Page 159 - Balancing between the present and the past

7.1 Introduction
“I think it is just stupid when you lose your job when you married. And females should do all the household labor too, shouldn’t they? Men are also grown-ups, right? Let them do the cooking and cleaning.” This was said by Lisa, a 14-year-old secondary school student, when we asked her to explain why, until the late 1950s, Dutch female governmental officials lost their jobs when they married. Lisa reacted with disbelief and was not able to understand or explain this historical phenomenon. Lisa and many other students tend to view and judge the past from a present-oriented perspective instead of using historical context knowledge to explain and understand historical phenomena (Foster, Lee, & Ashby, 2008; Huijgen, Van Boxtel, Van de Grift, & Holthuis, 2014). To help students to view and judge the past in its own terms, it is necessary to increase their ability to perform historical contextualization (Wineburg, 2001). Historical contextualization is the ability to situate phenomena and actions in the context of long-term developments, their specific time, and the historical location to be able to give meaning to these phenomena and actions (Van Boxtel & Van Drie, 2012).
Previous research has indicated, however, that history teachers might demonstrate
historical contextualization themselves in their lessons but do not explicitly engage
students in historical contextualization processes (Huijgen, Holthuis, Van Boxtel, & Van
de Grift, 2018). For example, the teachers included in the sample often reconstructed 7 a historical context themselves instead of creating opportunities for students to use
historical sources to create a historical context on their own. The students might therefore miss opportunities to practice their historical contextualization skills and keep viewing the past based on their own values and beliefs (Reisman & Wineburg, 2008).
Moreover, most studies focusing on the development and testing of contextualization pedagogies consider contextualization to be a heuristic along with, for example, sourcing, collaboration, and close-reading. Building upon the work of Wineburg (1991, 1998), Reisman (2012b), and De La Paz et al. (2014) examined the use of these heuristics in primary source instruction and in a disciplinary reading and writing curriculum intervention, respectively. In contrast to these studies, we focus solely on students’ ability to perform historical contextualization and the role contextualization plays in preventing present-oriented perspectives among students.
A historical contextualization framework
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