Page 137 - Balancing between the present and the past

examining the life of a young man (Hannes) who lived in Germany in 1930 and must decide which political party he would vote for might result in a better understanding of the rise of Hitler (Hartmann & Hasselhorn, 2008; Huijgen, Van Boxtel, et al., 2017). Endacott and Pelekanos (2015) discussed introducing relevant historical agents and their situation to explain and understand social control in ancient Athens.
These studies suggested that when students use affective connections and focus on the role of a historical agent, they may be able to perform historical contextualization successfully. In our pedagogy, we therefore selected a relevant historical agent for each historical topic. Students were provided with a short description accompanied by two central questions that the students need to answer. To answer the questions successfully, the students needed to use affective connections and consider the role and (social) position of the historical agent
6.3 Research question
Since practical and effective instructional tools for teaching historical 6 contextualization are lacking, this study focuses on identifying whether a developed
pedagogy, based on the pedagogical design principles of historical contextualization,
can improve students’ ability to perform historical contextualization. For the present
study, we formulated the following research question: What are the effects of a lesson unit based on the four design principles for teaching historical contextualization on 15- and 16-year-old students’ ability to perform historical contextualization?
6.4 Method
6.4.1 Research design
We chose an empirical quasi-experimental pre-test–post-test design (Shadish, Cook, & Campbell, 2002) to test the pedagogy. Compared to the experimental designs, quasi-experimental designs lack the random assignment of participants to experimental or control groups. Random assignment was difficult because our research was conducted in an educational setting and we were dependent on the teachers’ voluntary participation to implement an intervention. Within the quasi- experimental design, we established an experimental condition where the teachers
A historical contextualization pedagogy
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