As delineated in the preceding literature review, historical thinking is a complex process, but not a new one. It is at the heart of what historians do as they research and write their accounts, produce their documentaries, and design historical sites and museum exhibits. Having students interact with these products in a critical way is what Barton and Levstik (2004) identified as “the analytic stance,” a subcategory of which is “not to retain specific interpretations constructed by historians or found in textbooks but to understand the process of developing historical accounts” (p. 82). In this action research study, these accounts include those at historical sites and museums.
Contemporary attempts to engage students in this type of historical thinking have their roots in the New Social Studies of the 1960s and 1970s and its counterpart in Britain (Barton & Levstik, 2004, p. 82). During the former, the primary emphasis was for
students to engage in inquiry exercises where they participated in lessons similar to what social scientists actually do (Bruner, 2013; Massialas, 2009; Rice, 1992). Barton and Levstik (2004) singled out the Amherst Project. Using teachers, it produced a number of inquiry exercises, such as those focused on the Battle of Lexington and Truman’s
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determine if what really happened can be settled in the former and the ethics of decision- making in the latter (Brown, 1996). Unfortunately, for a number of reasons, the New Social Studies did not change the paradigm of history teaching (Brown, 1996; Fenton, 1991; Massialas, 2009; Rice, 1992), and the essentialist emphasis of content rather than inquiry emerged as dominant as ever in the typical history curriculum.
Britain was also involved in revising history curriculum and making it more inquiry-focused. In 1973, a new program called the School’s Council History 13-16 Project (SCHP) was begun at the University of Leeds. In 1984, four years before its end, the SCHP’s curriculum was used in 25% of the United Kingdom’s high schools (Roy Rosenzweig Center for History & New Media at George Mason University, n.d.; Rosenzweig & Weinland, 1986). For three years, British students took courses focused on inquiry into the historical process and particular topics. For example, their beginning course “What is History?” introduced the historical method of evidence analysis and evaluation followed by “Study in Development,” “Enquiry in Depth,” “Studies in
Modern World History,” and “History Around Us.” These four courses allowed students to focus on specific topics such as the history of medicine, Elizabethan England, the Irish Question, and Industrial Archaeology, to name just a few. Rosenzweig and Weinland (1986) observed that “the critical element . . . turns on the treatment of historical fact as ‘evidence,’ as information necessary to prove an [sic] hypothesis or provide the answer to a question” (p. 269). A glance through the dates of the primary and secondary literature cited in this chapter reveals that much work has followed in the steps of the New Social Studies and the School’s Council History 13-16 Project. Applying this analytical
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approach to historical sites and museums - the topic of this action research study – made sense because they, too, are subjective interpretations of the past.
While it is important to understand this action research topic in light of the literature on historical thinking, it is equally essential to see how this study related to the general ideologies and philosophies of education. In fact, developing students’ historical thinking at historical sites and museums is a complicating amalgamation of both. At its most basic level, I wanted my students to be able to think like historians about sources, specifically historical sites and museums. In this sense, this study was consistent with the Scholar Academic ideology, which believes in “introducing children into both the
knowledge base of a discipline and the ways in which academicians within the discipline think [emphasis added], feel, and communicate” (Schiro, 2013, p. 20). The HTM itself is a tool based on the cognitive theory of learning in that its purpose was to provide students with a schema they could use when they encountered a historical site or museum exhibit (Driscoll, 2000, p.146). On the other hand, it was hoped that students would begin to realize that “history is not the past; it is the sense we make of the past” (Yellis, 2009, 54 para.). Such an epistemology is certainly more consistent with the Learner Centered and Progressive conception of knowledge. This view, known as constructivism, claims that
knowledge is actively constructed, invented, created, or discovered by learners. It is not passively received by them and stored in their minds as photographic images of objective reality – it does not magically appear in their mind in a form identical to what a teacher, book, or real life experience might have transmitted to them. (Schiro, 2013, p. 142)
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The same could be said about the creators of historical sources such as textbooks, primary documents, visuals, museum exhibits, monuments, and memorials. In fact, Wineburg (2001) observed that
the traditional view, in which knowledge goes from the page of the text to the head of the reader, is inadequate. But the metacognitive view, in which
knowledge is constructed by students questioning themselves about a fixed and friendly text, is equally inadequate. We could do no better than to heed the words of Robert Scholes [1985]: “If wisdom, or some less grandiose notion such as heightened awareness, is to be the end of our endeavors, we shall have to see it not as something transmitted from the text to the student but as something developed in the student by questioning the text.” (p. 83)
In other words, in learning how to analyze and interpret such historical sites and
museums, students were engaged in a progressive and constructive activity. The source was not seen as the final say about its topic nor a text with static meaning, but one to which students themselves brought their own interpretations. In fact, the connection section of the HTM was constructive in its emphasis for it asked students “how . . . the exhibit’s viewpoint or perspective [is] similar to or different from your own?”
This action research study and the HTM should also be understood in terms of Vygotsky’s work. The students themselves typically worked with each other as they analyzed an exhibit in addition to having access to me as their teacher. In this way, they were able to push themselves beyond what they may have been able to do on their own. Vygotsky labeled this as the zone of proximal development (Driscoll, 2000, pp. 246-248). Considering that people usually visit historical sites and museums with others and that
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middle school teenagers are very social, it made sense for them to use the HTM in pairs or groups rather than completely alone, although some students did prefer to work alone. Even in those cases, they still had the option to ask me or classmates for help if they felt they needed it. This action research study was a social one consistent with Vygotsky’s theory of learning (Driscoll, 2000) and students’ natural inclinations.
In contrast, the current emphasis of history in the public schools is what can the individual do with factual content. For example, an examination of the South Carolina State Standards (South Carolina Department of Education, 2011) reveals a heavy emphasis on factual knowledge although the verbs themselves demand higher level thinking than just recall. As mentioned in chapter 1 of this dissertation, the South Carolina Support Documents for sixth, seventh, and eighth grades are 76 pages, 102 pages, and 126 pages, respectively (South Carolina Department of Education, n.d.b). The vast majority of these pages are devoted to a narrative explanation of the content of these historical periods. Unfortunately, the amount of content required can result in the teacher focusing on it and not as much on higher level intellectual skills, especially the authentic historical thinking described in this chapter. So much information to cover can preclude time-intensive curriculum that turns students into thinkers rather than memorizers. In a survey of Mississippi and Tennessee high school social studies teachers, Vogler (2008) found that nearly 62% of the former devoted over two months preparing students for the state test (p. 24). When pondering why these teachers were prone to use “teacher- centered” as opposed to “student-centered” methodologies, despite the fact that in Mississippi the state test emphasizes the former pedagogy, Vogler (2008) suggested several possibilities, one of which was time:
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Time . . . has never been an ally of teachers. A common complaint of teachers for decades has been a lack of classroom time to provide adequate coverage of the curriculum. To combat this problem, teachers have used practices that allow for maximum content coverage in a minimum amount of time. Now in this era of testing, accountability, and standards, time (or the lack of time) has become an even greater enemy of teachers. (p. 24)
I myself have felt the pressure to finish the content by May so that my students would be prepared to take the Palmetto Assessment of State Standards (PASS). Consequently, he was unable to cover some topics in as great depth as he would have liked and incorporate more advanced thinking activities than he did.
Today’s essentialism has a strong hold on education’s power brokers. Since 1635, it has been the dominant education philosophy, except from the end of the nineteenth century until the middle of the twentieth when progressivism challenged it (Oliva, 2009, p. 160). The 1990s to the present have seen the Social Efficiency take the content of the Scholar Academics and transformed the public schools into meccas of high stakes standardized testing, and authentic history learning has suffered. There appears to be a shift in emphasis though. During the 2017-2018 school year, the South Carolina State Department of Education began to hold meetings where it revealed the proposed South Carolina Social Studies College-and-Career-Ready Standards . . . Anticipated 2020. These new standards have reorganized the content into six historical thinking skills – comparison, causation, periodization, context, continuities and changes, and evidence (South Carolina Department of Education, n.d.a). In the meantime, the goal of this action research study was to implement historical thinking into my field studies to
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historical sites and museums, both virtual and actual. It was hoped that it would begin a systematic realignment of his overall curriculum in a more progressive and constructivist direction.