Page 24 - Balancing between the present and the past

Chapter 1
4. How do history teachers promote historical contextualization in their classrooms?
(Study 4)
The third and final challenge was to develop and test classroom materials that promote historical contextualization. This aspect resulted in two intervention studies answering the following question:
5. What are the effects of a lesson unit designed to promote secondary school students’ ability to perform historical contextualization? (Studies 5 and 6)
1.4 Structure of the thesis
After the introduction to the thesis in this chapter, the second chapter discusses the benefits and limitations of two instruments intended to measure students’ ability to contextualize historical agents’ actions. Moreover, the second chapter presents information on how students of different ages and educational levels exhibit this ability. In this chapter, we view three components of the framework for teaching historical contextualization (reconstructing a historical context, avoiding presentism, and historical empathy) as necessary to explain and interpret historical agents’ actions (historical perspective taking). This chapter is based on an article in the European Journal of Psychology of Education (Huijgen, Van Boxtel, Van de Grift, & Holthuis, 2014).
The third chapter examines how students contextualize historical agents’ actions. How successful are they? What knowledge and strategies do students use to explain those actions? Which frames of reference are used the most? As in the second chapter, the three components of the framework are considered essential to achieve historical perspective taking. This chapter is based on an article in Theory & Research in Social Education (Huijgen, Van Boxtel, Van de Grift, & Holthuis, 2017).
The fourth chapter focuses on how teachers’ instructions with regard to historical contextualization could be observed. In this chapter, the four components of the framework (reconstructing a historical context, avoiding presentism, historical empathy, and practicing historical contextualization to enable historical reasoning) are used to develop and test a subject-specific observation instrument called the
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