Confronting History’s Interpretive Paradox While Teaching Fifth Graders to Investigate the Past

Abstract

This article reports on one facet of a researcher-practitioner project undertaken with class of 23 diverse fifth graders. The project was rooted in taking recent history education reforms seriously. It was premised principally on reforms dealing with teaching practices found in the history standards and the research literature. As the researcher-practitioner, the author engaged the students in historical investigations to help them learn to think historically and better understand the past. He operated from a theoretical framework based on how he believed historical thinking and understanding occur for such novice learners. During the first three lessons, on Jamestown's "Starving Time," the author and class encountered history's interpretive paradox. The article begins with an analogy drawn from the discipline of history. It then describes classroom events. The analysis focuses on a teaching dilemma that the encounter with the paradox provoked and conveys how the author's pedagogical thinking and decision making were influenced by that encounter. The discussion of the dilemma suggests how research and reform in history education and the theories that underpin them mingle, in promising but unpredictable ways. VanSledright 1090 cluded that Davis's efforts in Martin Guerre took her well beyond the interpretive boundaries long regarded as sacrosanct in the historical profession. Davis (1988) responded in the main by defending her treatment of the Martin Guerre case as an attempt to create an account that could be read as detective work, paralleling the way in which the story unfolded in 16thcentury France. She added that this entailed using a form of conjectural logic because the so-called facts of the case were and continued to be in dispute. She noted that there were differences between Finlay's and her own "mental habits, cognitive styles, and moral tone" (p. 574). She observed, "I see complexities and ambivalences everywhere. . . . Finlay sees things in clean, simple lines; he wants absolute truth, established with no ambiguity. . .; he makes moral judgments in terms of sharp rights and wrongs" (p. 574). In effect, Davis argued that their divergent readings of the case and their differing interpretive stances, which had produced those readings, accounted for the dispute about the evidence. She spent the better part of the rest of her essay describing those differences.This exchange is one of many that expose the epistemological turmoil in the historical profession during the last decade or two. The recent flap over Dutch, Edmund Morris's 1999 biography of Ronald Reagan, is only the most recent. This particular brand of contentiousness has to do with the relationship between the putative facts at historians' disposal from evidentiary documents, records, and artifacts, and the interpretations of the pastor histories-that result from the analysis of those facts. Although the issues raised by the Finlay-Davis exchange are not new to the historical profession, they have taken on a certain urgency, as recent criticism ...

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