Seixas, P., & Peck, C. (2004). Teaching historical thinking. In A. Sears & I. Wright (Eds.), Challenges and Prospects for Canadian Social Studies (pp. 109-117). Vancouver: Pacific Educational Press.

110

these fragments of thinking and develop them sothat students have a better basis upon which to makesense of their own lives. That is, we need to teachstudents to think historically. In part because his­tory in Canada is taught largely within the contextof social studies, we have done all too little thinkingabout what "thinking historically" really means.'

Consider the following two quotes, which seem,on first glance, to be pointed in two diametricallyopposite directions:

The past is never dead, it's not even past.-William Faulkner'

The past is aforeign country: they do things dif­ferently there.-L.P. Hartley'

What might these quotations tell us about howto think about our relationship to the past? Faulknerpointsto the fact that the past suffuses every part ofour lives; it is embodied in our streets, buildings,our schools, our personalities, our government, andour ideas. Indeed, it is embodied in our own bodies;our civilizations scientific legacy was injected intomy ann in the fomi of a tetanus shot yesterday. Ahernia scar is a legacy of the relatively recent past,while my genetic inheritance is the legacy of genera­tions. The past shapes everything we are, everythingwe do. The past is, as Faulkner said, not even past.

On the other hand, as Hartley reminds us, thepast is "a foreign country:" The past may be so differ­ent, that its different in ways that we don't even imag­ine. Not only did people experience a radically dif­ferent extemal world, but the whole structure of theirfeelings and thoughts was different. Their reasonsfor doing things were radically different from ourown. At every step of the way, then, as we try toknow the past, we need to ask ourselves whether weare anachronistically imposing our own frameworksof meaning upon people from another time.

If Faulkner is right, then we need to know a lotabout the past to know who weare (individuallyand collectively) in any deep way. IfHartley is right,then finding out about the past is no easy matter.We think they are both right. Taken together, theyshow us how big and important and difficult a prob­lem it is to think historically. Perhaps the only thing

Challenges & Prospects for Canadian Social Studies

that is more difficult is to teach students to do so.Basically, we have two ways of knowing about

the past: traces and accounts. (We believe "traces"and "accounts" capture the important differencesmore clearly and comprehensively than the morecommonly used "primary" and "secondary" sources.)Both are problematic for reasons that we will explain.

Tracesinclude documents both official and pub­lic (such as the British North America Act) and un­official and private (such as a teenagers journal en­try). They also include relics, such as the Enola Gay,the plane now lodged in the Smithsonian Museumin Washington, DC, which dropped the atomic bombon Hiroshima. Traces cannot be read simply or di­rectly. They don't tell us what happened in so manywords. They must be contextualized and analyzed.We use them as bases for inferences. They offer onlya starting paint to reconstruct what happened andwhy and what it all means. Furthermore, they changeover time. The meanings of words in documentschange over time, often in subtle and slippery ways.Physical artifacts decay, unless they are preserved orrestored. But then thepreservation and restorationbecome traces of a later period, embedded with ideasabout how we think things should have looked orfelt. Furthermore, artifacts can mislead us, if placedin contexts different from those of the lost worldsthey once inhabited.

Accounts include narratives and explanations ofwhat happened in the past. Storytellers, journalists,filmmakers, grandmothers, textbook writers andnovelists-c-as well as historians-c-all create accountsof the past. Once again, we can't read them simplyor directly. Unlike traces, they do tell us what hap­pened in so many words, but we cannot necessarilybelieve them. They change over time, so that an ac­count of the Northwest Rebellion written for Cana­dian school children in 1893 looks very differentfrom one published in 2003.

Despite all of these problems, traces and accountsare all we have to work with as we try to know aboutthe past, the past we need to know in order to knowwho we are. How do we do it? That is, what do wedo when we think historically? In the next sectionof the chapter, we explore six problems that are cen­tral to historical thinking.' These are all implicit in

!

r

Teaching Historical Thinking

the history lessons we present in schooLBut so muchof history instruction is caught up in teaching "thefacts" that we often let students fend for themselvesin the crucial tasks of making sense of the informa­tion that we present. By defining the kind of sense­making that is particular to understanding the past,it becomes possible to make it an explicit part ofhistory curriculum and assessment. Only then canwe start to piece together the problem of what mightcount as advancement in historical thinking.

Elements of HistoricalThinkingSignificanceWe can't teach everything that happened in the past,nor can a historian write about everything that hap­pened in the' past. In choosing what to teach andwhat to write about, teachers and researchers makedistinctions between the historically significant andthe historically trivial. Students, too, must be able todistinguish the significant from the triviaL But whatmakes an event or a trend or a person historicallysignificant?" The answer is not straightforward. Inconfrontingvarious fragmentary historical traces andaccounts, we undertake a process of sifting and draw­ing of relationships to make sense of the past. Butwhat kind of relationships do we draw? Significantevents and people may be those that have the great­est impact on people and our environment over thelongest period of time. Thus World War I, the FrenchRevolution, and the great political, economic, andmilitary leaders would count as the most significant.But, by these criteria, the entire corpus of social his­tory, "history from the bottom up," women's history,and labour history, which have occupied the bulk ofprofessional historians' time and energy over the pastthirty years, might be discounted as trivial, Such cri­teria would not allow much time for the study of assparsely populated a country as Canada, let alonethe regional or local histories that command the fo­cus of historians, teachers, and students.

Clearly these criteria, alone, are not adequate."Significance" is about a relationship not only amongevents and people of the past, but also about the

111

relationship of those events and people to us, in thepresent, who are doing the historical thinking. De­fining historical significance involves organizingevents in a narrative that will show us somethingimportant about our position in the world. Likeeachof the elements of historical thinking, nobody canmake much headway on historical significanceif theydo not already "know" a fair amount of history. Onthe other hand, "knowing" a lot of historical facts isuseless without knowing how they fit together andwhy they might be important.

Epistemology and evidence

What accounts of the past should we believe, on whatgrounds, and with what reservations?When studentsread the historical novel, Copper Sunrise, how shouldthey approach its portrayal of the end of the Beothuk?When they read their social studies textbook's ac­count of the Riel Rebellion, should they have a dif­ferent stance towards the things it says? When theyhear a grandmother tell about her experiences in theJapanese occupation of Hong Kong, what should theybelieve? Public media are filled with conflicting his­torical accounts and interpretations of what theymean: Native land claims, the experiences of the in­mates in residential schools, the role of Canadiansoldiers and the Canadian air force in World War II,to name a few from Canadian history. Students needto develop abilities to assess these accounts and askquestions such as, "What are the problems with theseaccounts?" and "Shall I take them as is, or do theyneed revision?"

All of us rely selectively on the knowledge ofexperts, but young people's choices of which his­torical authorities to believe may be more or lesswarranted. They may relyuncritically on those whomthey take to be experts, express generalized skepti­cism, or be able to articulate criteria for distinguish­ing reliable from unreliable authorities. Shortly afterthe film Dances with Wolves came out, I (Peter) inter­viewed a small sample of students after they watchedseveral segments from it. They expressed a variety.of reasons forbelieving the films account of historicalevents: (1) the film's conformity to their under­standing of human nature; (2) the familiarity of the

r

112

depiction of the historical characters; (3) the film'scompatibility with school history accounts; (4) thefact that it was a recent film; (5) the technicalsophistication of the film; and (6) the emotional im­pact of the film. Students need to learn which ofthese grounds are better to rely on than others.

Students also need to be able to use traces. Atthe most elementary level, students can read tracesonly directly as information, that is, without ques­tioning authenticity or reliability. At a more advancedstage, students may learn to use the words of evenan unreliable witness as a basis for inferences aboutthought, motivation, and action in the past.

Continuity and change

Understanding change over time is central to his­torical thinking. Yetsuch understanding also relieson certain' assumptions of continuity. For instance,if we talk about religion changing over time, we as­sume a relatively constant conceptual category. reli­gion, within which the change takes place. At a cer­tain point, the change may be profound enough thatthe same category is no longer appropriate for nam­ing the phenomenon we wish to describe.

The interaction between the concepts of changeand continuity raises a host of problems for students'historical thinking. Even when they consider pro­found change in one aspect of social, political, oreconomic life,students may assume much more con­tinuity in other aspects of life than is warranted. Forinstance, a student looking at the technological de­velopment of photography (an example of what theBritish call "development studies") may fail to con­sider related changes in the purposes of photogra­phy, in the availability of photographs and cameraequipment, or in various peoples' modes of "read­ing" photographs. Highlighting any example ofchange in the foreground may inadvertently contrib­ute to a set ofahistorical assumptions about the back­ground to the change. Yet the more is brought intothe changing foreground, the more complex the pic­ture becomes.

Individuals' direct experience of historicalchange is relevant to their conceptualization ofchange and continuity. Age is clearly a significantfactor in such experience. Asixty-year-oldin twenty-

Challenges & Prospects for Canadian Social Studies

first century North America has simply lived throughmore historical change than has a ten-year-old, andis likely to have more direct experience with howfundamentally things can change. But age is not theonly factor in contributing to such historical experi­ence. One's historical location is also significant. Aperson who lives through a war or a coup d'etat,who experiences the ramifications of a technologi­cal innovation, who immigrates to a new country orwho sees the impact of demographic change on aneighbourhood has a different experience of histori­cal change from one who lives in traditional stabil­ity. Those who have lived through social instabilitymay be more sensitive to the nuances of profoundhistorical change. Teaching these nuances to studentswith diverse backgrounds requires attention to theirdifferent experiences.

Progress and decline

The issue of progress and decline adds an evaluativecomponent to the issue of continuity and change.As things have changed, have they improved? Theymay do so in a number of different areas. Thus, wemay speak of progress as technological, economic(in terms of standards of living), political (in termsof democratic participation and representation),moral (in terms of protection of human rights, orhumane treatment more generally), environmental,scientific, spiritual, and so on. Each of these aspectsof progress implies certain standards by which toevaluate change over time.

Most history textbooks (as well as most of thework of academic historians, until very recently) as­sume an underlying framework of historical progress.In Canadian history textbooks, a major componentof progress is the development of Canadian consti­tutional autonomy. It is difficult to contemplate howone avoids nihilism and despair without some senseof the possibility of historical progress. Yetone neednot look far in popular culture today to see that theidea of progress is under siege. Paul Kennedy coinedthe term "declinism" to describe the phenomenon.'The New Yorker listed fourteen books published inthe last two years whose titles take the form, "TheEnd of__," including, among others, the future,education, reform, innocence, affluence, the victory

r,

Teaching HistoricaLThinking

culture, and evolution.' And they do not even in­clude Francis Pukuyamas widely discussed 1992meditation on "the end of history"8

How do students orient themselves in what ap­pears to be a complex moment in historical time?How does this orientation help to frame their his­torical knowledge, and conversely, how might his­torical knowledge help to orient them better? Andwhat should we do with our progress-based historytextbooks?

Empathy (historical perspective­taking) and moral judgement

People in the past not only lived in different circum­stances (in terms of, for example, technology, shel­ter, and political institutions), but also experiencedand interpreted the world through different beliefsystems. When students confront the differences ofthe past, however, they may naturally (and mistak­enly) assume that people living in different circum­stances nevertheless thought in ways essentiallysimi­lar to themselves. The error of "presentism" is a fail­ure to realize how much they don't know about thepast. Twoaspects of our intellectual relationship withpeoples different from ourselves are empathy andmoral judgement.

Empathy, or historical perspective-taking, is not,in this context, an affective achievement. Rather, itis the ability to see and understand the world from aperspective not our own. In that sense, it requires"imagining" ourselves into the position of another.However-and this is crucial-that "imagining" mustbe based firmly on historical evidence if it is to haveany meaning. Exercises that ask students to imaginebeing a medieval knight or a "Iille du roi" make nosense unless they are based on a rich base of infor­mation about the fundamental structures and pro­cesses of everyday life during those times. Moreover,student writing and performance based on such ex­ercises need to be assessed with an eye to anachro­nistic, presentist imposition of their own, twenty­first-century worldview upon the worlds of the past.

Paradoxically, this ahistoricalpresentism is some­times used by historical novelists, filmmakers, and,alas, history teachers. These architects of historicalaccounts may attempt to make their characters "come

113

alive" for their contemporary audiences by givingthem familiarbehaviours, motivations, assumptions,and conventions from their own culture. The result­ing anachronisms are pervasive in the popular me­dia. Thus after watching Native people discuss howto handle the white intruder in Dances with Wolves,one student said revealingly, "You get a sense thatthese are real people and they're trying to deal witha real problem, as opposed to just a 'bunch ofIndians." What made the film so "real" for him? "Icould see very easily a bunch of white people talkingabout almost exactly the same thing..." The powerof the film came, then, from rendering Natives of1863 familiar, like "white people" today. This studentresponded "empathetically" to the historical accountthat presented the "other" as fundamentally like him­self. After all, we "understand" someones actions ifwe believe that, facing similar circumstances, wewould do the same. The paradox of empathy, then,is that it involves an effort to confront difference,which, at every tum, tempts us to impose our ownframeworks of meaning on others.

Moral judgements in history pose similar kindsof problems. We make judgements by understand­ing historical actors as agents who faced decisions,sometimes individually, sometimes collectively,which had ethical consequences. Moral judgementsrequire empathetic understanding, that is, an un­derstanding of the differences between our moraluniverse and theirs, lest they be anachronistic im­positions of our own standards upon the past. Thathaving been said, meaningful history cannot enter­tain a relativism that disallows our condemnation ofbrutal slave-holders, enthusiastic Nazis, and maraud­ing conquistadors. Exactly as with the problem ofhistorical empathy, our ability to make moral judge­ments in history requires that we entertain the no­tion ofan historically transcendent human common­ality,a recognition of our humanity in the person ofhistorical actors, at the same time that we open ev­ery door to the possibility that those actors differfrom us in ways so profound that we perpetuallyrisk misunderstanding them.

Historical agency

The problem of historical agency is a way of think-

114

ing about historical causation. The concept ofagency,

however, focuses the historian on relationships of

power. Who makes historical change, and in what

ways are their efforts constrained by the social, po­

litical, and economic structures in which they find

themselves? Historian]ill Ker Conway describes her

own "passion to understand the deterministic forces

which constrained human freedom of the will." She

continues, "I'd seen those deterministic forces over­

whelm my rural family, and needed to understand

for myself to what extent human action is free."

In the past thirty years, historians have sought

ways to understand the historical agency ofrelatively

powerless groups. Labour historians, women's his­

torians, and other social historians have attempted

to take their subjects out of the textbook "sidebars"

into the centre of history, and not simply as victims.

How did they actively shape their lives, their cul­

tures, and the course of history, as they operated

within the constraints of their social and historical

positions?To what extent do young people have such a

democratic sense of historical causation? How do

they view their own relationship to social change?

Do accounts of the past in which significance is

located only among elites have an impact upon stu­

dents' own sense of agency? Some of the most viru­

lent arguments about history curriculum have in­

volved assertions about the psychological impact of

history on marginalized groups. Proponents of

women's, ethnic, and working-class history claim,

plausibly, that their histories would offer students a

chance to see themselves as active forces for histori­

cal change; opponents, of course, may fear exactly

that. How young people in a variety of social and

historical situations understand their own life activ­

ity as a part of historical change is, then, an impor­

tant consideration in thinking about the way we

present the past.

Some Comments onRecent ResearchAs Ken Osborne has shown, there is a long history

of Canadian debates about historical thinking in the

history curriculum.'? But a significant new body of

Challenges & Prospects for Canadian Social Studies

history education research has accumulated over the

past decade, exploring how students work with these

problems. In many respects, it has the characteris­

tics of any young field of research: it is vibrant,

changes quickly,and stillhas much room for growth.

Key texts in the field include the three volumes of

the International Review of History Education;ll the

collection edited by Peter Stearns, Peter Seixas, and

SamWineburg, entitled, Knowing, Teaching andLearn­

ingHistory: National and International Perspectives;"

SamWineburg'sHistorical Thinking and Other Unnatu­

ral Acts: Charting theFutureofTeaching thePast;13 and

Linda Levstik and Keith Barton's Doing History: In­

vestigating with Children in Elementary and Middle

Schoolsl 4

Recent research on students' understanding of

historical significanceis, for the most part, concerned

with how and why students ascribe significance to

particular people and/or events from the past." Stu­

dents from varying ethnic groups and/or social con­

texts have been shown to understand historical sig­

nificance in differingways. Research on students' use

of and ways of thinking about historical evidence

has produced fairlyconsistent findings." Perhaps the

single most important conclusion is that the claim

that young children are unable to work with evi­

dence to construe a picture of the past appears to be

untrue. Nevertheless, students' ability to work with

evidence does not come naturally: it develops as an

outcome of systematic teaching. Barton's work and

that of Foster and Yeager also indicate that students

are more adept at working with evidence orally, as

opposed to providing written accounts. 17

Barton has conducted much of the recent, albeit

limited, research on students' understanding of con­

tinuity and change. In a comparative study involv­

ing students from the United States and Northern

Ireland, Barton found that students' understanding

of historical change differed stgnificantly " These

differences, moreover, were strongly tied to differ­

ences in curriculum, and were rooted in deep differ­

ences between social, cultural and political contexts.

Whereas American children tended to describe

change as a story of their nation's progress; attribut­

able to canonical individuals in their society, chil­

dren in Northern Ireland tended "to describe change

Teaching Historical Thinking

in terms of societal institutions and group pro­cesses."" Den Heyer found that American studentsgenerally linked agency and progress, and locatedthe sources of historical change in "great men" (andsometimes women) who saw something wrongwithin their society and decided to make a change,rather than in social movements." Again, nationalcontext and social location may account for varia­tion in these ideas.

Peter Lee and Ros Ashby; building on a long tra­dition of British history education research, foundthat many students relied on "deficit theories-c-thatpeople from the past simply were not smart enoughor did not know enough to act differentlyor to choosea different course of action-to explain the actionsof people from the past. 2l There were glimpses ofhope on issues of historical empathy; however. Someof the second-graders "behaved as if they believedthat even puzzling institutions like the ones in thetasks could be made intelligible by understandinghow people saw their world"." While this type ofthinking was more typical of older students, the au­thors advise "how mistaken it would be for teachersto have low expectations of younger children. "23

In the ClassroomIf these issues and problems are as central to histori­cal thinking as we argue, then they are probably al­ready present, though perhaps submerged andunarticulated, in many of the best history classrooms.This chapter can be seen as a contribution towardsbringing them to the surface, towards making thema central part of our history teaching. In order tohelp that process, we offer the following questionsand exercises as a starting point." They are not in­tended as lesson plans but as a way to start thinkingabout applying these ideas in the classroom. Thebracketed suggestions are intended to serve as ex­amples, and teachers may substitute alternative top­ics appropriate to their particular classrooms.

Significance

1. List four significant events in your own life.Whydid you choose these? Write an autobiography

115

using only these events and transitions betweenthem. Now list four different significant eventsfrom your life. Write another autobiographyusing only these four and transitions amongthem. How are the two stories ofyour lifesimilar?How are they different?

2. Draw a diagram showing the most significantevents in your familys history from [the birth ofyour grandparents] to [the present]. Why didyou choose these? Ask another member of yourfamily to do the same exercise. How are theydifferent?

3. Make a poster showing four significant eventsin the history of Canada. Be prepared to defendyour choice of events to the class.

Epistemology and evidence

I. Examine a historical artifact. What do you thinkthis is? What makes you say so?

2. What do you think [the artist, the photographer]wanted people to think when s/he [painted,took] this picture? How do you know?

3. How could we find out about what it was like in[schools 100 years ago]?

4. Which of these sources best shows how [radi­cals] were thinking about [the Family Compact)in [1837]7

5. What seems to be the directors purpose in thefilm [Black Robe, 1492, The Ballad of Crowfoot!?How did that purpose shape the story?

Continuity and change

I. Examine two or more photographs of the samestreet scene from different eras. What haschanged? What has remained the same?

2. Examine a historical artifact. Why is this nolonger in use?What do we use now instead? Howdoes the change make our lives different?

3. Arrange the following [quotations, pictures, etc.]

116

in the order of the dates when they occurred.Explain why you ordered them in this way.

4. Conduct a development study of particular top­ics, for example, clothing, transportation, health,war, schooling. Different groups of students canresearch different topics and compare rates ofchange, progress (see below), causes of, andimpediments to change.

Progress and decline

1. Have things progressed (i.e., improved) since thetime [pictured, written about] here? In what waysyes? In what ways no? For whom?

2. Do you think things were better when [childrenwere strictly disciplined; monarchs had absolutepower]? Why?

3. How did the changes in [child labour laws! im­proye the lives of [children]?

Empathy (historical perspective­taking) and moral judgement

1. What did the author of this document thinkabout [slavery]?

2. Write a response to [the coming of the railroad]from the perspective of [the Blackfoot].

3. How were the beliefs of [the Catholic clergy inNew France] different from our own?

Historical agency

1. Which groups of people [have been/are/will be]most responsible for bringing about [equal po­litical rights/social equality/economic security]?

2. Have there been people who have changed manyother people's lives? Who? How?

3. What conditions helped [NellieMcClung] makea difference?What conditions made it harder for[Nellie McClung] to make a difference?

Challenges & Prospects for Canadian Social Studies

ConclusionWhat we have proposed here is a radically differentapproach to history education than what is currentlyembedded in social studies curriculum documents.Thinking in social studies is too often defined interms of generic "critical thinking" or "informationprocessing" approaches. Following that line of rea­soning leaves only "the facts" about the past as any­thing specifically historical. The argument here isthat historical thinking involvescertain distinct prob­lems that cannot be collapsed into a more generic"critical thinking." We have attempted to show thatstudents' social, political, and historical orientationrequires confronting these problems. Students sim­ply cannot get their bearings without grappling withthese issues. Educators moan that too many socialstudies classrooms are dominated by rote memori­zation, mainly of historical facts. We have attemptedhere to define a richer vision of what students andteachers might strive towards.

EndnotesI Karen Cushman, Catherine, Called Birdy (New York Clarion,

1994).2 However, see ThomasC. Holt, Thinhing Historically: Narra­

tive, Imagination, andUnderstanding (New York: CollegeEn­trance Examination Board, 1990).

3 William Faulkner, Requiem for aNun (New York: RandomHouse, 1951); 92.

4 Quoted in David Lowenthal, The Past Is a Foreign Country(New York: Cambridge UniversityPress, 1985), xvi.

5 Another versionof theseideasappears in Peter Selxas,"Con­ceptualizing the Growth of Historical Understanding," inHandbook ofEducation andHuman Development: New Modelsof Learning, Teaching, and Schooling, ed. David Olson andNancy Torrance (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1996).

6 PaulKennedy, The Rise andFall ofthe GreatPowers: EconomicChange and Military Conflict from 1500-2000 (NewYork: Ran­dom House, 1987),

r The New Yorker 71, no. 42 (December 25,. 1995/January 1,1996): 9-10.

8 Francis Fukuyama, The End ofHistory andthe LastMan (NewYork: Pree Press, 1992).

9 Jill Ker Conway, True North: A Memoir (New York: Vintage,1995), ix.

10 KenOsborne, "Teaching Historyin Schools: A Canadian De­bate," Journal of Curriculum Studies 35, no. 5 (2003): 585­626.

t

Teaching Historical Thinking

11 AlaneDickinsonet al., eds., International Yearbook oj History

Education, International Review of History Education, voL 1

(London: Woburn Press, 1995); James F. Voss and Mario

Carretero, eds., Learning and Reasoning in History, Interna­

tional ReviewofHistory Education, vel. 2 (London: Woburn

Press, 1998); and AlaricDickinson, Peter Gordon, and Peter

Lee, eds., Raising Standards inHistory Education, International

Review of History Education, vol. 3 (London: Woburn Press,

2001).

12 Peter N. Steams, Peter Seixas, and Samuel Wineburg, eds.,

Knowing, Teaching, and Learning History: National and Inter­

national Perspectives (New York: New YorkUniversity Press,

2000).

1.3 Samuel Wineburg, Historical Thinking and OtherUnnatural

Acts: Charting the Future of Teaching the Past (Philadelphia:

Temple University Press, 2001).

14 Linda Levstik and Keith Barton, Doing History.Investigating

withChildren in Elementary andMiddle Schools (Mahwah, Nj:

Lawrence Erlbaum, 2001).

15 See, for example, Daria]. Almarza, "Contexts Shaping Mi­

nority Language Students' Perceptions of American History;'

Joumal oISooalStudies Research 25, no. 2 (2001): 4-22; Keith

Barton, "You'd be Wanting to Know about the Past'; Social

Contexts of Children's Historical Understanding in North­

ern Ireland and the USA," Comparative Education 37, no. 1

(2001): 89-106; Keith C. Barton and Linda S. Levstik, "'It

Wasn't a Good Part of History': National Identity and Stu­

dents' Explanations of HistoricalSignificance," Teachers Col­

lege Record 99, no. 3 (1998): 47&-513; Terrie Epstein,

"Deconstrucung Differences in African-Americanand Euro­

pean-American Adolescents' Perspectives of u.s. History,"

Curriculum Inquiry 28, no. 4 (1998): 397--423;--,"Ado­

lescents'Perspectiveson Racial Diversityin U.5. History:Case

Studies from an Urban Classroom," American Educational

ResearchJoumal37, no. 1 (2000): 185-214; ---, "Racial

Identity and Young People's Perspectives on Social Educa­

tion," Theory intoPractice 40, no. 1 (2001): 42--47; Linda S.

Levstik, "The Wen at the Bottom of the World: Positionality

and New Zealand [Actearoa] Adolescents' Conceptions of

Historical Significance" (paper presented at the annual meet­

ing of the American Educational Research Association,

Montreal, Aprtl1999); PeterSeixas,"HistoricalUnderstand­

ing Among Adolescents in a Multicultural Setting,"

Curriculum Inquiry 23, no. 3 (1993): 301-325;--,"Stu­

dents' Understanding of Historical Sfgniflcance," Theory and

Research in Social Education 22, no. 3 (1994): 281-304;

---, "Mapping the Terrain of Historical Significance,"

?cial Education 61, no. 1 (1997): 22-27; and JamesWertsch,

Voices of Collective Remembering (New York: Cambridge

University Press, 2002).

16 See,for instance, KeithBarton,"'I]ust Kinde Know': Elernen­

tary Students' Ideas about Historical Evidence," Theory and

Research inSocial Education 25, no. 4 (1997): 407--430; Stuart

I. Foster and Elizabeth A. Yeager, '''You've Got To Put

117

Together the Pieces': English l Zvyear-clds Encounter and

Learn from Historical Evidence," Journal of Curriculum

Supervision 14, no. 4 (1999): 286-317; Peter Leeand Rosalyn

Ashby, "Progression in Historical Understanding among

Students Ages 7-14," in Knowing, Teaching, and Learning

History, 199-222; BruceVanSledrtght, "ConfrontingHistory's

Interpretive Paradox while TeachingFifth Graders to Inves­

tigate the Past," American Educational' Research Journal 39,

no. 4 (2002): 1089-1115; Samuel Wineburg, "Making

Historical Sense,"in Knowing, Teaching and Learning History,

306-326; and ---, Historical Thinking and Other

Unnatural Acts.

17 Barton, '''1 Just Kinda Know": Foster and Yeager, "'You've

Got To Put Together the Pieces.'»

18 KeithBarton, ~A Sociocultural Perspectiveon Children'sUn­

derstandingof HistoricalChange: ComparativeFindings[rom

Northern Ireland and the United States," American Educa~

tional ResearchJoumal38, no. 4 (2001): 881-913.

ts ibid., p. 896.

20 In "BetweenEvery 'Now' and 'Then': A Role for the Study of

Historical Agencyin History and Social Studies Education,"

Theory and Research in SOCial Education (forthcoming), Kent

den Heyer draws largely on Keith Barton, " 'BossedAround

by the Queen': Elementary Students' Understanding ofIndi­

viduals and Institutions in History," Journal ofCurriculum and

Supervision, 12 (Summer 1997): 290-314; ---, "A

SocioculturalPerspectiveon Children'sUnderstanding ofHis­

torical Change," 881-913; ---, "'Oh, That's a Tricky

Piece!': Children, Mediated Action, and the Toolsof Histori­

cal Time," The Elementary School Joumal 103, no. 2 (2002):

161-185; Ola Hallden, "On the Paradox of Understanding

History in an Educational Setting," in Teaching andLearning

in History, ed. GaeaLeinhardt, Isabel L. Beck,and Catherine

Stainton (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1994), 27--46;

---, "On Reasoning in History," in Learning andReason­

ingin History, 272-278; and Peter Setxas, "HistoricalUnder­

standing AmongAdolescentsin a MulticulturalSetting," 301­

325.

21 Peter Leeand RosalynAshby, "Empathy,Perspective Taking,

and RationalUnderstanding," in Historical Empathy andPer­

spective Taking in theSocial Studies, ed. Oarc LukeDavis.jr.,

Elizabeth A. Yeager, and Stuart]. Foster (Lanham, MD:

Rowrnan & Littlefield),21-50. See also Christopher Portal,

ed., The History Cuniculum for Teachers (london: Palmer,

1987).

22 Lee and Ashby, "Empathy, Perspective Taking, and Rational

Understanding," 37.

n Ibid.

24 Our thinking in these exercises has been shaped by Tim

Lomas, Teaching andAssessing Historical Understanding (Lon­

don: The Historical Association, 1990).

II