Chinnery, A. (2010). “What Good Does All This Remembering Do, Anyway?” On Historical Consciousness and the Responsibility of Memory. Philosophy Of Education Yearbook, 397-405.
Historical thinking is an important skill to have in society today. Thinking historically allows us to look at situations outside of ourselves and develops a moral responsibility. The author of this article highlights the fact that there has been a shift in the way teachers and students are approaching history. Rather than one linear story of progress, the focus is now on first person narratives and other such documents as legitimate sources of knowledge. Thus, we have seen a shift in history education from an emphasis on historiography to “historical consciousness.”
She presents two interpretations of a term now popular in the field: “historical consciousness.” One of the ways this has been defined is the ability to read and analyze primary source documents, to take different historical perspectives, and understand the moral obligations we have on our present lives because of what we know about history. The second definition sees historical consciousness as a kind of debt that the present owes to the past, changing the way we think about our present. Essentially what the author breaks this down to is learning about the past versus learning from the past.
The author challenges the idea that personal testimonies are superior to other kinds of sources when studying history. She speculates that the generation of students that are so accustomed to personal testimony or hearing others’ personal accounts that personal accounts have somehow lost their power as a teaching tool. This is a big deal in the field because what kinds of sources we expose our students to can really change the way they access the content and how they build literacy in history.
Li, H. (2010). On Living and Learning in Between the Past and the Future. Philosophy Of Education Yearbook, 406-409.
The author states that Chinnery is correct to value this critical historical consciousness; however he believes that it can be gained not only in the ways she outlines in her article. The author suggests that the process of teaching students to be historical thinkers mandates that we as teachers of the subject must be aware of the politics surrounding the field of study. Because students have to learn about the past from somewhere, it has become a very political process deciding what students should and will know about the past. And not just in the classroom, more at the curriculum development level where the process is so political. The author also reminds us that students today do not all have the same culture and worldview and will therefore likely learn differently from different kinds of sources. We cannot rule out a method (i.e. using person testimonies from historical characters) just because it doesn’t seem to work for one or a group of students. He reminds us that simply learning about the past does not necessarily make students develop a moral compass about how to deal with the future. The author challenges the notion that we learn about the past only to improve our futures, but rather that we learn about the past also in order to understand our present.
Burenheide, B. (2007). I Can Do This: Revelations on Teaching WithHistorical Thinking. The History Teacher (Long Beach, Calif.), 41(1), 55-61.
Historical thinking is not the same as historical knowledge. History has traditionally been seen by students as boring and a useless subject that does not have any real bearing on their lives. This problem stems from the fact that the design of history curriculum has been so broad and has not allowed students to learn deeply. In order for deep learning to happen, and for students to learn how to think historically, teachers have to be committed to the fact that understanding, investigating, and analyzing history is a literacy skill that our students do need. Students can make the curriculum matter to them by forming opinions about it. Forming opinions is a literacy skill that is used in my field all the time. The author of this article suggests that we compare what we are having your students do to the activities that historians do. Historians don’t just read for content, they dissect documents. They write about the discoveries they make and about their opinions. They read what other historians have to say. Students can go beyond this in proving what they know, but it is a good line of thinking to start from. Historical inquiry is also part of literacy in my field. This essentially means that we are asking questions about history and finding those answers based on investigation and analysis of texts.
