The Wiley International Handbook of History Teaching and Learning

Scott Alan Metzger, Lauren McArthur Harris, Scott Alan Metzger, Lauren McArthur Harris

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781119100805
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Éducation
• Subtopic: Enseignement de l'Histoire

A comprehensive review of the research literature on history education with contributions from international experts

The Wiley International Handbook of History Teaching and Learning draws on contributions from an international panel of experts. Their writings explore the growth the field has experienced in the past three decades and offer observations on challenges and opportunities for the future. The contributors represent a wide range of pioneering, established, and promising new scholars with diverse perspectives on history education.

Comprehensive in scope, the contributions cover major themes and issues in history education including: policy, research, and societal contexts; conceptual constructs of history education; ideologies, identities, and group experiences in history education; practices and learning; historical literacies: texts, media, and social spaces; and consensus and dissent. This vital resource:

• Contains original writings by more than 40 scholars from seven countries
• Identifies major themes and issues shaping history education today
• Highlights history education as a distinct field of scholarly inquiry and academic practice
• Presents an authoritative survey of where the field has been and offers a view of what the future may hold

Written for scholars and students of education as well as history teachers with an interest in the current issues in their field, The Wiley International Handbook of History Teaching and Learning is a comprehensive handbook that explores the increasingly global field of history education as it has evolved to the present day.

Section II
Conceptual Constructs of History Education

5
Historical Thinking: Definitions and Educational Applications

Stéphane Lévesque¹ and Penney Clark²

¹ University of Québec à Chicoutimi

² University of British Columbia

Those engaged in history education research are confronted with a plethora of references to historical thinking. This concept has literally become a “standard” in the theory and practice of history education across the Western world (Keirn & Martin, 2012). Once an obscure scholarly concept underlying research in history, psychology, and education, historical thinking is now trendy, with even video game developers claiming to promote it (Kapell & Elliott, 2013; Kee, 2014). Perhaps both because this work is so recent and because national perspectives on the subject differ, history educators have not fully integrated the growing body of research on the nature of historical thinking into their practice.

Indeed, if the ability to think historically should go beyond the mere mastery of factual knowledge about the past (“know that”), it is still unclear as to what the alleged connection between “history” and “thinking” actually means in conceptual and practical terms (“know how”). Of course, history education around the world continues to be plagued by ongoing controversies over the purpose of history in school: What history should be taught to students? How should we deal with diversity and the histories of minority groups? What obligations do we have to our predecessors and past wrongs? In many cases, answers to these difficult questions reflect fundamental differences over our understanding of and beliefs about history. Any attempt at defining historical thinking thus presents a difficulty: There is no single, agreed‐upon definition. Yet, despite researchers’ varied perspectives, backgrounds, and possible disagreements over questions of historical thinking, there is nonetheless significant convergence in the literature thanks in large part to the productive exchange network connecting scholars in the Western world.

This chapter aims to bring some conceptual coherence to this field of study, thus offering scholars and practitioners a clearer view of the landscape. It brings together some of the key findings in publications that use the terms “historical thinking,” “thinking historically,” and the French equivalent pensée historique. Building on this review, we discovered four major strands that have developed over the past few decades—English, German, Canadian, and U.S. While each has distinctive foundations rooted in the historiographies, philosophies, and pragmatism of its respective national community, they nonetheless have been shaped by transcontinental ideas and streams of thought. These four strands also incorporate a growing body of research that is not distinctively national in definition and focus. Indeed, scholars in Australia, the Netherlands, Spain, and other parts of the world are making important contributions to the (re)definition of historical thinking in education. This chapter seeks to capture the essence of the current literature and help clarify the term in contemporary debates over the nature of history education and practices.

Historical Thinking in England

Beginning in the early 1970s, English researchers led the way toward a new conceptualization of history education. We refer to England rather than Great Britain or the United Kingdom for two reasons: the two universities where the most relevant and influential research has taken place are located in England, and the history curriculum in each of England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland is unique. Below we offer four key generalizations about the scholarship from England.

Empirical research in England has been significant and highly influential elsewhere. There has been a significant amount of empirical research in England since the 1970s and this work has been highly influential on subsequent work in North America. The initial research was conducted at two major centers. In the early 1970s, just as the “New History” was waning in the United States, researchers at the London Institute of Education began to investigate adolescents’ understandings of explanations of actions and then moved to the assumptions underlying their explanations of social practices (Dickinson & Lee, 1978). In 1972 empirical work began in Leeds under the auspices of The Schools Council History 13–16 Project (later referred to as the Schools History Project or SCHP), led by David Sylvester. According to London researcher Peter Lee (2011), Denis Shemilt’s 1980 evaluation of this project “was the most important landmark in both research and curriculum development in history education in the UK in the second half of the twentieth century” (p. 138).

In the late 1980s the Leeds and London researchers joined forces to create the Cambridge History Project, which developed a syllabus for 16‐ to 19‐year‐olds that was organized around second‐order or procedural concepts of evidence, explanation, and historical accounts. While this syllabus was being piloted, the London group began another project, Concepts of History and Teaching Approaches 7–14 (CHATA). This project, which had 320 student subjects, analyzed interviews and student responses to written tasks in order to map changes in ideas about history between ages 7 and 14. It focused on second‐order concepts such as evidence, accounts, cause, and empathy (Lee and Ashby, 2000). Ultimately, it defined a six‐stage model of progression in historical learning.

This work represented a significant shift to history as discipline. Emphasizing history as a discipline, rather than history as a national narrative about which students were tested for recall of factual information, these researchers distinguished between the substantive content of history, or what history is “about” (trade, class systems, wars, etc.) and second‐order or procedural concepts (evidence, explanation, cause, accounts) that shape the way historians “do” history. They also identified colligatory concepts, which involved broad labels that included a time dimension (McCullagh, 1978; Walsh, 1967), such as the age of exploration, the medieval period, the Enlightenment, and the Cold War. To some extent, this work was inspired by an effort to determine if Jean Piaget’s ideas about progression in thinking were applicable to history learning. It was grounded in Jerome Bruner’s (1960) notion of the “structure of the disciplines” and Paul Hirst’s (1965) “forms of knowledge.”

English researchers have made the point very clearly that emphasis on second‐order concepts does not imply reduced attention to the substantive content of history (Lee, 2014; Lee and Ashby, 2000). Nor are second‐order concepts to be confused with skills. Christine Counsell (2000) has noted the importance of distinguishing between conceptual understanding, or what she called “the big ideas that history generates, such as causation, consequence, change, continuity and so forth” and skills “such as the ability to construct multi‐causal explanations” (p. 57). Reinforcing this point, Rosalyn Ashby and Christopher Edwards (2010) cautioned that if we treat concepts as skills we run into the danger of having students view second‐order concepts as having “value in themselves independent of knowledge” (p. 34).

Curriculum applications were never intended to produce miniature historians. This was a departure from the work of Bruner and other advocates of the “structure of the disciplines” approach in North America (see Lee & Howson, 2009, p. 255.) English researchers explicitly acknowledged that most students would not become academic historians as adults. Therefore, it was crucial that they learn how historical knowledge is created and use it while still in high school.

Research, curriculum, and student assessment were inextricably linked. By the early 1980s the work of the SCHP was being widely applied in English schools. According to Lee (2011),

research and public examinations for SCHP were closely linked, and new post‐hoc assessment schemes were being developed by examiners. Hence SCHP provided both the impetus and an opportunity for the development of sophisticated assessment techniques providing additional large scale evidence about children’s ideas and historical thinking. (p. 138)

Lee (2011) described the early 1980s examination papers and reports of a member of the Inspectorate as “exemplary and unsurpassed as innovative and helpful guides for teachers” (p. 157). The National Curriculum implemented in the early 1990s presented history as a discipline reflecting this triad of research, curriculum, and assessment.

Lee (2014) has set out a list of five broad findings of the English research on historical thinking (pp. 183–187):

1. “History is not just a matter of common‐sense.” Students tend to think that people in the past shared their own contemporary beliefs and values but were more stupid (Lee & Ashby, 2001; Shemilt, 1984). As Lee (2011) writes,

   Parts of history degenerate into tales of unintelligible mistakes made by mental defectives. It is only as children abandon the assumption that people in the past saw the world as we do that meaningful history becomes possible for them. Hence they must substitute counter‐intuitive ideas for their common‐sense everyday life understandings. (p. 136)

   Lee (2011) has also made the point that if children “assume that we can only know what we can directly witness, and that history reports a fixed past (it only happened once, after all) then history is impossible” (p. l36). Children may not understand that there is no fixed past and that history is constructed from available evidence. “Because historical accounts are not copies of the past, but share some of the characteristics of both metaphors and theories, there can be more than one account of ‘the same thing’ without one necessarily being fake or distorted” (Lee, 2011, p. 136).
2. “Students can develop more powerful ideas about history from at least age seven.” The English research indicates that students develop increasingly powerful understanding of second‐order concepts. However, Lee cautions that it is important to teach students the deep meaning of these concepts because 14‐ to 16‐year‐olds are capable of using specialist terminology “in superficially convincing ways without grasping the nature or significance of the conceptual apparatus to which this terminology pertained” (p. 184).
3. “Progression models can be constructed for some secon...