Peter Seixas's Big Six Historical Thinking Concepts
Peter Stearns, "Thinking Historically in the Classroom"
David Lowenthal, "Dilemmas and Delights of Learning History," in Knowing, Teaching, and Learning History: National and International Perspectives, ed. by Peter N Stearn, Peter Seixas, and Sam Wineburg (New York: NYU Press, 2000).
The study of history, argues Lowenthal, helps us get a historical understanding of everyday affairs, enables us to realize that the past has ongoing consequences, and makes us see that the past is "uniquely unlike the present". The trope about the "strangeness" or "uniqueness" of the past can be traced in all the readings for this week. According to Lowenthal, seeing the past as different from the present will help Americans shed their present day lenses and "put themselves in others' shoes" (p 67). Thus, for Lowenthal, the study of history enables us to overcome the culture of ahistoricism.
According to Lowenthal, historical understanding is hindered by amateurish attempts to make sense of the past – attempts that are characterized by a lack of maturity and academic rigor. He also blames postmodernism for impeding historical understanding; postmodernists, he says, attack universal historical referents and deny claims to historical truths (p 71).
Russell H. Hvolbek, "History and Humanities: Teaching as Destructive of Certainty" in History Anew: Innovations in the Teaching of History Today, ed. by Robert Blackey (Long Beach, Calif. : University Press, California State University, 1993), 3-9.Hvolbek is concerned by the inability of teachers to inspire students to learn and to appreciate "the value of our cultural, intellectual, and social past". He identifies the drive for "objective knowledge" and the desire to be "scientific" as the "deeper reason" why teachers cannot inspire students (p 1). Hvolbek wants historians to reconsider their purpose for teaching history. He argues that the goal of history and the humanities is to make students aware "how their lives connect to past human experience". (p 4)
To help students connect with the past, Hvolbek believes that history teachers must help them overcome their smugness: they must assist them to look beyond their sociocultural assumptions, prejudices and destroy their self-assured and commonsensical understanding of the past. Destruction, for him, is a metaphor for education.
Sam Wineburg. Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts: Charting the Future of Teaching the Past (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001), p 1-25.Wineburg takes his cue from Lowenthal and continues the engagement with the malady of "presentism" – the act of seeing the past through the lens of the present. A psychologist by training, he sees presentism as a psychological condition, a way of thinking that comes naturally to us (p 19). Historical thinking, on the other hand, is an unnatural act. It challenges us to alter the mental structures we use to grasp the past (p 7). Like Lowenthal, Wineburg sees virtue in seeing the past as a strange place, but he does not want the study of history to be distinct from our concerns in the present (p 6). Thus, he believes, historical thinking not only helps us perceive how people in the past experienced the world, but also how people in the present live in it.
As a high school history teacher and a graduate student in history, Bain found he was torn between the disciplinary rigor of history and the passive understanding of history by students. In this article, Bain discusses his attempt at implementing a cognitive approach to history instruction in which students’ thinking about historical inquiry is privileged. He uses excerpts from students’ journals to illustrate their thoughts about their thinking as they were introduced to elements of expert historical thinking. He also emphasizes that permanent classroom resources emphasizing the process of historical inquiry and collaborative questioning of historical material aid students in maintaining a disciplinary focus throughout their study of history.
This article explores historical reasoning, an important activity in history learning. Based upon an extensive review of empirical literature on students’ thinking and reasoning about history, a theoretical framework of historical reasoning is proposed. The framework consists of six components: asking historical questions, using sources, contextualization, argumentation, using substantive concepts, and using meta-concepts. Each component is discussed and illustrated by examples from our own research. The article concludes with suggestions on how to use the framework both in future research and in educational practice.
