Page 15 - Balancing between the present and the past

1.1 Aim of the thesis 1
“That is just inhuman. Such a girl should be at school and not be forced to marry someone she does not know and love.” This response was said by Emma, one of my 12-year-old students, when I provided my students with a historical source describing the medieval marriage of a 13-year-old girl to a 36-year-old knight. After this lesson, I noticed similar reactions from my students when teaching other historical topics. Students could not understand why Germans in the 1930s voted for “a man who killed millions of people and loved violence” or that people in the 19th century thought they would suffocate when travelling in the first trains at speeds of more than 20 miles per hour. When I told students that the Dutch Republic exchanged the colony of New Netherland (currently New York City) for Suriname in the 17th century, they responded, “Man, giving up a world class city; that is just stupid.”
Scholars worldwide agree that history education should aim at promoting students’ ability to perform historical thinking and reasoning rather than training students to memorize as many historical facts as possible (e.g., Lévesque, 2008; Levstik & Barton, 2011; Van Drie & Van Boxtel, 2008). However, Wineburg (2001) noted that historical thinking is an “unnatural act” since people automatically tend to view the past from a present-oriented perspective. This presentism often results in misunderstanding historical phenomena and historical agents’ actions (Barton & Levstik, 2004; Lee & Ashby, 2001). This misunderstanding is similar to what occurred in the case of Emma and with many of my other students: they were not able to explain and interpret the historical events and historical agents’ decisions under study because they viewed the past from their own current beliefs, values, and knowledge.
Historical contextualization can help students such as Emma to become aware of their present-oriented perspectives. Historical contextualization is the ability to situate historical phenomena or historical agents’ actions in a temporal, spatial, and social context to describe, explain, compare, or evaluate them (Van Boxtel & Van Drie, 2012). Without this ability, students often misunderstand historical phenomena and historical agents’ actions (Reisman & Wineburg, 2008; VanSledright, 2001; Wineburg, 2001); therefore, the ability is considered a key component of historical thinking and reasoning (Seixas & Morton, 2013; Van Drie & Van Boxtel, 2008).
General introduction
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