Understanding History

International Review of History Education 4

Ros Ashby, Professor Peter Gordon, Peter Lee

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• Print ISBN: 9780713002454
• eBook ISBN: 9781135783457
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

What sense do children and young people make of history? How do they cope with competing historical accounts in textbooks? How do they think historical or archaeological claims are supported or rejected? And whatever students think about history, how do their teachers see history education?

The contributors to this fourth volume of the International Review of History Education discuss these questions in the context of their research. Divided into two sections, the first part of the book examines students' ideas about the discipline of history and the knowledge it produces. The second part looks in detail at teachers' own ideas about teaching. Featuring contributions from authors throughout the world, including the USA, Canada, Portugal, Brazil, Taiwan and the UK, the book provides interesting studies of how history is both taught and received in these different countries.
Understanding History contributes to current knowledge of successful teaching: that teachers must take into accounts students' preconceptions that they bring to the classroom as well as accepting the complexity and importance of their own professional knowledge. The book will be of interest to anyone studying or researching history education as well as teachers of history throughout the world.

1
Assessing the Status of Historical Sources: An Exploratory Study of Eight US Elementary Students Reading Documents

BRUCE A.VANSLEDRIGHT AND PETER AFFLERBACH

In Virginia Colony in 1676, an armed uprising occurred, led by a wealthy Virginian named Nathaniel Bacon. This uprising is frequently referred to in the history books as Bacon’s Rebellion. Despite his family’s wealth and social position, Bacon was able to marshal the forces of poor frontier planters, first against native Indian tribes, who were alleged to have practised indiscriminate raids on the planters and their families, and later against the then Virginia Governor William Berkeley. Bacon appeared to whip up a campaign against Governor Berkeley by claiming that he had refused to use his power to charge the Virginia militia with defending the poor frontier planters against the alleged Indian attacks. Berkeley, Bacon argued, was deaf to the needs of the poor class, had populated the Virginia House of Burgesses with his wealthy friends and had ignored the ‘intrusions’ of the natives against the frontier planters, causing them unwarranted grief and contributing to their grinding poverty. At one point, Bacon’s ‘army’ laid siege to Jamestown, the colonial capital, effectively driving Berkeley into hiding. Then Bacon died, probably of disease, abruptly ending the campaign against Berkeley and the ‘offending’ natives.

Historical investigators have puzzled over these events. They have asked questions about what caused the rebellion. In particular, they have been interested in Bacon’s motives, whether he himself had designs on the governorship and whether he used class conflict as a method to further dissension in order to meet his desire. These investigative interests have turned sometimes towards understanding the role social class may have played in the development of democratic institutions and practices in early American culture. In this particular case, Bacon’s abrupt death has left these questions open to various interpretations. The writings that remain, from Berkeley and Bacon especially, fail to provide a trail that would lead to a clear understanding of Bacon’s Rebellion. So how are investigators to make sense of these events in 1676? The remaining accounts speak in somewhat convoluted ways, reflecting differing publicly expressed interests and commitments, and they seldom convey the private motives and intentions of the agents. As a result, a close examination of the documentary sources would appear to be in order. Reading ‘below the surface’ of these textual sources in search of clues that could reveal hidden motivesto the extent that this is possible—would also be necessary.

Assessing the Status of Sources

A pivotal feature of the historical cognition that could lead to a better understanding of Bacon’s Rebellion involves assessing the status of the documentary sources. Knowing something about the nature of a source helps situate it within an array of different types of historical evidence that can be used to build an interpretation of the events under investigation. Some might argue that assessing the status of sources is the sine qua non of historical understanding because access to the past is largely, perhaps solely mediated by evidentiary accounts and artefacts. But what does it mean to assess the status of sources?

The process of assessing source status is not fully understood. However, researchers in North America and Europe, particularly in Great Britain, have made progress in sorting out its complex cognitions among young children, older grade-school students, college students and historians.¹ In what follows, we draw from this work to construct a portrait, however incomplete, of the process of assessing the status of historical sources as a means of framing an exploratory study of eight US 8- and 9-year-old children, who read aloud several sources as they attempted to address the question, ‘What caused Bacon’s Rebellion?’ For our purposes here, we confine our primary consideration of sources to those accounts that appear in the written form or in image form (drawings and/or paintings) because they are most relevant to the present study.

Assessing source status draws on at least four closely interconnected cognitive activities that begin with close, critical reading. These activities include attribution, identification, perspective and reliability. Attribution involves recognizing that a source is an account constructed by an author or artist (hereafter, simply author) for a particular purpose or purposes. It also requires locating the author within his or her historical context. These claims are not as self- evident as it might seem. Children, adolescents and adults often approach sources as decontextualized, disembodied, authorless forms of neutral information that appear to fall out of the sky ready-made.² Recognizing that an author with a historicized position constructed an account for a purpose and that it can function as evidence in building historical understandings is an important cognitive first step.

Identification involves knowing what a source is. This requires a series of steps in which the source is effectively interrogated by a collection of questions such as: What type of account is this—a journal, a diary, an image, a newspaper article and so on? What is its appearance—does it seem older or newer; is the paper brittle; is the handwriting clear; is the drawing faded? What is the date it was created? What is the grammar, spelling and syntax? Would I classify this as a primary or secondary source? The last question, although perhaps useful, turns out to be less so than the other questions because it often depends upon understanding beforehand that answering it is relative to the investigator’s purposes. Novices, by definition, typically have less clear purposes that they can use to interrogate sources. However, knowing what a source is, combined with clear investigative purposes, does help an investigator determine how it can be interrogated and therefore what sorts of evidence claims and interpretations can be drawn from the account.³

Perspective requires a careful reading of an account followed by a set of judgements as to the author’s social, cultural and political position. Making these types of judgements is difficult because the author is absent, unavailable for direct questioning about his or her intent. To engage in this cognitive activity well involves studying a fair amount about the historical context in which the account was authored and waiting to render judgements until a variety of accounts have been read. Making sense of the author’s perspective or positionality often takes the form of reading between the lines, or below the surface of the text.⁴ This perspective-assessment effort has frequently been termed judging bias. Among young learners who are taught to look at author perspective, bias detection appears to be a considerable preoccupation.⁵ However, it differs from perspective judgements in that bias detection takes on the character of a good-bad dichotomy (telling the truth or lying), whereas the former is concerned with understanding authorial intent in its fullest sense, with bias assumed to be a natural by-product of the author’s historicized positionality. Bias detection alone turns out to be a weak, and perhaps misleading form of judging perspective.⁶

Reliability also requires judgement. It is a corroborative activity in which a cluster of related accounts are assessed for their relative value as strong or weak forms of evidence used in making claims about what has occurred in the past. Judging the reliability of an account involves comparing it to other accounts from the period or context. The investigator attempts to understand if an author’s assertions and statements can be corroborated elsewhere among documentary sources. Time scale is important here. Judging reliability, because of its cognitive complexity, is almost always a relative accomplishment even among experts, because reliability is not inherent in a source. Rather, as noted, it is relative to a set of questions an investigator poses and to other sources that can speak to those questions. A source that may be germane to a given historical event being investigated, for example, cannot necessarily address all questions posed to it. In this regard, it could be unreliable. Yet, this does not mean ipso facto that the author’s perspective is unreliable, especially given different questions.

The elements can be distinguished as we have done here. However, evidence from the research work suggests that they are not so easily teased out. At best attribution and identification appear to work together, with an investigator sometimes beginning by identifying a source, other times starting with attribution. How much prior knowledge an investigator possesses and the nature of her questions appear to play a role, something also the case with perspective and reliability judgements. Attribution and identification usually precede perspective and reliability assessments, especially among those more expert in assessing source status.⁷

The Study

The exploratory study reported here was concerned with the academic development of novices in the domain of history.⁸ We purposefully selected eight young US students to participate in an assessment designed to understand how they would deal with conflicting source accounts as they attempted to piece together a response to the question of what caused Bacon’s Rebellion. Specifically, we were interested in the following questions: In what ways do these novices assess the status of sources they are examining? In what ways do they make use of procedures and practices—attribution, identification, perspective and reliability judgements—on a path towards constructing defensible interpretations?

More generally, we focus on the foregoing questions because we are interested in addressing concerns about how assessing the status of sources can be taught to novices, what procedures best facilitate its learning and how to assess that learning.⁹ We would argue that, although assessing the status of sources is a valuable and perhaps necessary ingredient in developing deep historical understandings among learners, it also has profound implications as a practice for its use in everyday life. Participants in democratic, information-rich cultures frequently encounter situations in which competing claims and assertions about evidence require careful readings before informed decisions can be made. Learning to think historically has the added benefit of preparing such thoughtful, critical readers. We would like to think that it is never too early to begin teaching these criticalreading protocols in school.

School context and curriculum

The elementary school in which this study took place was large and contained multiple classes of students at each grade level from kindergarten through fifth. This study focused on fourth graders who are typically 8 and 9 years old. The school is located about five miles from the city line in a large school district that abuts a dense urban environment. It draws upon a diverse population, socio- economically, ethnically, racially and in terms of physical and socio-emotional disabilities (designated as one of several schools in the district that serves large numbers of these students). The sample of eight reflected gender, race, ethnic and class diversity but did not include students classified with disabilities. Four were girls and four were boys. Two of the girls were African American (Carrie, Judy), one boy was Latino/Filipino (Jamelle), one girl was a Latina (Vania) and the remaining four were European Americans (Brent, Helen, Kent, Terese). The students’ teacher helped us select the sample. We sought the participation of two readers reading somewhat above grade level (Carrie, Kent) as measured by standardized reading tests, four in the middle range or on grade level (Brent, Helen, Judy, Terese) and two reading slightly below grade level (Jamelle, Vania).

The school district had recently revised its fourth-grade social studies curriculum to include more on United States history and embed state history (common to fourth grade in the US) within the national historical chronology. The curriculum was innovative in that it included a much larger emphasis on doing investigative work and focusing on teaching students to learn to think historically than is common in US school curricula. The curriculum proved challenging for both teacher and students because professional development efforts designed to assist teachers in learning how to teach the new curriculum were constrained by budget reductions. Anticipating this eventuality, the curriculum revisionists scripted the curriculum more heavily than they had in the past and provided a host of ancillary support materials. Nonetheless, the teacher we observed for four months was often challenged by the investigative work and historical-thinking components it included. In effect, she was learning along with the students most every day.

Materials

At the conclusion of each of the three large units forming the social studies curriculum was a summative assessment the teachers were asked to conduct with their students as a means of assessing their knowledge. The second unit contained the performance assessment on Bacon’s Rebellion. Students were asked to examine a picture, read five documents, judge whether these sources were primary or secondary accounts and then build an interpretation of Bacon’s Rebellion specifically addressing the question about what caused it. See the Appendix (p. 18) for document copies. This Bacon’s Rebellion performance assessment became the principal source of our data.

For our purposes here, we confine ourselves most specifically to students’ dealings with the five documents, which include (1) a fictional letter by a Virginia planter, ‘William’, detailing his participation in Bacon’s Rebellion (authored in 2001 by staff in the school district’s central curriculum office); (2) an excerpt from a frontier planters’ petition to Governor Berkeley for protection from Indians (1676); (3) an excerpt from Bacon’s ‘Declaration in the Name of the People’ (1676); (4) an excerpt from Berkeley’s response to Bacon (1676) and (5) a hybrid document culled together by authors in the curriculum office (dated 2001) from dispatches by William Aylesbury, a fur trader, who had interactions with Doeg and Susquehannock Indians. Documents (2) through (4) also contained modern translations located just below a separator line on the same page as the original primary source excerpt. The purpose was to assist readers who had difficulty making sense of the original language contained in the source. All five documents contained bold-faced attributions (author, title) and origination dates across the top of the page.

Procedures

We asked the students to read their way through the five documents aloud as we tape-recorded the process. We coached each of them on unrelated text excerpts about how to read aloud while occasionally stopping to tell us what they were thinking. We put red dots approximately every two sentences in each text to signal them that they needed to stop and tell us their thoughts. After reading each document, the students addressed, again aloud, three questions that were built into the school district assessment packet: What is the source of the information? Is it a primary or secondary source? What could you estimate as to the possible causes of Bacon’s Rebellion from reading the document?

Because this was an exploratory study, we examined the transcripts holistically for evidence of how the students assessed the nature and status of the sources as they built up an understanding of Bacon’s Rebellion (to the extent that they could) and its possible causes. We were interested in the processes by which the students judged the accounts as differing types of sources after they had completed their reading. We looked for examples of students’ uses of identification, attribution, perspective and reliability, and how students worked with them singularly or in combination. The students are novices and generally inexperienced with assessing the status of historical sources. Given our focus on academic development and the location of students at the novice end of the progression continuum, we sought to understand the range and nature of what the students were doing as they assessed the sources, rather than impose a top-down coding rubric rooted in what experts do in order to calculate frequency distributions. The results follow in this vein as we attempt to show what students accomplished in the face of convoluted and varying sources.

Reading and Assessing Five Documents

Prior to taking on the performance assessment, students studied some of the early colonial developments in class. In particular, they examined some of the difficulties that arose in relations between the English colonists and Indians in Virginia. Students held a generalized sense that the Indians and the English settlers, although occasionally cooperating with each other via trading arrangements, were engaged more often in land disputes that resulted in bloodshed. This type of prior knowledge was voiced frequently when students worked with the source documents.

Students began the assessment by examining an image that appeared to depict a small group of colonists engaged in an armed skirmish with a group of Indians. Students were asked to make a prediction about the possible nature of Bacon’s Rebellion by examining the picture. All eight made some reference to the disputes between the English settlers and the Indians, predicting th...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Introduction: Research and History Education
• 1: Assessing the Status of Historical Sources: An Exploratory Study of Eight US Elementary Students Reading Documents
• 2: Students’ Approaches to Validating Historical Claims
• 3: Digging for Clues: An Archaeological Exploration of Historical Cognition
• 4: Taiwanese Students’ Understanding of Differences in History Textbook Accounts
• 5: ‘Till New Facts are Discovered’: Students’ Ideas about Objectivity in History
• 6: Children’s Understanding of Historical Narrative in Portugal
• 7: Between Reproducing and Organizing the Past: Students’ Beliefs about the Standards of Acceptability of Historical Knowledge
• 8: History, Memory and Learning to Teach
• 9: The Epistemological Reach of the History Teacher
• 10: Portuguese History Teachers’ Ideas about History
• 11: Understanding the Knowledge Bases of History Teaching: Subject, Pupils and Professional Practices
• 12: Interpreting the Past, Serving the Present: US and English Textbook Portrayals of the Soviet Union During the Second World War
• Notes on Contributors