Page 23 - Balancing between the present and the past

However, it is not enough to promote students’ awareness of their present-oriented 1 perspectives, reconstruct a historical context, and enhance historical empathy. The
fourth and final component is that teachers should create opportunities for students
to practice historical contextualization to enable historical reasoning. An example
of such a task is asking students to explain why a particular German person in 1930 might have voted for the Nazi Party of Hitler or why the Dutch Republic exchanged New Netherland for Suriname in the 17th century. When historical contextualization is used to examine such questions, it becomes meaningful because it helps to explain and interpret historical phenomena (Van Boxtel & Van Drie, 2018).
1.3 Research questions
Based on the three problems that we described in the first section of this chapter, we formulated the following main research question for this thesis: How can students’ ability to perform historical contextualization be promoted? To answer this question, we formulated five research questions.
The first challenge was to develop and test instruments that can examine students’ ability to perform historical contextualization. This task was examined in two studies that focused on students’ ability to contextualize historical agents’ actions. The following questions were researched:
1. How can we measure elementary and secondary school students’ ability to contextualize historical agents’ actions?
(Study 1)
2. How successfully can secondary school students contextualize historical agents’ actions?
(Study 2)
The second challenge was to develop an observation-instrument to observe how history teachers promote historical contextualization in classrooms. Two studies were therefore conducted with the following questions:
3. What instrument can be used to observe how history teachers promote historical contextualization in classrooms?
(Study 3)
General introduction
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