how to reconstruct a historical context of the historical topic under study to answer and discuss historical questions.
6.2.3.3 Enhancing the use of a historical context to explain the past
Teachers should also create opportunities for students to reason using their historical context knowledge (Counsell, Burn, & Chapman, 2016; Halvorsen, Harris, Aponte Martinez, & Frasier, 2015). Historical context knowledge could, for example, be used to interpret a historical source (Reisman & Wineburg, 2008), formulate historical
A historical contextualization pedagogy
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