Session Information
27 SES 10 B, Learning in History and Social Sciences
Paper Session
Contribution
In the recent decade, history education society in Europe and in the English speaking countries has recognised the need to foster students’ historical reasoning. There should be more to history education than memorising facts from the past. History in school should also mean to learn to make use of this information in order to describe, explain, and/or compare historical phenomena, i.e. to reason historically.
Historical reasoning is a domain-specific ability that consists of a number of components:
"In doing this [historical reasoning] he or she asks historical questions, contextualises, makes use of substantive and meta- concepts of history and supports proposed claims with arguments based on evidence from sources that give information about the past" (Van Boxtel & Van Drie, 2008, p. 89).
The meta-concepts, or second order concepts, are of special importance. The discipline of history takes an interest in processes of change and continuity, causes and consequences of processes and events, discusses the significance of historical phenomena, and the interaction between agents and structures. These second order concepts helps us organize and make meaning of historical information (Lee, 2005).
Research has investigated second order concepts in an educational setting: contextualization (Van Boxtel & Van Drie, 2012); significance (Peck, 2010); cause and consequence (Montanero & Lucero, 2011); change and continuity (Blow, 2011); historical empathy (Endacott & Brooks, 2013); the use of sources (Wineburg, 1998).
The concept ‘agency and structure’ is important in explaining and understanding the past: what had the greatest impact on a historical phenomenon: the individuals and groups of different kinds, or structural factors as economy, technical inventions, political situation, traditions, ways of thinking etc.? Earlier research show that young people tend to ascribe change in the past to the actions of individuals, their intentions and actions, rather than to structural factors (Halldén, 1998; Jacott, Lopez-Manion & Carretero, 1998), and that they tend to retell causes of events in temporal order, rather than discussing the interplay between agency and structure (Alexandersson & Runesson, 2006; DelaPaz, 2010). It appears difficult for students to reason historically in terms of agent and structure, therefore this has to be taught in history class.
In an empirical study I explored the concept agency and structure in an educational setting, asking what it means to reason in this specific way and what it takes for students to develop this ability. The study draws on previous research on historical reasoning and on Phenomenographic research.
Phenomenography (Marton & Booth, 1997) explores different ways to conceptualize various phenomena. A phenomenon is characterized by a number of critical aspects that distinguishes it from other phenomena and from the context, and is also characterized by the meaning ascribed to it. Different ways of understanding is related to the critical aspects a person discerns and to the meaning ascribed. Within this theoretical framework, learning can imply:
- A change in how a person discerns a phenomenon and distinguishes it from its context
- A change in what aspects are discerned, how they relate to each other and to the whole
- A change in the meaning a person ascribes to a phenomenon.
The objective of a Phenomenographic analysis is to form a categorization that clarifies the critical aspects distinguishing various conceptions from each other. A teacher can form instruction that makes it possible for his students to discern more of these critical aspects, developing a deeper and more complex understanding. A basic assumption (Marton & Booth, 1997) is that the critical aspects found empirically in one group are critical in other groups as well, though a researcher never can claim to have found all possible critical aspects connected to a phenomenon.
Method
Expected Outcomes
References
Alexandersson, M., & Runesson, U. (2006). The tyranny of the temporal dimension: Learning about fundamental values through the Internet. Scandinavian Journal of Educational research. 50(4), September 2006. 411- 427 Blow, F. (2011). Everything flows and nothing stays. Teaching History 145, December 2011. Coffin, C. (2004). Learning to write history: the role of causality. Written Communication 2004, 21, 261-289. De La Paz, S., & Felton, M. (2010). Reading and writing from multiple source documents in history: Effects of strategy instruction with low to average high school writers. Contemporary Educational Psychology 35 (2010), 174-192. DOI: 10.1016/j.cedpsych.2010.03.001 Endacott, J.L. & Brooks, S. (2013). An updated theoretical and practical model for promoting historical empathy. Social Studies Research and Practice, Spring 2013, 8(1), 41-58. Halldén, O. (1998). Personalization in historical descriptions and explanations. Learning and Instruction, 8(2), 131-139. Jacott, L., Lopez-Manjon, A., & Carretero, M. (1998). Generating explanations in history. In Voss, J. & Carretero, M. (Eds): Learning and reasoning in history. International Review of History Education, Vol 2. New York: RoutledgeFalmer. Lee, P. (2005). Putting principles into practice: Understanding history. In Donovan, S. & Bransford, J. (Eds): How students learn. History in the classroom. National Research Council of the National Academies. Washington D. C.: The National Academies Press. Lilliestam. A-L. (2013). Aktör och struktur i historieundervisning. [Agency and structure in the classroom. About the development of students' historical reasoning]. Göteborg: Göteborg studies in educational studies. Marton, F., & Booth, S. (1997). Learning and Awareness. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum Montamero, M., & Lucero, M. (2011): Causal discourse and the teaching of history. How do teachers explain historical causality? Instructional Science 2011, 39(2), 109-136. ISSN: 0020-4277 (Print) 1573-1952 (Online). Peck, C. (2010). ”It’s not like [I’m] Chinese and Canadian. I am in between”. Ethnicity and students’ conceptions of historical significance. Theory and research in Social Education Fall 2010, 38(4), 574-617. DOI:10.1080/00933104.2010.10473440 Skolverket (1994). Curriculum for the non-compolsory school system, Lpf 94. Stockholm: Fritzes. Van Boxtel, C., & van Drie, J. (2012). ”That’s in the time of the romans!”. Knowledge and strategies students use to contextualize historical images and documents. Cognition and Instruction, 30:2, 113-145. DOI:10.1080/07370008.2012.661813 Van Boxtel, C. & van Drie, J. (2008). Historical reasoning: towards a framework for analyzing students’ reasoning about the past. Educational Psychological Review. 20(2), 87-110. DOI 10.1007/s10648-007-9056-1 Wineburg, S. (1998). Reading Abraham Lincoln: an expert/expert study in the interpretation of historical texts. Cognitive Science, 22, 319-346.
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