Page 155 - Balancing between the present and the past

activities were completed due to a lack of time. An approach where the lesson activities are more evenly distributed across different lessons is therefore preferred.
Future research on testing the pedagogy should also pay more attention to the
use of mixed methods, as advocated by Shadish et al. (2002), because combining
quantitative data with more qualitative data (e.g., thinking aloud protocols triggered
by stimulated recall methods) provides insight into teachers’ and students’ motives
and experiences during an intervention. In this study, teachers’ diaries and post-
intervention interviews were only used as a qualitative method to gain insights in how
students improved in historical contextualization. A protocol analysis of a classroom
discussion during the intervention and students’ responses to contextualization tasks,
as suggested by Reisman (2012b), could be more valuable to examine the students’
progress in the ability to perform historical contextualization and their situational
interest. Moreover, since research suggests that historical contextualization might
also promote competencies such as learning about democratic citizenship, social
perspective adoption, and the ability to adopt multiple perspectives (e.g., Barton, 2012;
Gehlbach, 2004), it would be interesting to examine the effects of the pedagogical
design principles for these competencies. 6
Finally, we discuss some practical implications for the teaching and learning of history. Since there might be a dichotomy between historical skills and knowledge in history education (Counsell, 2000) and teachers might experience problems when teaching historical reasoning competencies (e.g., Barton & Levstik, 2003; Hall & Scott, 2007), the pedagogy could help teachers combine the teaching of historical content knowledge and historical reasoning competencies in a practical manner. Teachers who want to explicitly teach historical contextualization could start with implementing the cases in their lessons to prevent presentism among their students.
To conclude, intervention studies are scarce within the field of history education research; however, more attention has been given recently to the use of this methodology to examine the learning and teaching of history (e.g., De La Paz et al., 2014; Reisman, 2012b; Stoel, Van Drie, & Van Boxtel, 2017). To contribute, we conducted an intervention study focusing on the learning and teaching of historical contextualization. The developed pedagogy may help teachers not only teach students historical facts but also actively engage them in the process of historical contextualization to understand and explain the differences and connections between the past and present.
A historical contextualization pedagogy
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