Historical Thinking and other Unnatural Acts

Abstract

The choice seemed absurd, but it reflected exactly what the debate about national history standards had become. "George Washington or Bart Simpson?" asked Sen. Slade Gorton (R-Wash.) during the congressional debates. Which figure represents a "more important part of our nation's history for our children to study?" (Nash, Crabtree, and Dunn 1997: 232). To Gorton, the proposed national standards represented a frontal attack on American civilization, an "ideologically driven, anti-Western monument to politically correct caricature" (Nash, Crabtree, and Dunn 1997: 234). The Senate, in apparent agreement, rejected the standards by a vote of 99-1. Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts Debates about national history standards become so fixated on the question of "which history" that a more basic question is neglected: Why study history at all?

The role of history textbooks in promoting historical thinking in South African classrooms

“…He, along with other experts such as Seixas and Morton (2013) and Reisman (2012), advocate the use of primary sources in the classroom in order to engage learners in the sophisticated process of producing historical knowledge. In responding to this new approach, Wineburg (1999) identifies in historians an epistemological orientation toward texts that regard them as human constructions, who probably can and should be interrogated (Reisman, 2012). Wineburg distilled three heuristics namely "sourcing", "corroborating" and contextualizing in order to engage students in the cognitive analysis of sources.…”

Conflict Transformation and History Teaching: Social Psychological Theory and Its Contributions

“…13) with directions pointing to the need for a preservation of the memory of one-sided victimization and an ethnocentric orientation to history teaching. In the case of Cyprus, as in the case of Israel, this gap is successfully filled by the work of local NGOs who work either intercommunally like the Association for Historical Dialogue and Research (AHDR) or monocommunally and in co-operation with international organizations like the Council of Europe promoting the idea of a transformative form of history teaching that cultivates both the critical historical thinking skills of the students (Seixas 2004;Wineburg 2001;Carretero, Chap. 14) and reconciliation through a critical approach to ethnocentric master narratives.…”

Do Master Narratives Change Among High School Students? A Characterization of How National History Is Represented

“…Research about history learning indicates that students only modestly progress in historical understanding. For example, learning to think historically has been found to be difficult for 150 students because presentism limits them in developing a more disciplinary historical approach toward the past (Wineburg, 2001). Also, tensions occur between identification with and taking a distance from the national past as sources of historical reflection (Carretero & Kriger, 2011;Goldberg, 2013).…”

“…History education is supposed to generate an understanding of the relation between past and present. If students do not understand that past and present are very different epistemological worlds (Carretero & Solcoff, 2012;Lowenthal, 1985), this is not only confusion but also a misconception in opposition to the development of historical thinking 680 20 CARRETERO AND VAN ALPHEN (Levesque, 2008;Seixas, 2004;Wineburg, 2001) and ultimately a limited understanding of the complex and dynamic present. In this sense, identification is conceived to be a possible inhibitor to historical understanding.…”

“…Thus, they might be able to understand that the nation is the result of a historical, political, and social process instead of a preexisting entity with a teleological destiny. Also, they might learn with more ease that both national narratives and nations are representational tools that can be reflected on with historical consciousness and thinking abilities, such as comparing sources and contextualizing (Seixas, 710 2004;Wineburg, 2001).…”