Session Information
01 SES 02 A, Action Research (Part 1)
Paper Session to be continued in 01 SES 03 A
Contribution
For elementary teachers, history is only one of many subjects they teach. Beliefs teachers hold about the nature of history and the construction of historical knowledge significantly influence what they perceive as relevant content and how they teach the subject (Stoel et al., 2022). Elementary teachers’ beliefs, mental conceptualisations and constructs of history are usually formed by how history is presented in movies, books, museums and the textbooks they read as a student (Gibson & Peck, 2020). In general, elementary teachers have not engaged in historical inquiry themselves. This is problematic, because history education researchers have emphasized the importance of historical reasoning activities in teaching history (e.g., Levstik & Thornton, 2018). Teachers can only teach students a disciplinary way of working with history if they themselves master these disciplinary skills to a certain extent.
In the Netherlands, historical reasoning is not commonly part of the history curriculum for elementary schools. Teachers teach a ten-era framework illustrated with events and persons from the Dutch Canon (Kennedy, 2020). In schools that experiment with inquiry-based learning in history, a common practice is that students are encouraged to gather information on the internet and present this, but due to no or limited modelling, real historical inquiry and historical reasoning are lacking and students’ understanding of historical events remains limited (Béneker et al., 2021). This can reinforce the naïve belief, both in teacher and students, that history is a single story, based on a series of facts (Van Boxtel et al., 2021).
Helping teachers develop beliefs about history and teaching history that foster inquiry into historical sources and historical reasoning can take place through a professional development (PD) programme in which teachers are informed about and experiment with historical inquiry and reasoning. In their Interconnected model of teacher professional growth, Clarke and Hollingsworth (2002) suggest that change in knowledge, beliefs and attitude triggers change in teachers’ practice when they engage in professional experimentation. A reversed influence is also possible: that teacher beliefs change by experimenting with new approaches and reflecting on the effects on student learning and learning outcomes.
In previous research on teacher beliefs about history, attention has been paid to how epistemic beliefs of teachers in middle and secondary schools influence their choices in teaching history (Voet & de Wever, 2016) and how pre-service teachers’ beliefs about history develop (Gibson & Peck, 2020; Wansink et al., 2017). Maggioni et al. (2004) describe developments in elementary teachers’ epistemic beliefs in the course of a PD programme on content and method of teaching American history. In their study, the shifts in epistemic beliefs after the programme were limited and suggested relative stability in teacher beliefs.
To prepare teachers in grade 3-6 (students 8 to 12 years old) to engage students in historical inquiry and reasoning, we developed a two-year PD programme. The programme aims to develop participants’ own historical thinking and reasoning skills and their skills in designing inquiry-based history lessons that encourage students to reason historically. We aim to contribute to knowledge on how participation in a PD programme influences teachers’ beliefs about history and inquiry-based history teaching, and to the discussion of effective elements of teacher PD that enhance development in subject-specific beliefs.
We address two research questions.
1. How does a PD programme, in which elementary school teachers learn to reason historically and develop skills to design inquiry-based historical reasoning lessons, influence participants’ epistemic beliefs about history and pedagogical beliefs about history teaching?
2. Which elements of the PD programme do participants consider as sources of growth for their professional development?
Method
The study included nine teachers from six elementary schools in the Netherlands, who enrolled in a two-year PD programme on historical reasoning in inquiry-based history lessons. The ethics committee of the university of Amsterdam approved the data collection. All participants hold a Bachelor’s Degree in Education. In addition, one teacher holds a Master’s Degree in History. Participants teach in grade 3 to 6 and their mean years of experience is 11 years. The teachers chose to participate voluntarily. The programme consisted of fourteen 2,5-hour meetings spread over two school years. The first author was the facilitator and actively participated in the meetings. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic during the first year, meetings three to six were online. Table 2 summarizes the content of the meetings. During each meeting, theoretical background about historical reasoning and inquiry was offered. Topics were chosen by the facilitator or requested by participants. In every meeting participants received historical source material and engaged in historical inquiry. This inquiry involved collaboratively corroborating sources, comparing sources and coming to a substantiated conclusion about the question at hand. In some cases, participants were encouraged to search for additional historical sources themselves. To identify development in participants’ beliefs about history and history education we collected data using two instruments, which enables methodological diversity and will be discussed in the presentation: individual in-depth interviews and the Beliefs about Learning and Teaching of History (BLTH-) questionnaire (Maggioni et al., 2004, Dutch version adapted by Havekes, 2015). The semi-structured interview contained questions about teachers’ beliefs of general goals of history education, the nature of history, knowing versus doing history, inquiry-based learning activities and their sense of agency. These questions were based on previous research on epistemic beliefs about history (Voet & de Wever, 2016). We used a Dutch translation of the BLTH-questionnaire (Maggioni et al., 2004) that consists of 22 questions (Havekes, 2015). Participants filled in the questionnaire individually immediately after the premeasurement interview and at the end of the final meeting of each year (seventh and fourteenth meeting). All interviews were fully transcribed. The transcriptions were coded using a coding scheme based on our theoretical framework, supplemented with themes that were derived from the answers in the pre-interviews. The transcriptions were coded using a coding scheme based on our theoretical framework, supplemented with themes that were derived from the answers in the pre-interviews.
Expected Outcomes
Even though more naïve beliefs about history remain, teachers developed more nuanced beliefs. Pedagogical beliefs of all participants became more crystallized and more nuanced in nature. Epistemic beliefs about history, on the other hand, remained less crystallized or developed in a different direction. This is anticipated, as elementary teachers generally do not think about the nature of history, but do think about how best to teach history. The development that teachers in our programme show, matches the description by Wansink et al. (2017) how individuals can simultaneously hold opposite beliefs and switch between stances, especially when beliefs about teaching history are discussed as opposed to beliefs about the nature of history. We describe two development profiles. Teachers that fit the first profile come to understand how difficult history is, epistemically. They develop richer and more nuanced ideas in the course of the PD programme, but risk development of misconceptions about historical narratives all being equally valid. Considering their pedagogical beliefs, teachers in this group developed towards more explicit ideas about doing inquiry in history lessons. Teachers that fit the second profile tended to develop richer beliefs about the nature of history and explicit ideas about inquiry by students in history lessons. Participants indicated that their pedagogical beliefs about teaching history and performing historical inquiries changed because of the programme. It was the combination of engaging in historical inquiry, modelling by the facilitator, group discussions about historical inquiry, searching for historical sources themselves and developing and discussing their own lesson designs and putting them to practice that made participants see the possibilities of inquiry-based history learning and also helped develop their beliefs. This is in line with earlier findings about professional development for inquiry learning in history (Williamson McDiarmid, 1994, in Van Boxtel et al., 2021; Voet & De Wever, 2018).
References
Béneker, T., Van Boxtel, C., De Leur, T., Smits, A., Blankman, M., & De Groot-Reuvenkamp, M. (2020). Geografisch en historisch besef ontwikkelen op de basisschool. https://hdl.handle.net/11245.1/39bbcabc-b3b3-4415-b0d3-747b97e51984 Clarke, D., Hollingsworth, H. (2002). Elaborating a model of teacher professional growth. Teaching and teacher education, 18(2002), 947-967. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0742-051X(02)00053-7 Gibson, L., & Peck, C. (2020). More than a Methods Course: Teaching Preservice Teachers to Think Historically. In Ch. Berg & Th. Christou (Eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of History and Social Studies Education (Vol. 1, pp. 213-251). Palgrave MacMillan. Havekes, H. (2015). Knowing and doing history. Learning historical thinking in the classroom [Doctoral dissertation]. Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen. Kennedy, J. (2020). Open vensters voor onze tijd. De canon van Nederland herijkt. Rapport van de Commissie Herijking Canon van Nederland. Amsterdam University Press. Levstik, L., & Thornton, S. (2018). Reconceptualizing history for early childhood through early adolescence. In S. A. Metzger & L. McArthur Harris (Eds.), The Wiley International Handbook on History Teaching and Learning (Vol. 1, pp. 409-432). Wiley Blackwell. Maggioni, L., Alexander, P., & VanSledright, B. (2004). At the crossroads? The development of epistemological beliefs and historical thinking. European Journal of School Psychology 2, no. 1-2, 169-197. Stoel, G., Logtenberg, A., Wansink, B., Huijgen, T., Van Boxtel, C., & Van Drie, J. (2017). Measuring epistemological beliefs in history education: An exploration of naïve and nuanced beliefs. International Journal of Educational Research 83, 120-134. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijer.2017.03.003 Van Boxtel, C., Voet, M., & Stoel, G. (2021). Inquiry learning in history. In R. Golan Duncan & C. Chinn (Eds.), International Handbook of Inquiry and Learning (Vol. 1, pp. 296-310). Routledge. Voet, M., & De Wever, B. (2016). History teachers’ conceptions of inquiry-based learning, beliefs about the nature of history, and their relation to the classroom context. Teaching and Teacher Education 55, 57–67. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tate.2015.12.008 Wansink, B., Akkerman, S., Vermunt, J., Haenen, J., & Wubbels, T. (2017). Epistemological tensions in prospective Dutch history teachers’ beliefs about the objectives of secondary education. Journal of Social Studies Research, 41(1), 11–24. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jssr.2015.10.003
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