Abstract
<p class="Body"><span lang="EN-US">This article offers an exploration of how the teaching and learning of philosophy and history may go forward together in the future. This comes at a time when both disciplines are undergoing considerable challenges in making themselves meaningful in school curriculums, albeit for different purposes. Whilst school philosophy has implicitly been considered a necessary feature of school curriculums by way of teachers addressing topics such as logic and ethics, the explicit teaching of philosophy itself has gone begging because the benefits of doing so have not been proven to be self-evident for curriculum writers (Hand 2018a). On the contrary, school history has consistently maintained itself as a subject that must be learnt by students, but the teaching and learning of the subject has undergone significant pedagogical reform since history educationalists have introduced and revised the ideas of historical thinking within history curriculum. Whilst philosophers have begun to form a more definitive pedagogical approach towards how they should teach philosophy, they are now concerning themselves with the policymaker’s question of <em>why</em> they should be teaching it. In contrast, historians are still at a crossroads as to <em>how</em> they should be teaching history but are still assured that they should be in the first place. Accordingly, this article will explore how both disciplines can answer their respective questions by unpacking the concept of ‘historical consciousness’. In doing so, it will make a more direct case as to why philosophy should be explicitly taught in schools as it provides a framework for students to engage with philosophical ideas and skills that are essential to the encountering and exploration of a student’s historical consciousness within the school history classroom.</span>
Highlights
In The Pursuit of History: Aims, Methods and New Directions in the Study of Modern History, John Tosh and Seán Lang (2006) outline the two traditional approaches to writing history
Zinn championed the postmodernist analysis of history claiming that the Zinn Education Project (ZEP) understands that ‘anyone reading history should understand from the start that there is no such thing as impartial history’ (Zinn, in ZEP 2019c), the need for A People’s History as it flips the script so that students can become equipped with a more comprehensive and accurate understanding of America’s history
The Centre for the Study of Historical Consciousness (CSHC) argued that the use of such historical concepts allowed anyone to ‘assess the legitimacy of claims’ and ‘detect the differences’ between ‘the uses and abuses of history’ (CSHC 2018a). Today this language for explaining how we confront ‘presentations of the past’ (Seixas 1996, p. 767) provides a scope and sequence for school students in the history classroom and is significant towards transitioning them from historical thinking to historical reasoning, this being a multimodal process of asking historical questions, contextualisation and argumentation. Historical questions such as ‘why is this story important to me?’, ‘should I believe it?’, ‘on what ground?’ and ‘what evidence do we have?’ (Lévesque 2014) are all indications that students have begun to undertake a degree of historical thinking and reasoning, the results of which demonstrate an understanding of how the past is being looked at by either the primary perspective or secondary interpretation that is being analysed as evidence
Summary
In The Pursuit of History: Aims, Methods and New Directions in the Study of Modern History, John Tosh and Seán Lang (2006) outline the two traditional approaches to writing history. 767) provides a scope and sequence for school students in the history classroom and is significant towards transitioning them from historical thinking to historical reasoning, this being a multimodal process of asking historical questions, contextualisation and argumentation (van Drie & van Boxtrel 2008) Historical questions such as ‘why is this story important to me?’, ‘should I believe it?’, ‘on what ground?’ and ‘what evidence do we have?’ (Lévesque 2014) are all (but not the only) indications that students have begun to undertake a degree of historical thinking and reasoning, the results of which demonstrate an understanding of how the past is being looked at by either the primary perspective or secondary interpretation that is being analysed as evidence. A student’s encounter with history has become one that may discuss what has been written, but how it has been written in an attempt to find meaning from the multiplicity of primary perspectives and historical interpretations
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