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Below are the first 10 and last 10 pages of uncorrected machine-read text (when available) of this chapter, followed by the top 30 algorithmically extracted key phrases from the chapter as a whole.
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Part I
HISTORY
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PUTTING PRINCIPLESINTOPRACTICE: UNDERSTANDING HISTORY 31
2
Putting Principles into Practice:
Understanding History
Peter J. Lee
A major principle emerging from the work on How People Learn is that
students do not come to their classrooms empty-handed. They bring with
them ideas based on their own experience of how the world works and how
people are likely to behave. Such ideas can be helpful to history teachers,
but they can also create problems because ideas that work well in the every-
day world are not always applicable to the study of history. The very fact
that we are dealing with the past makes it easy for misconceptions to arise
(soldiers and farmers are not the same now as in the seventeenth century,
and "liberty" did not have the same meaning for people then as it does
today). But problems with everyday ideas can go deeper. Students also have
ideas about how we know about the past. If they believe, for example, that
we can know nothing unless we were there to see it, they will have difficulty
seeing how history is possible at all. They will think that because we cannot
go back in time and see what happened, historians must just be guessing or,
worse, making it up. If, as teachers, we do not know what ideas our students
are working with, we cannot address such misconceptions. Even when we
think we are making a difference, students may simply be assimilating what
we say into their existing preconceptions.
Another principle of How People Learn is that students need a firm foun-
dation of factual knowledge ordered around the key concepts of the disci-
pline. Some of the key concepts for the study of history are concerned with
the content or substance of history--with the way people and societies work.
These substantive concepts include, for example, political concepts such as
state, government, and power, and economic concepts such as trade, wealth,
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32 HOW STUDENTS LEARN: HISTORY IN THECLASSROOM
and tax. But understanding history also involves concepts of a different
kind, such as evidence, cause, and change.
Historians talk and write about things that go on in the world. Their
histories are full of pioneers, politicians, and preachers, or of battles, bu-
reaucracies, and banks. They give their readers explanations, they use evi-
dence, and they write accounts, but their books are not about the idea of
explanation, or the notion of evidence, or what kind of thing a historical
account is. Rather, they use their own (usually sophisticated) understandings
of evidence or explanation to write books about Columbus or the Maya or
the American Revolution. Nevertheless, concepts such as evidence lie at the
heart of history as a discipline. They shape our understanding of what it is to
"do" history and allow us to organize our content knowledge (see Box 2-1).
There is no convenient agreed-upon term for this knowledge of the
discipline. It is sometimes called "metahistorical"--literally, "beyond history"--
because the knowledge involved is not part of what historians study, but
knowledge of the kind of study in which they are involved. Another term
sometimes used is "second-order" knowledge, denoting a layer of knowl-
edge that lies behind the production of the actual content or substance of
history. Finally, because the knowledge involved is built into the discipline
of history, rather than what historians find out, another term used is "disci-
plinary" knowledge. In this chapter, all three terms are used interchangeably
to refer to ideas about "doing history." It is important to stress that the intent
here is not to suggest that students in school will be doing history at the
same level or even in the same way as historians. The point is rather that
students bring to school tacit ideas of what history is, and that we must
address these ideas if we are to help them make progress in understanding
what teachers and historians say about the past.
Once we start to include ideas of this kind among the key concepts of
the discipline, we can see that they also provide a basis for enabling stu-
dents to think about their own learning. We thereby arrive at the third prin-
ciple emphasized in How People Learn--the importance of metacognitive
strategies (see Chapter 1). Monitoring one's own learning in history means,
among other things, knowing what questions to ask of sources and why
caution is required in understanding people of the past. It means knowing
what to look for in evaluating a historical account of the past, which in turn
requires understanding that historians' accounts are related to questions and
themes. In short, it means having some sense of what counts as "doing"
history.
In Box 2-1, for example, Angela is implicitly asking whether her group
is making the right moves in its attempt to explain why World War II started.
She is using her knowledge of what counts as a good explanation in history
to question how well the group really understands why the war began. In
this way, metahistorical (disciplinary) concepts allow students to begin to
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PUTTING PRINCIPLESINTOPRACTICE: UNDERSTANDING HISTORY 33
monitor their understanding of particular events in the past. As metacognitive
strategies of this kind become explicit, they play an increasingly important
role in learning.
This introductory chapter first explores students' preconceptions about
history, pointing out some key concepts involved in making sense of the
discipline. It considers students' ideas of time and change, of how we know
about the past, of how we explain historical events and processes, and of
what historical accounts are, and why they so often differ (second-order
ideas). The discussion then turns to students' preconceptions of how politi-
cal and economic activities work (substantive concepts). Of course, stu-
dents' ideas change as their experience grows and they encounter new prob-
lems; this means we need to consider how we might expect students' ideas
to develop as we teach them. Although there is a growing volume of re-
search on students' ideas about history, one that is expanding particularly
rapidly in the United States, it is important to remember that there has been
much less work of this kind in history than in science or mathematics.1
Research conducted in the United States and Europe over the past three
decades appears to suggest that some of the key concepts of history (the
discipline) are counterintuitive, and that some of the working assumptions
about history used by students are much more powerful than others and
may be developed in a systematic way over the years spent studying history
in schools. The chapter ends with an exposition of how teachers can present
history to their students in a way that works to develop historical under-
standing.
HISTORY AND EVERYDAY IDEAS
What do we mean by saying that history is "counterintuitive"? The "in-
tuitions" at stake here are the everyday ideas students bring to history les-
sons. They are the ideas that students use to make sense of everyday life,
and on the whole they work very well for that purpose. But people doing
history are looking at things differently from the way we handle them for
practical daily living.
Take the example of telling the truth. If a youngster gets home late and
her mother asks where she has been, the child has a choice between "telling
the truth" and "telling a lie." From the child's point of view, what has hap-
pened is a fixed, given past, which she knows very well; the only issue is
whether she tells it the way it was. Often children learn what counts as
"telling the truth" in just this kind of situation, where the known past func-
tions as a touchstone; it is as if what one says can be held up against the past
to see if it measures up. This idea works fine in some everyday situations,
but in history the past is not given, and we cannot hold what we are saying
up against the real past to see whether it matches. The inferential discipline
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34 HOW STUDENTS LEARN: HISTORY IN THECLASSROOM
BOX 2-1 Understanding the Past and Understanding the Discipline
of History
The three (British) seventh-grade students in the excerpt below are discussing
why World War II started and whether it could have been avoided without thus far
having studied this at school. All they have to work with from school history is their
knowledge of World War I, along with anything they know from outside school. To
understand what is going on here, we need to distinguish between two different
kinds of knowledge about history: knowledge of what happened, of the content of
history, and knowledge about the discipline of history itself.
Angela I think Hitler was a madman, and I think that's what . . .
Susan He was . . . a complete nutter, he should have been put
in a . . . um . . .
Angela He wanted a super-race of blond, blue-eyed people to
rule the world.
Susan Yeah--that followed him. . . .
Angela I mean, but he was a short, fat, dark-haired sort of
person.
Susan . . . little person.
Katie Could it be avoided? I don't think it could have.
Angela No.
Katie If Hitler hadn't started . . . I mean I can't blame it on
him, but if he hadn't started that and provoked . . . you
know . . . us . . . if, to say, you know, that's wrong . . .
Susan It would have been [avoided]. . . .
Katie Yeah, it would have been, but it wasn't.
Susan Yeah, if you think about it, every war could've been
avoided.
Angela I reckon if Hitler hadn't come on the scene that would
never have happened.
Katie Oh yeah, yes, yes.
Angela There must've been other underlying things, like
World War I we found out there was lots of underlying
causes, not only . . . Franz Ferdinand being shot. . . .
Susan Yeah.
Angela . . . but loads of other stuff as well.
Katie Oh yeah, I don't think he was so far . . .
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PUTTING PRINCIPLESINTOPRACTICE: UNDERSTANDING HISTORY 35
Angela Yeah, there must've been a few other main
currents. . . .
Katie But, like that Franz Ferdinand, he didn't get,
that was the main starting point for it all, that
really blew it up. . . .
Angela But I don't know whether . . . because we don't
know any underlying causes. If Hitler hadn't
been there, I don't know whether it could've
been avoided or not.
Susan Yeah but most wars can be avoided anyway, I
mean if you think about it we could've avoided
the First World War and any war . . .
Katie . . . by discussing it.
Susan Exactly.
Katie Yeah, you can avoid it, but I don't think . . .
Angela Yeah but not everybody's willing to discuss. . . .
SOURCE: Lee and Ashby (1984).
In discussing World War II, the three girls try to use what they have
learned at school about World War I. Their knowledge points in two dif-
ferent directions. What they know about the events suggests to them
that "most wars can be avoided" if people discuss their problems, so
Susan and probably Katie think that World War II could have been avoided
by reasonable negotiation. They have learned a "lesson" from their study
of one passage of the past and, sensibly enough, try to apply it to an-
other. Unfortunately the "lesson" does not hold. Angela has learned a
different kind of knowledge from her earlier study of World War I, and it
leads her to treat her friends' lesson with caution. She has learned that a
historical explanation is likely to require more than a single immediate
cause, and that "underlying causes" may also be at work. So even if
there had been no Hitler, we need to know more about international rela-
tions between the wars before we can say that World War II could have
been avoided. Angela's knowledge of how explanations are given in the
discipline of history provides her with a more powerful way of thinking
about why things happen. She knows what to look for.
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36 HOW STUDENTS LEARN: HISTORYIN THECLASSROOM
of history has evolved precisely because, beyond the reach of living memory,
the real past cannot play any direct role in our accounts of it. History de-
pends on the interrogation of sources of evidence, which do not of them-
selves provide an unproblematic picture of the past.
Everyday ideas about a past that is given can make it difficult for stu-
dents to understand basic features of doing history. For example, how is it
possible for historians to give differing accounts of the same piece of his-
tory? (See Box 2-2.) Students' common sense tells them that the historians
must be getting things wrong somewhere.
Differences in the Power of Ideas
The everyday idea of telling the truth is often closely linked to a very
recent past in which people remember what they did or saw. Some students
behave as if they believe the past is somehow just there, and it has never
really occurred to them to wonder how we know about it. In Box 2-2, Kirsty,
like many other fifth and sixth graders, does not even raise the question of
how we could know about the past.
Other youngsters are only too well aware that this question may be
problematic. Allison, a fifth grader, states the difficulty quite clearly: "You
cannot really decide unless you were there." If one thinks like this, history
becomes impossible. If knowing something depends on having seen it (or
better still, having done it), one can never say anything worthwhile about
most of the past. Many students stop here, wondering what the point of
history is. However, while some working assumptions make history appear
to students to be a futile exercise, others allow its study to go forward.
Samantha (fifth grade):
Why are there different dates?
No one knows, because no one was around then, so they
both can be wrong.
How could you decide when the Empire ended?
If you found an old diary or something it might help.
Does it matter if there are two different dates?
Yes, because you can get mixed up and confused.
We can see here both the problem and initial steps toward a solution.
Samantha appears to agree with Allison when she writes, "No one knows,
because no one was around then." But Samantha, unlike Allison, sees the
beginnings of a way out for historians. Perhaps someone told it the way it
was and wrote it down, and we could find it: "If you found an old diary or
something it might help." This view remains very limiting because it still sees
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PUTTING PRINCIPLESINTOPRACTICE: UNDERSTANDING HISTORY 37
the past as fixed, but it does make history possible. If we have true reports,
historians are in business.
Of course, many students see that truthful testimony may not be easy to
come by. They are well aware that people have reasons for saying what they
say and the way they say it. As Brian (eighth grade) remarks, "I don't think
we could find out definitely [when the Empire ended] because there are
only biased stories left." Students who decide that we cannot rely on reports
because they are biased or give only opinions are almost back to square
one. If history is possible only when people (eyewitnesses or agents) tell us
truthfully what happened, its study once more comes to a stop.
It is only when students understand that historians can ask questions
about historical sources that those sources were not designed to answer, and
that much of the evidence used by historians was not intended to report
anything, that they are freed from dependence on truthful testimony. Much
of what holds interest for historians (such as, What explains American eco-
nomic supremacy in the postwar years? Did the changing role of women in
the second half of the twentieth century strengthen or weaken American
social cohesion?) could not have been "eyewitnessed" by anyone, not even
by us if we could return by time machine. Once students begin to operate
with a concept of evidence as something inferential and see eyewitnesses
not as handing down history but as providing evidence, history can resume
once again; it becomes an intelligible, even a powerful, way of thinking
about the past.
The Progression of Ideas
Insofar as some of the ideas students hold are more powerful than oth-
ers, we may talk about progression in the way students understand the
discipline of history. For example, changes in students' ideas about our
access to the past allow us to discern a pattern of progression of ideas about
evidence. Working from less to more powerful ideas, we find a given past
with no questions arising about how we can know; a notion of testimony,
with questions about how truthful a report may be; and a concept of evi-
dence, whereby questions can be asked that no one was intending to an-
swer.2 (Medieval garbage dumps were not constructed to fool historians.)
Once we are able to think in terms of a progression of ideas in history, we
can see how students' understandings can gradually be extended. In some
cases we can accomplish this by enabling students to discover how prior
conceptions break down in the face of historical problems. However work-
able the idea of a given past may be in everyday life, for instance, it is a
misconception in history. In other cases we can build more directly on exist-
ing ideas. Thus testimony is important to historians, even if it must be used
as evidence rather than simply being accepted or rejected. The goal is to
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38 HOW STUDENTS LEARN: HISTORY IN THECLASSROOM
BOX 2-2 Two Different Ideas About Historical Accounts
In research by Project CHATA (Concepts of History and Teaching Ap-
proaches) into students' understanding of how there can be different his-
torical accounts of the same events, 320 British students in grades 2, 5,
6, and 8 were given three pairs of stories and asked how it is possible for
there to be two different history stories about the same thing.Each pair of
stories was about a different topic, and the two stories making up any
particular pair were the same length and ran side by side down a single
page. Specially drawn cartoons illustrated key themes and steps in the
story. Younger children tended to say that the two stories in each pair
were "the same" because they were "about the same thing" but were
just "told differently." Many of the students considered that the pairs of
stories were different because no one has enough knowledge. Older stu-
dents tended to emphasize the role of the author, some relying on rela-
tively simple ideas of lies and bias as distorting stories, and others taking
a more sophisticated view about the inevitability and legitimacy of a point
of view. About 20 percent of the older students pointed out that stories
answer different questions and fit different parameters (not their word).
They did not see historical accounts as copies of the past and thought it
natural that such accounts should differ.
One pair of stories had to do with the end of the Roman Empire,
each claiming it ended at a different date. The first story, dealing mainly
with the barbarian incursions, ended with the fall of the Empire in the
West in 476. The second, which concentrated on the Empire's adminis-
trative problems, took the story up to the fall of Constantinople in 1453.
Below are two (written) responses to the task.
Kirsty (fifth grade):
Why are there different dates?
One of the stories must be wrong.
How could you decide when the Empire ended?
See what books or encyclopedias say.
Does it matter if there are two different dates?
Yes, because if someone reads it and it has the wrong
date in it then they will be wrong and might go round
telling people.*
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PUTTING PRINCIPLES INTO PRACTICE: UNDERSTANDING HISTORY 39
Kirsty's view of history is that if there is more than one account,
one must be wrong. The past is given (in books), and she is sure that
if historians read the same books and are honest, they will come up
with the same story "because they will do the same things and they
are not lying." Everyday ideas are apparent here, but they do not help
Kirsty solve the problem she faces. We can see how different things
look for someone who has a more sophisticated understanding of what
a historical account is if we read Lara's response to the same problem.
Lara (eighth grade):
Why are there different dates?
Because there is no definite way of telling when it
ended. Some think it is when its city was captured or
when it was first invaded or some other time.
How could you decide when the Empire ended?
By setting a fixed thing what happened for example
when its capitals were taken, or when it was totally
annihilated or something and then finding the date.
Could there be other possible times when the Empire
ended?
Yes, because it depends on what you think ended it,
whether it was the taking of Rome or Constantinople
or when it was first invaded or some other time.
Where Kirsty sees the past as given, Lara understands that it has
to be reconstructed in that statements about the end of the Roman
Empire are judgments about the past, not just descriptions of events
in it. This means that a historical account is not fixed by the past, but
something that historians must work at, deciding on a theme and
timescale. Thus the problem of the date of the end of the Roman
Empire is not a matter of finding an already given right answer but of
deciding what, within the parameters of a particular account, counts
as the end. Knowing when the Roman Empire ended is not like know-
ing when Columbus reached America.
*All responses in this chapter not otherwise attributed are unpublished
examples of responses from Project CHATA. For published CHATA work, see,
for example, Lee and Ashby (2000).
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68 HOW STUDENTS LEARN: HISTORY IN THECLASSROOM
other and illuminating each in the historical spotlight only begins to develop
historical understanding if such topics are set in a wider historical frame-
work. Students will be unable to make much sense of historical change if
they examine only brief passages of the past in depth. The snapshots of
different periods they acquire will differ, but it will be impossible to say why
the changes occurred. Moreover, if students need study only short periods of
history, they will have no opportunity to come to grips with a central char-
acteristic of historical accounts--that the significance of changes or events
varies with timescale and theme. A long-run study is therefore essential for
students both to understand the kind of discipline history is and to acquire a
usable framework of the past.
Working through a narrative sequence of events of the history of the
United States may not be the most effective way of helping students acquire
a framework that can be adjusted to accommodate to or assimilate new
knowledge. To provide something students can use and think about, we
may need to teach a big picture quite quickly, in a matter of two or three
weeks, and keep coming back to it. Such a framework focuses on large-
scale patterns of change, encompassing students' in-depth studies so they
are not simply isolated topics. For a temporally extended topic such as mi-
gration, exploration, and encounter, students can derive a broad picture of
migration to and within America, at first picking out just the main phases of
population movement to America (the land bridge crossings, the Arctic hunters,
the Europeans). As in-depth studies of Native American settlement and later
European arrivals (including Columbus, later Spanish exploration, Virginia,
and the Pilgrims) are taught, they can be fit into this broad picture. But if it
is to be a usable framework, the original broad picture will have to be
adapted and made richer as it expands to include new in-depth studies. The
original three phases will become more complex. Patterns of movement
within America can be taught (again quickly), and changes in population
movement from outside can be studied, so that, for example, differences in
the kind of European migration over time are recognized.
Such a framework is not just a long narrative of events and cannot be
organized in the same way as an in-depth study, bringing together all as-
pects of life in their complex interrelations. Instead the framework must
allow students to think in terms of long-run themes, at first rather isolated
from one another, but increasingly linked as students' understanding in-
creases. Population change, migration, and cultural encounter provide themes
for a framework, but these themes will be taught at the level of a big picture
of change. It is the in-depth studies nesting within the framework that allow
students to explore how the themes play out at the level of events.
If such a framework is to avoid overloading students with information, it
must give them a range of large-scale organizing concepts for patterning
change. It is the ability of such concepts as internal and external migration,
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PUTTING PRINCIPLES INTOPRACTICE: UNDERSTANDING HISTORY 69
population density, and life expectancy to "clump" information in meaning-
ful ways that allow students to handle "the long run" in history rather than
becoming overwhelmed by a mass of detail. The in-depth studies chosen to
nest in the long-run study remind students that the details of those studies'
complex interrelations matter too, and can serve as tests for the adequacy of
the framework developed in the long-run study. But the latter must concen-
trate on the big picture, not degenerate into a series of impoverished would-
be in-depth studies. Part of learning history is learning the effect of scale,
and the difference between big generalizations (which can admit of excep-
tions) and singular factual statements.
Taking stock of the ideas presented thus far, we can say that students'
substantive knowledge of history should be organized in a usable form so
they can relate it to other parts of the past and to the present. This means
students need to acquire a usable framework of the past, a big picture orga-
nized by substantive concepts they increasingly understand and can reflect
upon. It also means they need an in-depth knowledge of contained (not
overlong) passages of the past, with time to explore the way of life and
world view of the people they are studying. This in turn allows them to
begin to be aware of the complex interrelations involved and to be thought-
ful and reflective about analogies they draw with other times and places. But
learning history also requires an understanding of history as a discipline,
evidenced in students' increasing understanding of key second-order con-
cepts. Without this understanding, students lack the tools to reflect on their
own knowledge, its strengths, and its limits.
Any picture of the past to which students are introduced inside school is
likely to encounter rival and often opposed accounts in the wider world
outside.36 As soon as singular factual statements are organized into historical
accounts, they acquire meanings within the stories in which they figure.
Such stories may already be part of students' apparatus for thinking about
the world before they encounter competing accounts in school. Teaching
multiple perspectives, or critiquing particular accounts, is a valuable step
toward facing up to students' predicament, but it is not enough.
To understand this point, consider these students' responses when faced
with two alternative historical accounts. Laurence, an eighth grader, insists
that the differences between the stories do not matter "because it is good to
see how other people thought on the subject and then make your own mind
up. Everyone is allowed to hold on to his own opinions, and no matter what
the evidence, people believe different things." Briony, another eighth grader,
claims that the differences are just a matter of opinion, and it does not matter
"because it's up to you to express your opinion unless there are sufficient
facts that prove a story. . . . I think it really is a matter of opinion." Rosie, a
sixth grader, says accounts will differ "because some people are biased and
therefore have different opinions of how it happened. . . . People are always
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70 HOW STUDENTS LEARN: HISTORY IN THECLASSROOM
going to have different opinions of how something happened." If students
think like this, multiple perspectives are simply different opinions, and people
can believe what they want. Xiao Ming, also in the sixth grade, sums up:
"There can be many different opinions from historians so there can be dif-
ferent stories. Of course one has to be true but we don't know which one."
Critiquing accounts will not make much sense to Xiao Ming when, despite
our critiques, we can never know which is true.
Without explicit teaching and reflection on the nature of historical evi-
dence and historical accounts, as well as the different ways in which various
types of claims can be tested for validity, multiple perspectives become just
another reason for not taking history seriously. If students are to go beyond
helpless shoulder shrugging in the face of contested histories, they must
have an intellectual toolkit that is up to the task. There is a danger that
"toolkit" implies something overly mechanistic, so that it is simply a matter
of applying the tool to get the job done. Such a simple analogy is not in-
tended here. What is meant is that some tasks are possible only if certain
tools are available, and in this case the tools are conceptual. Students need
the best tools we can give them, understandings that enable them to think
clearly about, for example, what kind of evidence is needed to support a
particular kind of claim or what questions are being addressed in competing
accounts. Once they understand that accounts are not copies of the past but
constructions that answer a limited range of questions within a chosen set of
boundaries, students can begin to understand how several valid accounts
can coexist without threatening the possibility of historical knowledge or
leading to a descent into vicious relativism.
Students have ideas about the past, and about history, regardless of
what and how we teach them. The past is inescapable; it is built into our
ways of thinking about ourselves. What would we say of someone who,
when asked what the United States is, could define it only as a geographical
entity? Our notion of what the United States is incorporates a past; it is a
time-worm. Nor should we think that, because we are often told students do
not know this or that piece of information about the United States, they have
no version of its past. They certainly have one, but the question is whether
it is the best we can give them. And while "the best" here does not mean
"the one best story," because there is no such thing, the fact that there is not
just one best story most certainly does not mean that any story will do. What
we should give our students is the best means available for making sense of
and weighing the multiplicity of pasts they are offered in various accounts.
To this end, students must learn to understand the discipline of history--the
one offering school can make that the busy world outside cannot. Schools
could hardly have a more important task.
The study of history is often portrayed as learning an exciting--and
sometimes not so exciting--story. This chapter has attempted to show that
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PUTTING PRINCIPLESINTOPRACTICE: UNDERSTANDING HISTORY 71
there is more to learning history than this. But we are not thereby absolved
from asking how the history we teach can engage our students and what
they might feel about what they are getting from it. History offers students
(albeit at second hand) strange worlds, exciting events, and people facing
seemingly overwhelming challenges. It shows students the dark and the
light sides of humanity. It is one of the central ways of coming to understand
what it is to be human because in showing what human beings have done
and suffered, it shows what kind of creatures we are. The past is, as has
often been said, a foreign country.37 Its strangeness provides endless puzzles
and endless opportunities for students to widen their understanding of people
and their activities. An important part of understanding what appears strange
is the disposition to recognize that we must try to understand the situations
in which people found themselves and the beliefs and values they brought
to bear on their problems. If students fail to see that there is anything to
understand or do not care whether they understand or not, history will
appear to be a senseless parade of past incompetence and a catalogue of
alien and unintelligible practices. Empathy, in the very specific senses dis-
cussed earlier in this chapter, is central here. Historical imagination needs
tools.
History can also offer another very human motivation--a sense of mys-
tery and adventure. One source of adventure is to follow the experiences of
people who were moving into unknown territory. Such study can be quite
literal, when focused on people who explored lands they had not known
existed, or metaphorical, when focused on those who attempted what no
one had done before in some aspect of life. In the case of one of the topics
discussed in the next chapter--the Pilgrims--the sense of the precarious-
ness of their situation and the sheer scale of the challenges they faced has
long been understood by teachers to offer obvious opportunities for the
engagement of students' imagination. For older students, a dawning under-
standing of the enormity of the choices Native Americans had to make, in
circumstances in which the future could only be guessed at, can offer a
more complex and morally difficult stimulus to the imagination. But beyond
adventure, strangeness, and a sense of awesome challenges, there is mys-
tery. Young children--and many adults--love the mystery of the unknown.
The voyage of St. Brendan (a topic in the next chapter) appeals to just this
sense of mystery. What happened so long ago? What can we make of such
a weird but sometimes plausible tale? Even better, the mystery arises in
circumstances in which St. Brendan was having real adventures, too.
Of course, if history is the tale of things known, a fixed story that simply
must be learned, then mystery can be reduced to waiting for the next install-
ment. If we teach history as simply a set of facts to be imparted to our pupils,
the mystery is a phony one. The teacher knows the answers, so where is the
mystery? It can only be in deciphering the workings of the teacher's mind, in
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72 HOW STUDENTS LEARN: HISTORYIN THECLASSROOM
finding out what he or she wants to hear--in short, in getting the right
answer. In history there are unending opportunities for students to be given
tasks that leave room for them to maneuver, and to be more or less success-
ful in finding a valid answer to an open question. Knowing the facts then
becomes an urgent and meaningful business because they are essential for
beginning to answer the question, and the question is worthwhile because it
is a real question.
For a long time, and not just in history, schools have tended to keep a
kind of secret knowledge from all but their oldest and most able students.
Knowledge is contested, is provisional, and is subject to continuous change.
Mystery never stops, and there is always a job for the next generation to do.
The authors of this and the following chapter still remember, as one of the
high points of their teaching lives, the excitement of the moment when a
group of students whose main subject was science realized that science was
not "all sewn up." In learning the history of medicine, they came to see--
quite suddenly--that the whole way in which scientists approached and
understood disease had undergone major shifts. They had a future in science
beyond tweaking the textbooks. If they could devise new questions, they
could begin new projects. Knowledge was not closed but open and open to
them, too, if they mastered what was known well enough to understand
what was not.
As we learn more, we should begin to see that mystery does not fade
away as we come to know things. The more we know, the more questions
there are, and the more there is that we need to understand. History must
look like this to students as well. There is excitement in finding oneself in a
richer, more open world than one thought one inhabited, but there is even
more excitement in suddenly finding oneself empowered by a flash of un-
derstanding. It is not only that one has some stake in the answers and the
right to a view. One can actually see that it is precisely what one is learning
that gives one the right to the view, as well as the means to improve upon it.
Understandings of this kind must be taught precisely because they are not
things one picks up in everyday life. Generations of people have had to
fashion the conceptual tools that really make a difference in the way we see
the world. The only institutions whose central task is to hand those tools
on and encourage the next generation to develop them are schools and
universities, and the only people whose professional job it is to do this are
teachers.
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PUTTING PRINCIPLES INTOPRACTICE: UNDERSTANDING HISTORY 73
NOTES
1. This reservation is important, but it should also be pointed out that there has
been considerable agreement among independent research teams in the United
Kingdom; moreover, some recent U.S. work, as well as research in places as
diverse as Portugal, Spain, and Taiwan, appears to point in a similar direction.
There is a strong U.S. tradition of research into the ways in which the
meaning of particular history stories and topics is viewed by school students,
but there has been rather less focus on students' understanding of the disci-
pline. Where such research has been undertaken, many of the researchers,
such as Jim Voss, have worked mainly with college students. However, Keith
Barton, Linda Levstik, and Bruce VanSledright have all done extensive re-
search on the ideas of younger school students. Peter Seixas in Canada has
carried out wide-ranging research with older school students. Sam Wineburg
has worked with school and college students and with historians, and has
recently begun to pay particular attention to ideas acquired outside school.
Other U.S. researchers, such as Gaea Leinhardt, have investigated the differing
approaches of history teachers to classroom history teaching, and investigation
of students' understanding of textbooks has been widespread.
Students' understanding of second-order concepts has been explored by
Isabel Barca and Marilia Gago in Portugal; Lis Cercadillo, Mario Carretero, and
Margarita Limón in Spain; and Irene Nakou in Greece. Research in this area
outside the United States and Europe is also beginning to expand. Early find-
ings from a Taiwanese study by Liu Ching Cheng and Lin Tsu Shu suggest that
students in Taiwan share many ideas about historical accounts with British and
Portuguese students. Mario Carretero has carried out some of his research in
Argentina, and Angela Bermudez and Rosario Jaramillo have investigated ideas
about causation in Colombia.
Lists of this kind can only hint at the range of work, and any brief selection
of names is necessarily invidious. This list, for example, omits a whole new
generation of U.S. researchers whose work is beginning to be published. (See,
for example, the authors in O.L. Davis Jr., Elizabeth Anne Yeager, and Stuart
Foster (Eds.). Historical Empathy and Perspective Taking in the Social Studies,
Lanham, MD: Roman and Littlefield, 2001.)
2. Lee et al., 1996a.
3. Shemilt, 1980.
4. Shemilt, 1994.
5. Shemilt, 1983, pp. 11-13.
6. Ibid, 1983, p. 7.
7. Barton, 1999, 2001.
8. Barton, 1996, p. 61.
9. Ibid, 1996, p. 56.
10. Cercadillo, 2000, 2001.
11. Levstik, 2002; Walsh, 1992.
12. Dickinson and Lee, 1978, 1984; Shemilt, 1984; Ashby and Lee, 1987; Lee et al.,
1997; Lee and Ashby, 2001.
13. Ashby and Lee, 1987, p. 71.
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74 HOW STUDENTS LEARN: HISTORY IN THECLASSROOM
14. Brophy and VanSledright, 1997, p. 130.
15. Lee et al., 1997, p. 236.
16. Lee et al., 1996a, 1997.
17. Dickinson and Lee, 1984, p. 134.
18. Shemilt, 1980, p. 33.
19. Shemilt, 2000, pp. 89-92.
20. Shemilt, 1980, pp. 30-32.
21. Lee et al., 1998.
22. Martin, 1989, pp. 58-61.
23. Shemilt, 1987; Lee et al., 1996a.
24. Thomas, 1993.
25. Ashby, 1993.
26. Wineburg, 1998; Wineburg and Fournier, 1994.
27. Lee and Ashby, 2000.
28. Barca, 1997; Cercadillo, 2000.
29. Lee and Ashby, 2000.
30. Furnham, 1992; Berti, 1994; Delval, 1992; Torney-Purta, 1992.
31. Berti and Andriolo, 2001.
32. Berti and Vanni, 2002.
33. Ibid., 2002.
34. Berti and Andriolo, 2001.
35. Furnham, 1992, pp. 19, 25, 26.
36. Seixas, 1993; Penuel and Wertsch, 1998; Wertsch and Rozin, 1998; Wineburg,
2000.
37. Lowenthal, 1985.
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Representative terms from entire chapter:
historical accounts
