Page 18 - Balancing between the present and the past

Chapter 1
(2012) and visualize historical contextualization as an activity in which one situates phenomena and agents’ actions in the context of time, historical locations, long-term developments, and specific events to give meaning to these phenomena and actions. When historical contextualization is used to compare, evaluate, interpret, or examine historical agents’ actions, the term historical perspective taking (HPT) is often used (e.g., Hartmann & Hasselhorn, 2008; Seixas & Morton, 2013; Yeager & Foster, 2001). HPT focuses on understanding the perspectives of historical agents by considering their historical contexts (Seixas & Morton, 2013).
1.2.2 The role of historical contextualization in history education
Recently, several books on history education have been published (e.g., Carretero, Berger, & Grever, 2017; Chapman & Wilschut, 2015; Counsell, Burn, & Chapman, 2016). These books display a general view that the transmission of historical content knowledge should not be the sole aim of history education but students in history classrooms should also use this knowledge, for example, to evaluate historical sources, determine causes and consequences, and perform historical contextualization. In the literature, these competencies are often described as students performing historical thinking or historical reasoning (e.g., Lévesque, 2008; Van Boxtel & Van Drie, 2018; Wineburg, 2001). Van Drie and Van Boxtel (2008) presented an analytical framework of historical reasoning that comprises six interrelated components:
• asking historical questions,
• historical contextualization,
• using substantive concepts (concepts referring to historical
phenomena, structures, persons, and periods),
• using meta-concepts and related strategies (concepts and strategies
referring to the methods used by historians to investigate and describe
historical processes),
• using sources,
• and argumentation.
These six components should enable students to reach justifiable conclusions about (1) processes of change and continuity, (2) causes and consequences of historical phenomena, and (3) differences and similarities between historical phenomena or periods (Van Boxtel & Van Drie, 2018).
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