Bases generals

Here is a list of factors that helped Hitler come to power.

Nazi strengths

• Hitler’s speaking skills

• Propaganda campaigns

• Violent treatment of their opponents

• Their criticisms of the Weimar system of government

• Nazi policies

• Support from big business Opponents’ weaknesses

• Failure to deal with the Depression

• Failure to co-operate with one another

• Attitudes of Germans to the democratic parties Other factors

• Weaknesses of the Weimar Republic

• Scheming of Hindenburg and von Papen

• The impact of the Depression

• The Treaty of Versailles

• Memories of the problems of 1923

(Walsh, 2001, p. 157)

Text 4.4

(Beechener et al., 2004, p. 193)

The explaining genres: a summary

In the previous section we have seen that the two genres that make up the explaining set form a distinct (if small) ‘family’ (see Figure 4.3). However, the explanation genres and the historical account genre have much in common in that all three have as their purpose explaining past events and all three have high frequencies of the language of cause-and-effect. The major distinction between the historical account and the factorial and consequen-tial explanations is their use of time. While in the historical account chron-ology is the main organizational framework, in the explaining genres the time line is dismantled.

In sum, the explaining genres function to construe a relatively complex, multi-layered causal ‘model’ of past events. Rather than being temporally located in a one-way cause–effect chain, events and social/political/eco-nomic structures and trends are construed as part of a complex web of mutu-ally influencing, simultaneous causal interactions. In comparison to the recording genres, the view of the past presented in the explaining genres is therefore less ‘neat’. It is for this reason that they play an important peda-gogic role. That is, they form a ‘bridge’ between the iconic forms of the recording genres (in which events are recounted as they unfolded in chrono-logical time) and the highly abstract, arguing genres. Not surprisingly, learn-ing to read and write explainlearn-ing genres plays an important role in developlearn-ing students’ ability to manage conceptually framed and increasingly abstract historical texts. These are the texts that are the focus of the next section.

Figure 4.3 The explaining family

Text 4.5

Arguing about history

As I stated earlier, producing successful argument essays is fundamental to success in history, particularly in the senior years. A selection of curriculum statements set out below show the emphasis that is currently placed on the contingent nature of historical knowledge, particularly in the later years of secondary schooling, where students are expected to:

• draw conclusions and appreciate that historical judgements are liable to reassessment in the light of new or reinterpreted evidence (UK GCSE Criteria for History: Qualifications and Curriculum Authority, 2006);

• develop their understanding of the nature of historical study, for example, that history is concerned with judgements based on available evidence and that historical judgements may be provisional (Aims and Assessment Objectives in AS and A level in the UK:

Qualifications and Curriculum Authority, 2004, p. 3);

• consider multiple perspectives;

• challenge arguments of historical inevitability;

• hold interpretations of history as tentative;

• evaluate major debates among historians (National Standards for United States His-tory – Grades 5–12: California State Board of Education, 2000);

• describe[s] and evaluate[s] different perspectives and interpretations of the past (New South Wales Modern History, Stage 6 Syllabus: Board of Studies 2003).

Given the emphasis on the evaluation of historical interpretation, the find-ings from much contemporary educational research into the teaching and (Beechener et al., 2004, p. 50)

learning of history are of concern. Various studies suggest that students often experience difficulty in assessing the validity of different perspectives on the past as well as in justifying their own (Blanco and Rosa, 1997; Farmer and Knight, 1995; Voss and Wiley, 2000). By providing a rich description of what students have to do (linguistically speaking) in order to assess differing interpretations and put forward their own, I have sought to uncover what some of these difficulties may be.

Historical argumentation, as characterized in this book, can be viewed as expanding a student’s repertoire of explanatory resources to include those of negotiation and debate. In other words, constructing an arguing genre assumes and subsumes the ability to narrate, abstract from and reason about historical events in the manner of the explaining and recording genres but, in addition, requires the ability to reconfigure the resources of abstracting and reasoning in order to persuade. This requires the use of different inter-personal strategies and new ways of organizing text. Not surprisingly, this is a challenging shift for many students.

In the following section, I provide an overview of a three-way classification of arguing genres that emerged as a result of analysing historical discourse in the middle to final years of secondary school. These genres are referred to as the exposition, discussion and challenge genres (see Figure 4.4). The three genres share the overall social purpose of arguing the case ‘for’ or ‘against’ a particular interpretation of the past and foreground the debateable nature of historical knowledge and explanation. In this way they reflect the valued historical paradigm whereby a hypothesis or thesis is proved or disproved through the marshalling of arguments and evidence. The evidence used in arguing genres to support the writer’s position includes documentary and other primary source material, as well as secondary sources. It may also take the form of ‘mini’ recording or explaining genres.

While factorial and consequential explanations provide relatively categor-ical explanations of historcategor-ical phenomena, arguing genres highlight how likely such explanations of the past are. Most significantly, each of the three genres uses a different arguing ‘strategy’.

Figure 4.4 The arguing genres

The exposition

Within school history, an exposition is an analytical text that puts forward a particular interpretation of the past and then ‘proves’ the validity of the interpretation through a series of arguments and supporting evidence. Typ-ically, exposition tasks are framed in terms of probability or degree:

• How far was overproduction the cause of the Depression in the USA?

as opposed to

• What were the causes of the Depression in the USA?

• How important were economic factors in driving Japan into war in the Pacific and Southeast Asia in 1941?

as opposed to

• Why did Japan enter the war in the Pacific and Southeast Asia in 1941?

Questions such as those above require students to make a judgement about the explanatory value of specific factors that purport to account for a historical outcome. This requires a careful weighing up of available evidence in order to develop a thesis that measures the degree to which the factors can be said to offer a valid explanation or interpretation of the past. In other words, the student must plot the extent of the part played by specified histor-ical phenomena along a continuum that stretches from, at one end, ‘no part at all’ to, at the other end, ‘the main or only part’.

In order to achieve its social purpose an exposition moves through three distinct obligatory stages. An optional stage, Background, may also occur prior to the Thesis. These stages are illustrated in Text 4.6, which was writ-ten by a Year 11 Australian student in response to the question To what exwrit-tent was the 1920s a decade of hope? There you will notice that Concession (the part underlined) is an optional element that serves to qualify the writer’s argu-ments. It is also possible to have a more ‘full-blown’ Counter-Argument stage (with elaborating evidence), which is not, however, illustrated in the sample text. Both the Concession and Counter-Argument stages are important in qualifying what might otherwise appear to be a somewhat oversimplified argumentative line. By anticipating alternative positions, the writer makes clear that they have considered, but discounted, their validity (to a greater or lesser extent).