What Does It Mean To Think Historically . . . and How Do You Teach It?

Abstract

THERE IS A LOT OF TALK THESE DAYS about historically. Policy makers use the term. So do teachers, curriculum writers, test makers, and administrators. And above all researchers use it--a lot. A number of articles have been published in this very column concerning the topic, many by those who do history-education research. Some might argue that the term thinking historically has become nothing more than educational jargon, that educators use it as a metaphor for a significantly broad range of activities that occur in any given social studies classroom. Others might say that the term means different things to different people. As a result, it can be difficult to know what it means to teach it. In what follows, I will attempt to address the question I pose in the title. I hope to clarify what might be meant by historical and therefore shed some light on how it could more successfully be taught. I address the question as a former history teacher--thirteen years in secondary schools ending in 1989, with a return in 1999 to a fifth-grade classroom for part of the year--and as a history-education researcher who has been studying historical among teachers and students for fourteen years. The question the title poses has been something I have been deeply interested in since I first began teaching history. It has puzzled and perplexed me as a teacher and also as a researcher. Part of the difficulty in knowing what we mean by historical has to do with whom we are talking about and in what context. Are we describing the historical of the experts, or historians, and how they go about their work? Are we talking about novices, such as elementary school students, who perhaps are learning chronological, survey history for the first time in school? Or do we mean adolescents, those we might describe as intelligent novices? The historians can serve as a benchmark in relationship to which we can understand what the less sophistical historical thinkers do. However, we must not unfairly hold novices to the standard set by the experts. The academic developmental distance between novices and experts is a gap that history teachers--through history education--can strive to close. Work Historians by definition spend most of their professional lives engaged in historical thought. (1) In the initial investigative phases of their they occupy themselves with reading and digesting the residues of the past left behind by our ancestors. Much of this residue remains in the form of documents or sources. Source work, then, becomes a staple in the investigative lives of these experts. work is a complex undertaking, requiring a form of critical literacy. (2) This involves the constant interrogation of documents and their authors. Historians know that there is a distinct difference between history (the product of their investigations) and the past (traces and artifacts that remain--historical data, if you will). They also know that not everything that happened in the past is available to us in the present and that what does remain is organized from someone's perspective. As a result, historians reconstruct (some might say create) the past based on questions they attempt to answer. Criteria are involved in selecting and reconstructing the past, and these criteria relate to what is considered generally acceptable practice within the field, although this practice varies some and is often in dispute. (3) The product, a history, is subject to peer criticism based on those criteria. Because sources represent varying perspectives regarding a question under investigation, historians learn to become astute at assessing the nature of these sources, assessing sources is a complex process involving at least four interrelated and interconnected cognitive acts--identification, attribution, perspective judgment, and reliability assessment. (4) * Identification involves knowing what a source is. …

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