Storytelling in history classrooms: moving through historical empathy and analysis

While many educators have praised the growth of technology in the history classroom, there is still contradictory evidence as to its ability to help strengthen students' historical understanding. One of the most difficult components of historical understanding for young people to achieve is historical empathy. For this study, Foster & Yeager's (1998) conception of empathy as a four step process helped provide a lens by which to view students' impressions of the Civil War. This study attempted to determine if technology, particularly through the use of an activity known as the WebQuest, could lead students to a strong level of historical understanding. Two classes of eighth grade students completed the WebQuest ‘Civil War Personal Journal,’ and took on various roles of people living during this conflict. Students worked cooperatively to complete journals before, during, and after the Civil War. Despite student appreciation of the WebQuest structure in the classroom and a general positive attitude toward the technology used, results show a wide range of comprehension and understanding of the assigned roles. This article presents four categories to illustrate different types of historical understanding and offers reasons why some students were not able to achieve the levels of empathy desired by the WebQuest. Suggestions for improving historical understanding with technology in the classroom are also proposed.

Historical empathy and pedagogical reasoning

Historical feature films transport their audiences to experience another world and time, albeit temporarily. They are time machines that have become major artefacts of popular and youth culture and for a brief interlude they bestow global-scale historical significance on their filmic narratives of the past. This fleeting significance is intensified by media hype, social networking clamour, gaming versions and product merchandising. However, historical filmic narratives are often a single representation of the past with no obligation to adhere to evidentiary records. Added to this, feature films serve a commercial imperative, and coupled with the limitations of the art form, this often leads to manipulation of the narrative and the inclusion of fictionalized elements. Despite these flaws, international scholarship suggests that these frequently historically inaccurate and distorted filmic resources are being widely and regularly used as teaching resources in history classrooms. These history teachers have experienced the power of film to motivate today’s visually-orientated students, to engage them both emotionally and intellectually and to provide narrative frameworks which offer single representations of the past that may vary from more conventional sources. As well as considerations of significance and engagement, feature films can be effective primary and secondary sources for historical inquiry and providing the history teacher with unique and rich opportunities to explore issues of historical representation and understanding. These apparent tensions between student engagement and issue of historical authenticity prompted this research project. Designed in three phases, the research project explores the relationship between the use of feature films in the history classroom and its link to the creation and development of historical understanding. The first phase establishes the usage, rationales and filmic pedagogies in Australia with a focus on New South Wales. The project then adds the student voice to the discourse and an Australian perspective to international research in the field. The second and third phases of the research take a grounded theory approach to explore the mechanisms by which historical feature film captivates the viewer and the utilization of this in the quest for historical understandings in the classroom. The project reports on filmic pedagogical methodologies and the link between these and teacher disciplinary conceptual frameworks and develops guiding principles for optimizing historical understanding when using feature films in the history classroom. Graphic representations and models have been developed to conceptualize the research findings and reflections. The scholarship from this research will contribute to the fields of education, history and media studies

This paper reports the experiences of the History Unit at Tanjong Katong Secondary School (TKSS) in their attempts to craft a discipline-based curriculum model focusing on instruction that develops students’ historical understandings. The paper describes the project structure and development of the Tanjong Katong (TK) Teaching for Historical Understanding (TfHU) approach to historical instruction, shares some reflections by teacher participants involved in the project, and highlights several learning points and implications for curriculum change at TKSS. The history teachers at TKSS recognised that the TfHU project had further developed their awareness of more effective methods to teach history, and were confident that the focus on disciplinary understandings will enhance student engagement in their history classrooms. They demonstrated strong belief that students can be made to understand complex issues in history if they are given the proper tools or cognitive challenges suitably crafted to develop deeper thinking about aspects of the discipline. Introduction Recent efforts to address apparent shortcomings in the teaching and learning of history in schools have seen remarkable changes in the way the national history curriculum has been conceived. Across all age and academic levels (lower secondary, upper secondary and post-secondary) history instruction has shifted towards an approach that is inquiry-based, and one that focuses on the development of students’ historical understanding (MOE, 2012). At its best, a curriculum that uses historical inquiry as a pedagogical framework, supports it with ample opportunities for students to engage in rich tasks that are structured to develop disciplinary ideas about history, and provides teachers with interventionist strategies or scaffolds to help manage students’ preconceptions is more likely to develop deeper historical understandings among its learners. Designing a framework for curriculum development with progression in mind would serve not only as a focal point for thinking about ways to improve students’ ideas about history, but also offer opportunities for formative assessment strategies that are targeted at moving students’ ideas forward. Yet, how far have schools embraced the idea of history education as one that deepens students’ ideas and understandings about the historical discipline? To what extent has inquiry been successful in fostering students’ thinking and understanding in history? Has historical instruction in local classrooms changed in a way that has seen a shift from content aggregation and accumulation to one that focuses on providing students with opportunities to develop disciplinary practices and conceptual understandings? These are important questions that require addressing, but ones that may not be sufficiently tackled within the scope of the current paper. Instead, this paper reports the experiences of the History Unit at Tanjong Katong Secondary School (TKSS) and their attempts to craft a discipline-based curriculum model that placed focus on instruction that develops students’ historical understandings. The paper describes the project structure and development of the Tanjong Katong (TK) Teaching for Historical Understanding (TfHU) approach to historical instruction, shares some reflections by teacher participants who went through the process of undertaking to teach for understanding, and highlights several learning points and implications for curriculum change at TKSS.

In recent decades, the history classroom has been the site of much political wrangling (e.g., Nash, Crabtree, & Dunn, 2000). Yet, the studies reviewed here ask how to engage students in meaningful learning about the past, rather than which history to teach. For the past three decades, scholars in the anglophone world have looked to the professional discipline to build a model of what historical reasoning and understanding might look like in the classroom (e.g., VanSledright & Limon, 2006; Wineburg, 1996). Together, these scholars define historical understanding as a familiarity and facility with disciplinary ways of interpreting and reasoning with historical texts, an appreciation of the slippery nature of historical knowledge, and the application of conceptual, narrative, and discrete factual knowledge. The consensus has been that such processes come neither easily nor intuitively to students.

Most of the history education research that addresses controversial issues suggests that disputes arising in the history classroom are rooted in students’ diverse identities that relate differently to history. Therefore, a history education that wants to ease tensions must try both to make these different identities and their relations to history visible and to enable an understanding of different relations to history based on identity. Starting with Gadamer’s concept of historically effected consciousness, this article outlines a model consisting of ontological third-order concepts and historical empathy in the history education as a suggestion to enable and corroborate constructive deliberative discussions in the history classroom.

This study examined the actual use of computer technology by four beginning social studies teachers in their history courses during their first year in the classroom. Specifically, it involved an assessment of their efforts to use computer technology to teach their students about historical thinking and historical inquiry, in particular the concepts of perspective taking and historical empathy. The findings suggest that the beliefs the beginning social studies teachers in this study brought to the classroom profoundly impacted their students' appreciation of history. During their induction into the profession, these teachers focused on professional concerns, including the lack of effective support for the successful integration of technology in their classroom. Regardless of the resources that were available, each teacher's sense of self-efficacy and their students' dispositions created unique personal responses to the challenges posed by their particular school's technology infrastructure and culture. These teachers also often had difficulty using computers to engage their students in historical inquiry, especially when they tried to help their students grasp the concepts of historical thinking and historical empathy. The experiences they had in their teacher preparation program profoundly impacted these teachers' beliefs about using technology in the classroom as well as their efforts to integrate technology into their curriculum. As they attempted to integrate technology into their curriculum, they developed their own pedagogical content knowledge about teaching with computers.

Research has demonstrated the benefits of using historical empathy in history classrooms to encourage historical inquiry and understanding. This article chronicles the experiences of one middle school teacher as she integrates an updated theoretical and practical model of historical empathy into an existing instructional unit on Ancient Athens to help her students develop enduring understandings of social control. Students investigate primary sources, take part in group activities, and engage in Socratic dialogue to unpack the historical context, perspectives, and affective considerations of Athenian citizens who faced propositions revolving around slavery, the rights of women, and the prospect of war with Sparta. The culmination of their efforts is a simulated debate in the Athenian Assembly in which students display their newfound understanding of Ancient Athens and the human phenomena of social control gained through historical empathy.

This volume advocates for including feature films in secondary history classrooms through examining the ways in which films can promote students’ historical understanding while also addressing the potential drawbacks to using film. In part one the essays explore three frameworks for the analysis of film by secondary students. Part two fills a void in the scholarship, reporting on four recent studies that explore how the use of film may encourage the development of students’ historical understanding. Finally, part three describes the results from two secondary teachers incorporating film into their history classrooms.

1. Introduction 2. The purposes and benefits of school history 3. Subject knowledge: what do history teachers need to know? 4. Planning for learning 5. Teaching approaches and methods: what can you do in a history lesson? 6. Developing pupils' historical understanding (1): Developing Historical Understanding (1): time, cause, change, similarity and difference, empathy, significance 7. Developing pupils' historical Understanding (2): interpretation, accounts, substantive concepts 8. Ensuring Inclusion in the History Classroom 9. The use of new technology in the History Classroom 10. Assessment in the Classroom 11. Teaching for External Examinations 12. Continuing Professional Development

The article presents a historical narrative model designed to encourage analytical thinking. My historical narrative inquiry model (a) teaches procedural knowledge (the process of “doing” history); (b) enhances interpretative skills; (c) cultivates historical perspectives based upon evidentiary history; and (d) encourages student authorship of historical narratives. The instructional model emphasizes small- and large-group activities, including oral presentations, discussions about primary documents, and considerations relative to the creation of written history. Students generate their own historical narratives in order to articulate their perspectives. The purpose of the model is to facilitate students’ historical understandings by developing more empathetic perceptions of the people of the past.

Using research from two eleventh-grade U.S. history classrooms in the San Francisco area, this article examines how students draw on their lived experiences to create historical meanings. Specifically, a three-day lesson on Mendez v. Westminster was used as part of a curricular intervention to explore the following question: How do students use their experiences with race/ethnicity and language to understand how discrimination was enacted in a different time? A grounded theory approach was used to identify patterns and codes from the data including student work, student interviews, and classroom observations. Findings reveal that students’ lived experiences served as a tool for understanding racial/ethnic discrimination and reasons why 1940s Mexican Americans claimed whiteness. At the same time, students’ lived experiences limited their ability to recognize language segregation in the 1940s. Having said this, students in this study view history through various lenses: 1) a racialized lens that recognizes White privilege; and 2) a language lens that reifies language discrimination. The authors conclude by presenting the complexity of students’ intersectional identities in shaping their historical analysis.

In the context that many students have been fed up with rote learning or mechanical learning in history, this three-wave longitudinal study with one-year intervals examined the potential role of historical empathy in facilitating history learning. A sample of 821 middle school students participated (aged from 11 to 15 years, M = 13.47 years, SD = 0.64). Results indicated that historical empathy positively predicted students’ classroom engagement in history, which further positively predicted students’ history achievement. More specifically, both cognitive historical empathy and affective historical empathy could be longitudinally associated with cognitive, affective, behavioural, and agentic classroom engagement, respectively. Each of the four facets of history classroom engagement could be longitudinally associated with history achievement, respectively. These findings empirically validated the positive role of history empathy in improving history learning and suggested that it may be a promising way to change the current status quo of history learning by cultivating students’ historical empathy.

The benefits of using literature in second/foreign language instruction have been re-gaining recognition in recent years. This study investigates a reading program implemented by an experienced teacher in a Chinese high school, with the aim of exploring students’ and teachers’ perceptions, as well as possible pedagogical strategies. Graphic novels were used in the program, facilitated by such literacy activities as reader’s theatre, keeping a reflection journal, literature circles, and explicit vocabulary teaching. This exploratory case study lasted for four months, collecting data from student and teacher participants, classroom observations, semi-structured interviews, reflection journals, artifacts, and relevant documents. Using the framework of a critical literacy approach to second/foreign language teaching, this study finds that with explicit teacher guidance and critical pedagogies, students developed high-order reading/thinking skills, multiple perspectives, historical empathy, and agency by engaging in multiliteracies practices through language-literature integration. Additionally, by highlighting some of the challenges and confusions teachers encountered, this study draws attention to the need for teacher training in the implementation of this pedagogical approach, alongside implications for future research and practice.

Emotions and feelings play an important role within history education. Yet, the affective dimensions (feelings, emotions, connections) of learning about the past are understudied within research on historical empathy—defined here as a cognitive-affective process of attempting to understand the thoughts, feelings, experiences, decisions, and actions of people from the past within their historical contexts. Drawing from interviews with secondary school history teachers in Canada, this article offers insight into teachers’ perspectives on constructive ways that they approach the affective dimensions within history classrooms, as well as problems and challenges that arise when they intentionally elicit emotions or encounter them unexpectedly. In doing so, the article aims to further conceptualize the affective dimensions of historical empathy and expand understandings of emotions in history and social studies education, while positioning these discussions in relation to history education in Canada.