Rethinking contextualization in history education

History of Education has published a steady stream of papers on the history of secondary education over the first 40 years of its existence. This corpus of research has been generated in the context of renewed interest in the history of secondary education that has been stimulated by developments in social and historical inquiry as well as by the contemporary onset of intensive reform of secondary education in many countries. History of Education has made a distinguished contribution to this new literature, especially in relation to an understanding of the secondary school curriculum, elite forms of secondary education, and increasingly in relation to secondary education for girls and secondary education policy. Some other key themes and topics have been generally less to the fore and require further detailed investigation.

The article, derived from document study, presents a discussion on an important period in the history of catarinense education, the 1960s, this was the historical context in which the educational issues came to be thought in a global perspective. The process of modernization, by an oligarchy that was command of the apparatus government, launched the appeal of the hand planning as a tool to adjust positions and create public policies geared to the needs of the development of the capitalist mode of production. In Santa Catarina, in the years of 1960, establishes itself called the period of economic modernization conservative with a strong state intervention aiming to set the educational politics to allow the accumulation of private capital. The axle of the educational politics of the period was pautado in the binomial “education and development”, having as bedding the Theory of the Human Capital. Key-words: Educational Politics – History of the Education –Development - Theory of the Human Capital.

Making Historical Thinking a Natural Act Bruce Lesh (bio) Nicole came to my class last year assuming that history would be taught as it has always been. The textbook would serve as the core instrument for delivering the catechism, lecture would break up the reading, and she would again memorize and then regurgitate the content dictated by the curriculum. Nicole understood historical thinking as a methodology defined by the consumption of facts that are communicated by an authority—textbook or teacher—and processed in order to replicate an approved narrative about the nation’s past. But she left my class nine months later with a different perspective. She now likes the “idea of debating the past and looking at different types of sources to understand the past.” Her definition of thinking historically now encompasses notions of evidence, investigation, discussion, and interpretation. Nicole’s testimony confirms my core belief about classroom instruction: history teaching must move from lecturing about the past to investigating it. My efforts over the past fifteen years, narrated in “Why Won’t You Just Tell Us the Answer?” Teaching Historical Thinking in Grades 7–12, have focused on creating a history course that promotes the investigation of historical questions through the analysis of historical evidence.1 Why take time to develop, implement, and promote a course that is so different from the tried and true methods that have defined history instruction for well over one hundred years?2 Simply because every major measure of students’ historical understanding since 1917 has demonstrated that students do not retain, understand, or enjoy their school experiences with history.3 This dismal track record, combined with an alternative model for history instruction— first manifesting itself in England, and now growing in the States—provides an avenue by which we can alter students’ comprehension, appreciation, and performance in historical studies. A growing body of research indicates that students can evaluate various historical sources, apply them to the development of an evidence-based historical interpretation, and articulate their interpretations in a variety of formats. When taught to pose questions about evidence, causality, chronology, change and continuity over time, and other “categories of historical inquiry,” students become powerful creators of history rather than consumers of a predetermined historical narrative.4 Sam Wineburg describes historical thinking as “an unnatural act,” and he’s right. But Wineburg’s conclusions are not a death sentence for invigorating classroom instruction; instead they are a challenge. In my classroom I try to teach my students [End Page 17] to think historically. The traditional approach to teaching history centers on identifying the dates, individuals, events, or ideas that students must know. In my view, instead of identifying content, curricula should identify core historical questions for students to investigate. These questions should be provocative and encourage debate. They should compel students to consider causality; chronology; multiple perspectives; contingency; empathy; change and continuity over time; influence, significance, and impact; contrasting interpretations; and intent and motivation. The question-driven investigative process requires students to formulate evidence-based historical interpretations. To develop responses to the questions students must become comfortable with analyzing a variety of historical sources. A great way to get students to start thinking historically is to expose them to primary sources from the past and ask them to consider the following questions: What does the source say? What information does it provide? What was going on when the source was produced? What do you know about the historical context for the source that helps to explain the information it provides? Who created the source and why? For whom was the source created? Structuring students’ source work so that they habitually approach all historical sources in the same manner enables them to develop the cognitive skills necessary for making the unnatural natural. Once students have examined the sources, they then work together to aggregate, compare, contrast, and apply this information to the discussion of the investigatory question.5 A lesson on the Panama Canal that I have taught for a number of years can serve as a window onto how this kind of exercise works in my classroom when historical thinking collides with teenagers.6 The investigation begins with students confronting a selection...

This essay looks at the adoption of American Beaux-Arts in China. China's first architecture school was established in the 1920s in Nanjing. The Nanjing School enjoyed a prosperous time in the 1940s when a group of young architects joined the faculty. Most of them had been trained in the 1920s at the University of Pennsylvania under Paul Philippe Cret. The most prominent among them was Yang Tingbao, a star pupil of Cret's. Yang became one of the most influential architects and educators in twentieth-century China, and he remained the spiritual leader of the Nanjing School until his death in 1982. The early history of Chinese architectural education and of Yang's practice shows accidental affinities that have marked the encounters between two cultural frames. Based on a selected "thick description" of Yang's teaching and architectural works between the 1920s and 1980s, this article suggests that the Beaux-Arts method, from its early contacts to its later transformations, has corresponded to Chinese artisan traditions in a series of interesting areas. They include the process of cultivation in producing and appreciating a craft, axial planning and space perception, and close collaboration between architects and builders. Instead of underlining cultural difference, I attempt to shed some light on the entangled nuances between the universal Beaux-Arts method and the traditions of one of its adopted localities, China.

I have always thought that teachers should not teach what to think but how to think, and I wanted to embody this attitude within my own practice of teaching Classics. It was also interesting to me to link this to the ongoing debates in history teaching surrounding the relationship between the acquisition of substantive knowledge (i.e. the facts of history: dates, battles, names, etc.) and the acquisition of second-order concepts (i.e. the framework within which such knowledge is understood: e.g. historical interpretations, ascribing significance to events, understanding causation). According to Ford, ‘the challenge of restoring the link between substantive knowledge and conceptual understanding is one which the whole profession needs to address’ (Ford, 2014, p.33). Having previously taught philosophy, causation seemed to me to be a topic I would be well-suited to tackle, and I was intrigued to discover that there were opportunities to teach causation as early as Key Stage 3 (KS3). In fact, enshrined in the current National Curriculum (NC) for KS3 history is the key aim ‘to understand historical concepts such as … cause and consequence’ (DfE, 2013, p.1). Given that Stanford professor Sam Wineburg (2001) refers to historical thinking, albeit archly, as an ‘unnatural act’, I wondered whether it was possible for 12 and 13-year old students to ‘understand’ the complex concept of causation. But I was also eager to test out some of the pedagogical theories floated at the beginning of the PGCE course, in particular, Bruner's hypothesis that ‘any subject can be taught effectively in some intellectually honest form to any child at any stage of development’ (Bruner, 1960, p.33).

Muutused hariduselus ja ajalooõpetuse areng Eesti iseseisvuse taastamise eel 1987–91 [Abstract: Changes in educational conditions and the development of teaching in history prior to the restoration of Estonia’s independence in 1987–1991

Table of Contents: A: Introduction: Languages and History of Education 1. Languages as Contexts of Education 2. Philosophical Arguments, Historical Contexts, and Theory of Education 3. Perceptions as Performances, National Semantics, and Transnational Languages, or: Visions of Influence and Practices of Reception B: Protestantism and Education 4. The 'Kingdom of God on Earth' and Early Chicago Pragmatism 5. Langue as Homeland: The Genevan of Reception of Pragmatism 6. Max Weber and the Protestant Ethic in America 7. The Discourse of German Geisteswissenschaftliche Padagogik C. Republicanism and Education 8. History and Language of Education. The German Tradition and the Tradition of Swiss/American Republicanism 9. The Establishment of the Standard History of Philosophy of Education and Suppressed Traditions of Education 10. Republicanism as language of Communiatrianism

In a time of rapid social change pilgrimages are resurfacing as significant and visible social phenomena. Australia has historically been noted as a very secular society but in recent years there has been some scholarly attention to forms of spirituality outside of the orthodox, Church religion. In matters of national identity and commitment to place it is argued that there could be an upsurge in spirituality, in contrast to the decline of those practising formal religion. In this dissertation it is argued that two journeys undertaken by contemporary Australians can be considered true pilgrimages with spiritual dimensions and are therefore part of a growing spirituality apart from formal Church. A survey of the theological and anthropological literature about pilgrimages allowed the development of an eight-point frame of criteria that could be used as a standard against which an assessment of contemporary journeys could be made. Pilgrimage is a non-local physical journey to a historically and or mythically significant site or shrine that embodies the centre of a person's most valued ideals. These ideals may or may not be theistic but must be portrayed within the limits of the culture. The shrine casts an image of the culture and has an expert shrine custodian, but has the capacity to absorb a multiplicity of discourses. Pilgrims go to a shrine to experience the place of past events, take home spiritual traces and to model a changed or improved future. In order to apply this frame to two Australian journeys, field trips were made to the plaster image of Mary at Our Lady of Yankalilla Church in South Australia and to Gallipoli in Turkey around the Anzac Day commemorations in 2000.;Participant observations and interviews with six key informants, when considered in association with the historical context and media reports, provided 'thick description' of the behaviour at the journey destinations and insight into participants' experiences, motives and understandings. Both journeys, the sacred and ostensibly secular, satisfied the frame of criteria for a pilgrimage. Furthermore they may also exemplify some features that are distinctively Australian, in that in these pilgrimages spontaneity and egalitarianism jostled against bureaucratic structures and national hierarchies.

Geertz is well known for his methodology. Many Symbolic Interactionists refer to his notion of “thick description.” They may not know his work on Indonesia in general, but they often know his famous essay on the Balinese cockfight: “Deep Play” (Geertz, 1972, 1973). That essay is often held up as an exemplary “model” of ethnographic fieldwork. But we need to examine what he calls “thick description” more carefully. After the first few pages of the essay there is actually very little “idiographic description” per se. Much of the paper concerns general description and analysis. We do not get a blow-by-blow account of a cockfight as viewed by Geertz. Instead we get an analysis that is based on Jeremy Bentham’s Utilitarianism (Parekh, 1998). There is a good deal missing from the broader analysis as well. Much of that can be found in other work (Geertz, 1959, 1966, 1980, 1995). Students who only read “Deep Play” often form a superficial impression of the method of “thick description” and a distorted sense of Balinese culture (Howe, 2001; Vickers, 1996 [1981]; Warren, 1993). This essay supplements Geertz’s essay with a discussion of a religious ceremony of far more importance than the largely secular cockfight. I touch on a central feature of Balinese society not emphasized by Geertz: the temple anniversary festival. It is called an odalan (Belo, 1966 [1953a]; Eiseman, 1990; Geertz, 2004). But the problem is not just restricted to the “Deep Play” essay. Geertz’s other work is often also not based primarily on ethnographic thick description. It concerns historical and sociological generalizations. Those are often based on archives and general fieldwork. Geertz also benefits from reading of Dutch research not available in English. The celebrations which take place at a temple are “deeper” than more immediate, largely secular games like a cockfight. Geertz’s oeuvre is well worth reading, but his notion of “thick description” needs to be seen in a broader, comparative historical sociological context. That involves Interpretive research paradigms that Geertz, as a symbolic anthropologist, distanced himself from, including Symbolic Interactionism and Weberian verstehende Soziologie.

Following an interpretive approach to the study of culture, this paper examines Tahitian dance as a commodity for consumption in the Hawai‘ian tourism industry. I argue that the tourism industry sustains itself by producing a primitive Otherness through the deliberate display of bodies, and tourist dance performances provide a site for that display and visual representation. Following a ‘thick description’ approach to one Tahitian tourist dance show, I examine commoditization of the dance, and the multiple meanings and discourses such type of tourist representations produce. I also argue that though framed by tourist expectations, dance performances remain creative and authentic in tourism settings. I first describe an event as observed and then situate the meaning and representation of the observed phenomenon in social, historical, and political-economic contexts. The analysis is subjective and interpretive. I interpret the dance as observed in a Hawai‘ian social context and assign the purpose and intentionality to this act.

Social workers must locate their work within the history of our profession, while also recognizing how and why particular accounts are constructed, legitimized, and disseminated. The historical context of human rights work is especially significant. This narrative has been shaped by selective attention, which advances some perspectives and erases others. Intersectionality encourages scrutiny of missing elements, calling one to explore what else was happening concurrent with the mainstream account and whose perspectives are absent from the story. This paper illustrates the value of an intersectional frame by examining three erasures from human rights history in social work: the Combahee River Collective, the Black settlement house movement, and the Compton’s Cafeteria Disturbance. The paper closes with implications for social work education in four areas: deconstructing contemporary social work narratives, investigating historical and cultural locations of our knowledge base, theoretically contextualizing intersectional contributions, and respecting intellectual contributions beyond refereed journals and other traditional formats. Intersectionality theory engages marginalized aspects of human rights history in educating professional social workers; however, it must avoid cooptation to maintain its vibrant critique.

This study aims to explain the role of kitab kuning (classic Islamic books) in the treasures of Islamic religious education in Indonesia, so that it can be seen as one of the many influential aspects in the formation of educational discourse in Indonesia. It is carried out in a qualitative descriptive method that is directed to see the scientific discourse of Islamic education and the history of education. Data collections were carried out through literature studies employing historical approach to understand the historical context, changes, or evolution of thoughts or concepts as well as a comparative observation. The data obtained formed an analysis of traditional education discourse, its relevance in history and how the position of kitab kuning in modern education these days. The result of study shows that modern Islamic education today seems unable to abandon kitab kuning as a basic methodology in understanding Islam. There is a phenomenon of increasingly inclusive study of the new format of digitized kitab kuning, not only in pesantren but also in universities. This leads to the synthesis that kitab kuning is potential to be a general learning particularly with the increasingly open dissemination of Islamic literacy. The results of the present study are expected to be able to contribute to the education and teaching system.

The 2015 Elementary History Curriculum is defined by ‘the restructuring of content surrounding the key concepts’, ‘topic-oriented integrated composition’, ‘topic-based composition centered around historical figures and cultural history’, and ‘the distributed arrangement of prehistoric age and contemporary history’. However, the researchers of history education went further to highlight the key concepts in which the academic structure and essence of the subject are not disclosed. They also identified the mechanical association lacking contextuality, the emphasis on national history and the reduction of life history, and the application of the expanding environmental approach to the history field, as issues associated with the 2015 Elementary History Curriculum. This study would examine the responses of students and teachers concerning the difficulties raised with regards to the 2015 Elementary History Curriculum by the department of history education. As a result of interviews conducted among teachers and students, most teachers acknowledged that the key concepts of the elementary history curriculum, only include concrete historical facts. They indicated that the amount of learning had increased excessively, and knowledgeoriented history classes were provided. The teachers agreed on the use of the integrated approach in social studies, in addition to the purpose and direction of local history education for third and fourth grade students. Even so, they encountered various obstacles in preparing an appropriate teaching method. There was found to be a considerable number of teachers who agreed that history education should promote national identity, as well as those concerned about the problems caused by instilling patriotism through history education. The third graders could easily understand the prehistoric age through stories; however, no meaningful learning took place concerning the evolution of tools without historical context. As the fourth graders had recently encountered Korean history from various paths, they found national history to be more interesting than local history. The fifth graders did not understand the actions of historical figures in the context. They had difficulties in learning about cultural properties, since the terms were unfamiliar, and they did not encounter them often in their everyday lives. The sixth graders had a strong tendency to think of history as a subject that needed to be memorized and did not understand the flow of Korean history accurately. This kind of perspective toward history can be attributed to the ill-considered revision of the curriculum. Lastly, this study has the following proposals for elementary school history education: First, it is necessary to change the current curriculum, which requires students to memorize knowledge to one that creates opportunities for historical inquiry. Secondly, elementary school history classes should be a venue for students to experience and learn about history in a vivid and captivating manner. Thirdly, it is necessary to pay more attention to life history. Empty history education, which does not represent the dynamic lives of people, is a significant obstacle to students’ acceptance of meaningful history.

This article examines how ethnographic methodology and literary theory can advance research engines and artificial intelligence systems beyond the reductive computational approaches that dominate contemporary AI development. Drawing on recent Stanford research revealing fundamental gaps in large language models’ ability to distinguish factual knowledge from belief, I argue that contemporary AI systems enact what I term “abducted semantics”—appropriating the inferential logic of human meaning-making while systematically attenuating the culturally embedded, phenomenologically grounded capacities that generate authentic understanding. Through close analysis of Clifford Geertz’s thick description, Charles Sanders Peirce’s triadic semiotics, and canonical literary works—Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote and Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude—I demonstrate that human understanding operates through complex semiotic processes irreducible to pattern-matching and statistical prediction. The article proposes concrete interventions to transform research engines from tools of semantic extraction into technologies that preserve and enhance interpretive richness, arguing that ethnographic and literary methodologies offer essential correctives to the epistemological impoverishment inherent in current AI architectures.

Purpose: The aim of this study is to investigate the impacts of virtual reality on historical education emphasizing the effectiveness and efficacy of immersive learning experiences. Methodology: The study adopted a desktop research methodology. Desk research refers to secondary data or that which can be collected without fieldwork. Desk research is basically involved in collecting data from existing resources hence it is often considered a low cost technique as compared to field research, as the main cost is involved in executive's time, telephone charges and directories. Thus, the study relied on already published studies, reports and statistics. This secondary data was easily accessed through the online journals and library. Findings: The findings revealed that there exists a contextual and methodological gap relating to the impact of virtual reality on historical education. Preliminary empirical review demonstrate its positive effects on learning outcomes, student engagement, and motivation. The immersive and interactive nature of VR experiences provide students with a unique and engaging way to explore historical contexts, develop critical thinking skills, and deepen their understanding of historical events. VR in historical education has shown to enhance knowledge retention, foster historical inquiry skills, and promote long-term retention of learned information. The findings suggest that integrating VR technologies into historical education can significantly enhance the overall educational experience and improve students' learning outcomes. Unique Contribution to Theory Practice and Policy: The Constructivism theory, Presence theory and the Social Learning theory may be used to anchor future studies relating to the impact of virtual reality on historical education. Based on the reviewed studies, educators are recommended to integrate VR experiences into the curriculum for historical education; to ensure access to high-quality VR content; to provide adequate training and professional development opportunities for educators as well as have more forums for continued research and evaluation.