In response to the growing need for more relevant school history, the notion of historical consciousness has come to represent a way to help students understand the links between past, present, and future. However, translating the construct into practice in an ongoing puzzle in the field. Recently, efforts have been made to operationalize historical consciousness via a competency-based approach, but this is arguably problematic, because its proponents view historical consciousness as a hermeneutic quest for meaning yet operationalize it as a set path of mental processing. This article explores a different approach based on meaning-making practice. It does so through an extensive review and synthesis of the relevant literature, and based on the results, it suggests operationalizing historical consciousness through negotiating the presence of the past, inquiring about the past with the help of disciplinary and everyday habits of mind, and building a sense of historical being.
This article introduces Jörn Rüsen’s concept of narrative competence as a useful pedagogical framework for operationalizing a remedial narrative tool designed to help make room for Quebec’s English-speaking minority in the teaching of school history. Developed through empirical research and representing a schema-like narrative structure, the Narrative Template Tool’s aim is to assist students to produce and validate personal (his)stories of belonging through conducting original historical research. To counter the dangers of indoctrination, the tool moreover employs a feature of the orientation component of narrative competence—use-of-history—as a means of helping students account for their emerging perspectives.
This article explores student meaning making in a Grade 11 US history unit on the Second World War. The 10-lesson unit was designed as an experiment that aimed to apply an instructional model of historical consciousness to a classroom context. Although the notion of historical consciousness has gained significant interest in the field of history education, translating it into educational practice remains a challenge. In this study, it refers to a disposition to make meaning of the past for oneself, which is manifested in three meaning-making abilities and processes (Boix Mansilla and Gardner, 2007; Nordgren and Johansson, 2015; Rüsen, 2004). To study the manifestation of historical consciousness in the learning process during this unit, I employed found poetry on collected classroom transcripts and observations, as well as student work. I turned to this qualitative, arts-informed method when I realised the analytic methods that I had employed so far failed to capture important subtleties of students’ historical consciousness emerging from the data. In this paper, I present and discuss the results of my analysis, offer a rationale for using found poetry in history education research and reflect on the need for relevant and meaningful school history.
A atual discussão sobre a consciência histórica no campo do ensino de história no Canadá inscreve-se num contexto intelectual e social particular, marcado por profundas transformações nas relações com o passado e nossa compreensão da história. Com efeito, os historiadores, didáticos e professores de história, aqui como em outros lugares, estão presos há um problema que, conforme Seixas (2012b), é epistemológico (como nós conhecemos o passado?) e ontológico (como nos situamos no tempo enquanto seres dotados de historicidade?). Daí o interesse, realmente presente na didática da história canadense, de melhor compreender a noção de consciência histórica. Contudo, a discussão permanece díspar. Minha intenção, neste artigo, é elaborar um estado dos lugares (dessa produção acadêmica) por meio de uma revisão crítica da literatura. Eu apresentarei uma abordagem sobre o contexto no qual se insere as discussões sobre a consciência histórica e tentarei, em seguida, elaborar um quadro das definições, dos estudos e das justificativas deste conceito. Este artigo advoga pela necessidade crucial de um aprofundamento sobre a questão da consciência histórica, no intuito de que ela possa servir para os debates sobre a história escolar e pública no Canadá.
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