Page 187 - Balancing between the present and the past

8.1 Summary of the main findings
“Why on earth would you burn those women alive? It is obvious that witches do not exist, do they? That is just cruel. People in the past were indeed stupid.” This statement is a reaction from a student when the witch hunts in the Early Modern Period were the topic under study. This student viewed the witch hunts from a present-oriented perspective in which the past is examined with present beliefs, values, and knowledge. This process often results in misunderstanding historical phenomena and historical agents’ actions. Historical contextualization, the main focus of this thesis, can help prevent present-oriented perspectives among students when they examine the past (Wineburg, 2001). It is therefore considered a key component of historical thinking and reasoning (Lévesque, 2008; Van Drie & Van Boxtel, 2008).
Historical contextualization is the ability to situate phenomena and people’s actions in a historical context in order to give meaning to these phenomena and actions (Van Boxtel & Van Drie, 2012). It is not the same as relativism or the justification of controversial historical events and agents’ actions. Instead, historical contextualization should lead to reasoned ethical judgments about past events and help students to explain historical phenomena and agents’ actions (Seixas & Morton, 2013). It is not wrong for students to think that, for example, slavery or child labor is awful. However, to explain and interpret such historical phenomena successfully, students need to become aware that the past differs from the present, that people in the past held different beliefs and values and that these people might not have possessed the same knowledge as the students themselves.
Teaching historical contextualization in this thesis was conceptualized as four 8 interrelated components: (1) reconstructing a historical context, (2) raising awareness
of present-oriented perspectives, (3) enhancing historical empathy, and (4) creating opportunities for students to practice historical contextualization to enable historical
reasoning. All components of this theoretical framework for teaching historical contextualization should occur in interactions between teachers and students. The framework is visualized in Figure 1 in the first chapter of this thesis.
Despite the importance of historical contextualization in history education, there is a lack of (1) standardized instruments that measure students’ ability to perform historical contextualization, (2) observation instruments that provide insight into
General conclusions and discussion
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