Page 168 - Balancing between the present and the past

Chapter 7
Next, the teacher used the different frames of reference to reconstruct the context of the start of the Cold War. This context comprised a chronological context (timeline), a spatial context (geographical map), and the following historical events and developments: the enmity between the Soviet Union and the United States, the American fear of communism, and Senator McCarthy. At the end of the lesson, the teacher asked the students to use their newly acquired historical context knowledge to review their answer from the first lesson activity. Are they able to explain the execution of the Rosenbergs better?
In the first two lessons the focus was more on showing students how to perform historical contextualization successfully. Merrill (2002) argues that when information is presented through specific situations or cases, the students will remember and practice this information better. We therefore expected that using a specific historical case will result in a better application of historical contextualization processes. Furthermore, Merrill (2002) noted that learning is encouraged when procedures are demonstrated and behavior is modeled. The guiding questions of Appendix G had this goal. Moreover, procedures and processes must be visible (Merrill, 2002), and the final lesson activity (where the students had to use their newly acquired historical context knowledge to review the historical case again) therefore provided the opportunity for teachers to review and discuss successful and unsuccessful demonstrations of historical contextualization processes.
The third and fourth lesson focused on the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. At the start of the third lesson, the teacher organized students into dyads with two historical pictures (displaying a street name change) and asked them to discuss whether they could explain why a street in Amsterdam, called the Stalin Lane, was changed to 4 November Lane in 1956. Next, the students were divided into groups of four and were provided with five written historical sources about the Hungarian Revolution. One historical source provided general information about the Hungarian Revolution. The second historical source addressed the demands of Hungarian students and the working class presented to the Hungarian government. The third historical source addressed the Soviet invasion from the perspective of a Hungarian journalist. The fourth source presented the perspective of a British journalist on the Hungarian Revolution, and the fifth source presented the perspective of a Russian tourist in Budapest on the Hungarian Revolution. The central task of the third and fourth lessons was to use the historical sources to reconstruct a historical context to explain why the Amsterdam
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