CANADIAN SOCIAL STUDIES
VOLUME 39 NUMBER 2, WINTER 2005
www.quasar.ualberta.ca/css
Special Issue: New Approaches to Teaching History

Introduction to the Special Edition of Canadian Social Studies:
New Approaches to Teaching History

Carla Peck

University of British Columbia

By the time this issue of Canadian Social Studies is published the United States will have elected (and inaugurated) their 44th president and thanks to CBC programming, Canadians will have chosen "The Greatest Canadian" of all time. Talk about priorities. I am curious about what Canadian teachers and students are discussing more – which event is given more significance and why? If students are talking about the U.S. election, what are they saying to one another? Are they engaging in an informed debate or relying on what they watch on TV and read on the internet for all of their information? Do they know any of the history behind the issues in this election? If students are talking about the top ten candidates in the Greatest Canadian contest, what kinds of things are they saying? Do they know any of the history connected to the people on the list? How would they go about making their own decisions about the Greatest Canadian? Finally, do students even care about presidential elections in another country or popularity contests in their own?

History teachers ask questions like these almost every day in their efforts to engage students in an exploration of current events and the important history behind them. This issue of Canadian Social Studies is dedicated to their work. As the contributing authors to this special edition demonstrate, much is being done to understand how students best learn history and how we, as teachers, can improve our practice. Much of what we have learned about history education over the past 15 years has been a direct result of the research and thinking about what it means to think historically. This research has definite implications for what we do in classrooms.

Historical Understanding: Theoretical and Conceptual Issues

For many years historical understanding has been thought of in terms of recall. That is, how much could students remember (or forget) from their encounters with history in school or elsewhere? Indeed, some researchers and organizations still think of historical understanding in this way (Ravitch and Finn 1987; See also "The Dominion Institute" at www.dominion.ca ). In Canada, the public regularly faces newspaper headlines that proclaim the demise of our historical understanding: "Canadian history, corpus delicti" (Francis 1998), "WOE, CANADA: Survey shows majority of Canadians could not pass own country's citizenship test" (Duffy 2001), and "Ignorance of our history 'appalling'; Historian wants mandatory teaching of achievements in Canadian classrooms" (Poole 2002). But recall does not tell us anything about our (or our students') capacity to think historically.

Fortunately, many historians and history educators alike have sought to redefine what is meant by the term historical understanding. In the United Kingdom in the mid 1970s, for example, the government funded a "history curriculum development project…which was charged with generating a new history curriculum for pupils aged between 13 and 16" and which "took as its starting point the nature of history and the needs of the pupil" (Booth 1994, p. 63). This was a radical shift from earlier practice in two fundamental ways. First, researchers began to focus on "the particular nature of the discipline being taught" (Booth 1994, p. 62) and argued that "the object of the historian's study – the human past – is incommensurably different from the object of investigation of the natural scientist – the world of here and now – and the thinking it engenders is equally different" (Booth 1994, p. 63). At question is the nature of what is being taught. As Dray (1957) points out, "the logic of historical thought is not primarily deductive and there is little sympathy amongst historians for those who have tried to force the discipline into the clear cut framework of the natural sciences" (pp. 7-12, as cited in Booth 1980, p. 247).

The unique nature of the discipline was also an important consideration from a pedagogical standpoint. The argument that pedagogical methods could be designed without considering what was being taught (the subject matter) did not hold up under close scrutiny. In fact, the opposite was (and is) true. History education researchers then and now feel strongly that content and pedagogy cannot be separated because historical knowledge develops most successfully by doing history – using the discipline's (or historian's) tools to construct historical knowledge. As Seixas (1999, p. 329) writes, "content and pedagogy are inseparable in doing the discipline. Even conceiving of them as two different categories that must be united is no longer helpful" (See also Rogers 1987; Holt 1990; Levstik and Barton 1997; VanSledright 1997-98; Wineburg 1999; Levstik and Barton 2001; Wineburg 2001; Barton and Levstik 2004). Thus, doing history becomes the same as learning history, and pedagogy and content are married rather than falsely separated.

The needs of students were an additional concern for the researchers in the UK and are certainly important to researchers and teachers in North America and elsewhere (Seixas 1993; Epstein 1997; Seixas 1997; Levstik 1997-98; VanSledright 1997-98; Barton and Levstik 1998; Levstik 1999; Epstein 2000; Wertsch 2000; Barton 2001). To what end is history education the means? Some research is beginning to shed light on the processes students engage in as they try to orient their contemporary circumstances to people, events and developments in the past but, as Barton (2004, para. 4) illustrates, there is room for much more work to be done in this area:

If educators hope to build on what students know - a basic tenet of contemporary theories of learning - they must start with attention to how people lived in the past and then help students understand the broader developments that shaped their lives. This necessarily means expanding students' understanding of society, politics, and the economy, so that they recognize how such forces affect people's lives.

The second fundamental shift in the conceptualization of historical understanding concerns the Piagetian notion that children are not developmentally capable of thinking historically because this is too abstract for their young minds. This theory has begun to unravel under closer examination. Some British researchers challenged this supposition and the earlier research that supported it by conducting their own studies designed specifically to see if children could, in fact, be taught to begin to think like historians (Booth 1980; Booth 1983; Lee 1983; Ashby and Lee 1987; Booth 1987; Short and Carrington 1992; Lee et al. 1993; Booth 1994; Short and Carrington 1995; Ashby et al. 1997; Short and Carrington 1999; Lee and Ashby 2000; Lee and Ashby 2001). It turns out that they could. I think I can safely say that all of the authors who have contributed to this special edition of Canadian Social Studies also believe that students of any age can be taught to use some of the tools of the historian to varying degrees of sophistication in order to begin to understand the nature of historical thought and to orient themselves in space and time.

Unraveling the threads of historical understanding

Awakened to the possibility that students can be taught to think historically, historians and history educators alike began to delineate what historical understanding might look like. Tom Holt (1990) is widely recognized as a seminal author on this topic. His book, Thinking Historically: Narrative, Imagination, and Understanding, succinctly outlines the kinds of skills and habits of mind required to think historically. Interspersed throughout Holt's discussion of these attributes are excerpts from interviews between Holt and a number of high school history students. He convincingly uses the excerpts to demonstrate the historical understanding of these students.

One of the first things we learn from Holt's (1990) conversations with students is that they conceive of history as an uncontested story (as if the facts themselves are incontrovertible) – a story written from the "winners'" perspective which is of virtually no use to them unless they need to memorize it to pass a test. In other words, history is a story with a predetermined plot to be memorized but not interpreted. Shemilt (2000, p. 85) concurs, and notes that "…constructivist research into pupils' historical thinking suggests…that students conceive the aim of History to be the presentation of a uniform 'picture of the past'." Holt seeks to disrupt this notion of history and suggests that history teaching should shift from a process of handing over stories for students to learn to a process of giving students "the raw materials of history" and letting them discover and decide what story should be told and for what purpose (p. 10). According to Holt, students need to learn that, "to make sense, the narrative must have a point," and that "the point" might be different depending on who is constructing the narrative (p. 5).

Jennifer Tupper's contribution to this special edition of CSS asks us to consider this very issue. In an article that seeks to interrupt the grand narrative(s) of Canadian history that have traditionally placed white men at the forefront and everyone else in the distant background (think about the CBC's top ten list again…), Tupper proposes using "interruption" as a means of reintroducing figures often left out of narratives of Canadian history.

Kent den Heyer's article raises similar concerns. In this piece, den Heyer draws on his own experience as a high school history teacher as well as his experience as a researcher to explore the use of what he calls "animating throughline questions" with students. The phrase alone is thought-provoking. den Heyer readily admits that asking these types of questions can prove to be quite challenging for teachers and students alike because they do not have clear cut answers. But neither do the questions historians ask about the past.

Helping students move away from the notion that history is "a done deal" also requires that they begin to develop thinking skills most commonly associated with historians. Lee and Ashby (2000) refer to these as "second-order" or "procedural" concepts and explain that these are "ideas that provide our understanding of history as a discipline or form of knowledge…they shape the way we go about doing history" (p. 199). Second-order concepts differ from "substantive" concepts in that the latter simply make up the content of our history lessons whereas the former contextualize, support and provide evidence for whatever claims one might make in the course of those same lessons. Key second-order concepts are: historical significance, epistemology and evidence, continuity and change, progress and decline, empathy and moral judgement, and historical agency (Seixas 1996).

Two authors in this collection draw on their research at the elementary, middle and high school levels to explore the topography of students' historical understanding. Stéphane Lévesque focuses specifically on the second-order concept of historical significance and in so doing sheds light on the criteria some Francophone and Anglophone students use to assign significance to particular people and events from the past. The results of Lévesque's research are particularly relevant for anyone interested in how various contexts (social, linguistic, political, etc.) can affect one's understanding of history.

Keith Barton's work with children in Northern Ireland and the United States offers Canadians an interesting perspective on the interplay between history education and identity formation. In this article on American and Northern Ireland's students' understanding of history we learn that many of the difficulties and questions Canadian educators have been confronting are also being tackled by educators in other parts of the world.

The Raw Materials of History

If we return for a moment to Holt (1990) we find that he considers (as do many others) the process of working with the raw materials of history to be crucial for introducing students "to the essential skills a historian must cultivate" (p. 10). These include knowing the type of material or document with which they are working, asking questions of the document such as (a) Who produced it? (b) Is there evidence of bias? (c) What is the point of view? (d) What is the purpose of the document? (e) What are the apparent silences, gaps and assumptions made by/about this document? Finally, this process concludes with students using "the document or documents to synthesize a narrative about an event or development" (p. 10).

Admittedly, finding "raw materials" to work with can prove challenging. Fortunately, people like Ruth Sandwell have recognized this difficulty and developed a solution. In her article, Sandwell describes how she and her colleagues developed an on-line history education project that not only makes primary sources available to anyone with internet access, but also provides the structure within which one can use these resources. Through this website students can begin to develop, or continue to refine, their ability to think historically.
John Myers attends to the issue of using primary sources but does so from a different angle. In this article, Myers discusses his experiences with pre-service teachers as they worked together to create authentic assessment tools for evaluating students' ability to work with sources to produce an historical narrative. Their ideas about assessment fill in the gap that often remains when teachers move away from traditional tests but are unsure of the evaluation tools that will replace them.

Primary sources, animating throughline questions, examining concepts like significance and identity - surely these will help us, as teachers, engage our students in the study of history. Of course, we want to do more than engage them in the content of history; we also want to help them develop the skills to think historically, as has been discussed above. John Fielding brings this special issue to a close by describing some proven teaching strategies and activities that can help us achieve both of these lofty - but important - goals. Fielding, drawing on his experiences as a student, history teacher and teacher educator, delineates the effectiveness of a number of teaching strategies and then highlights those that he feels provide students with the most meaningful learning encounters.

Concluding Thoughts

Research on history education has come a long way in a relatively short period of time. In the past fifteen years we have gained a great deal of knowledge about how students think about and learn history. However, there is still much to discover. It is my hope that the articles in this special edition of Canadian Social Studies provide a glimpse into what has become a burgeoning field of research. I hope that you can create opportunities to try out some of the suggestions found within each article.

As a final note, I want to extend my deep appreciation to my supervisor, Dr. Peter Seixas. At the time of writing, Peter is on leave from the University of British Columbia and thus is unable to contribute an article to this collection. Peter, thank you for your continued support of this project and let me express what many are surely thinking: Your contribution is dearly missed and we look forward to hearing from you in the near future.