Page 87 - Balancing between the present and the past

that surround a particular historical phenomenon to render it more intelligible. Endacott and Brooks (2013) viewed historical contextualization as:
A temporal sense of difference that includes deep understanding of the social, political, and cultural norms of the time period under investigation as well as knowledge of the events leading up to the historical situation and other relevant events that are happening concurrently. (p. 43)
Historical events and historical agents’ decisions must be placed in the specific
socio-spatial and socio-temporal locations in which they emerged. For example,
students must know that in ancient Roman times, Julius Caesar could not have had 4 breakfast in Rome and dinner in the Gaul region of France on the same day because
the transportation modes needed for such a trip was not available (Lévesque, 2008).
4.2.4 Teachers’ strategies for promoting historical contextualization
Research has been conducted to conceptualize the instructional practices that effective teachers employ to promote historical contextualization in classrooms (e.g., Doppen, 2000; Rantala, 2011; Van Boxtel & Van Drie, 2012). To teach historical reasoning competencies such as historical contextualization, teachers must not only possess expert levels of subject content knowledge but also activate students to acquire knowledge and help them apply this knowledge to gain different historical reasoning competencies (Haydn, Stephen, Arthur, & Hunt, 2015). Additionally, Hattie’s meta-analysis (2008) indicated that effective teachers activate student learning. Other meta-analyses on effective teaching seem to confirm this finding (e.g., Kyriakides, Christoforou, & Charalambous, 2013; Seidel & Shavelson, 2007). Exposure to information alone is not sufficient for students to gain deep subject- specific understanding and historical reasoning competencies. Based on research that focused on historical contextualization, we identified four main teaching strategies for promoting historical contextualization in classrooms: (1) reconstructing the historical context, (2) fostering historical empathy, (3) performing historical contextualization to explain the past, and (4) raising awareness of present-oriented perspectives when examining the past.
First, the historical context of a phenomenon must be reconstructed to perform historical contextualization. Foster (1999) argued that students must possess
Testing an observation instrument
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