Page 150 - Balancing between the present and the past

Chapter 6
6.5.2 Students’ improvement in historical contextualization
To further explore how students in the experimental condition might have improved in historical contextualization, we asked the teachers in the post-intervention interviews to evaluate the intervention based on their diary notes and experiences.
All teachers noted that the lesson structure of (1) present a historical case at the start of the lesson, (2) instruct students to reconstruct a historical context of this case, and (3) instruct students to evaluate the historical case again using their acquired historical context knowledge promoted historical contextualization. For example, Lisa described in the post-intervention interview that a student immediately reacted from a present-oriented perspective when she showed the painting of the enormous Palace of Versailles, the large building costs and the poor circumstances of many French people. This student noted that people in the past must be really stupid to accept that this palace could be built because the building cost could better be spent on preventing people from dying of starvation. After Lisa explained that one must consider the specific circumstances when explaining historical events and agents’ actions and a historical context of was reconstructed (i.e., the political, economic, and cultural circumstances of 17th-century France) by the students, Lisa noticed that her students were more able to explain the building of the palace. For example, the student who displayed a present-oriented perspective at the beginning of the lesson now used historical context knowledge by considering that French kings in that time period saw themselves as substitutes for God and therefore ruled by absolutism. The student now understood that the French people did not have any political influence and that they could not protest such decisions. Moreover, Lisa noted that the student compared the historical context with the present political situation (i.e., elections to influence political decisions). When Lisa asked the student to explain why he had changed his answer from his answer in the first lesson activity, the student noted that he knew now that he had to consider the specific circumstances at that time to answer a question about the past.
Another example how students improved in historical contextualization using this lesson structure was provided by David. He experienced the same shift as Lisa among many of his students when he introduced the exchange of New Netherland for Suriname. Many students reacted with “That is insane” or “That is really not a good deal.” These students viewed the historical event from a present-oriented perspective (i.e., exchanging a very economically important city for a nugatory country). After
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