Page 21 - Balancing between the present and the past

Africa, the concept of triangular trade in the early modern period is misunderstood. 1 Social frames include knowledge of human behavior and social conditions of life as
well as knowledge of economic and political developments. Without this knowledge,
students are not able to interpret historical phenomena and agents’ actions (Reisman
& Wineburg, 2008).
The second component is raising awareness of students’ possible present-oriented perspectives. Avoiding presentism in history education is necessary to point out to students the differences and connections between the past and the present (Seixas & Morton, 2013). When students view the past from a present-oriented perspective, they do not succeed in explaining and understanding historical phenomena or agents’ actions (Lee & Ashby, 2001). A promising approach to raising students’ awareness of their possible present-oriented perspectives is by creating a cognitive conflict. These conflicts occur when incompatible ideas exist simultaneously in a person’s mind or when information that is received does not seem consistent with what one already knows (Johnson & Johnson, 2009). In history education, for example, this could be done by presenting a historical situation that students consider “strange” (e.g., Havekes et al., 2012; Logtenberg, 2012). Teachers could, for example, ask students to explain why there was child labor in the Netherlands in the 19th century.
The third component is enhancing historical empathy. Different scholars agree that historical empathy and historical contextualization are closely related (e.g., Cunningham, 2009; Endacott & Brooks, 2013). Historical empathy can help students to see and judge the past on its own terms by attempting to understand the historical agents’ frames of reference and actions (Yilmaz, 2007). We centralize two approaches to promote historical empathy: (1) using affective connections and (2) examining the role and position of the historical agent. Affective connections are considerations of how historical agents’ experiences, situations, or actions may have been influenced by their affective response based on a connection made to students’ own similar yet different life experiences (Endacott & Brooks, 2013). Seixas and Morton (2013) talked about universals: using commonalities in students’ and historical agents’ emotions to infer how people in the past thought and felt. A more cognitive approach investigates the role and the position of a historical agent, which includes understanding another’s prior lived experience, principles, positions, attitudes, and beliefs. This method also provides more insight into how a historical agent might have thought and behaved in a particular situation (Bermúdez & Jaramillo, 2001; Endacott & Brooks, 2013; Hartmann & Hasselhorn, 2008).
General introduction
19