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Behind the Curtain: Historical Thinking

Tom Morton (GuyLafleur64 - www.slideshare.net)

St. Clement’s, Toronto, June, 2014

www.heritagefairs.ca

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Histories are the stories we tell about the past. (Introduction to The Big Six)

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Day’s Agenda

• Challenge of Teaching History and the Role of HistoricalThinking

• Significance

• Break

• Evidence

• Lunch

• Continuity and Change

• Teacher Planning

• Report Back and Reflection

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The Fourfold Challenge to TeachingHistory: Purpose

I think that it is in the curriculum becausepeople need to learnabout it.

If you want to do something to do withhistory it is important but if you don’t I don’t know.

I don’t know or care.

I don’t know, but it helps you on quiz shows and pub quizzes.

They don’t tell us why.

Because it gives you an idea about human nature, the same as citzenship, and provides a basis for understanding the way the world istoday.

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The Fourfold Challenge: Connection

• Canadians and Their Pasts, a telephone survey of 3,419 adult residents of Canada found that family history was seen by Canadians as by far the most important aspect of the past and "'autobiographical memory,' a personal version of history is a first step in the development of a 'usable past.'” Yet beyond the primary grades it is not a feature of provincial curriculum.

• Student understanding is often “piecemeal and confused”, unconnected to the big ideas in history or a larger narrative.

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Fourfold Challenge: knowledge

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Fourfold Challenge: Engagement

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What would make history meaningful, coherent, and engaging?

• Students understand the purpose of a topic, project, or learning goal (through concepts of historical significance and cause and consequence among others).

• Students connect personal and local history to larger stories and see the connections amongst events over time (change and continuity, significance, cause and consequence).

• Students develop curiosity about the past and follow that curiosity with increasing competence (evidence and more).

• Students study stories about people of the past and questions of fairness that they care about (historical perspective taking, ethical dimension, cause and consequence).

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Six Concepts of Historical Thinking:

To think historically, students need to be able to:• Establish historical significance• Use primary source evidence• Identify continuity and change• Analyze cause and consequence• Take historical perspectives, and• Understand the ethical

dimension of historical interpretations.

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References:

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Learning Intentions:

• I have a better understanding of teaching and assessing historicalthinking

• I have a plan to decide whatconcepts to teach and how to do so

• I have a strategy that I want to try

• I have a more clear understandingof the purpose of learning history

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Introduction to the Concept of Evidence and Inquiry: I Left a Trace

1. Jot down everything thatyou have done in the last 24 hours.

(that would be appropriate for discussion.)

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2. Make a list of traces that mighthave been left from your life duringthe past 24 hours.

3. Check ✓ those that were likely

to have been preserved.

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1. How well could a biographer 50 years from now write the story of your 24 hours based on the traces you left? How much of what happened would be left out? What aspects of the story might the biographer miss?

2. Where else could he or she turn for evidence?

3. How could readers of the biography know if it was an accurate account?

4. What does this exercise tell us about the challenges historians face when writing histories?

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“the past as a series of events is utterly gone . . . some remnants remain like litter from a picnic, but these material remains never speak for themselves. In fact they are inert traces until someone asks a question that turns them into evidence.”

- Joyce Appleby, “The Power of History”