Session 7 April 5, 2011

 Review main points of Seixas article  Share thoughts/ideas on Barton article  SCIM-C strategy – 2 nd Attempt, comments, questions, concerns  Next session – Prof. Linford Fisher of Brown University:  Assist. Prof. of History at Brown University  Currently NEH Fellow at Massachusetts Historical Society.  PhD in History from Harvard University  Area of interest – cultural and religious history of Colonial America including Native Americans…

 Examines how students construct their own meaning from various sources of information about the past – family, experience, etc.  Grade 11 students of various ethnic backgrounds and social studies achievement levels were studied.  “History curricula must be developed not only with the attention to what history students should know, but also with an awareness of how they think and learn about the past and their own place in time” p. (302)

 Seixas identifies 3 elements of students’ historical thinking: 1. Historical significance – what is important in the past and why is it important? 2. Historical epistemology – students’ ability to refine, revise, and add to their picture of history, through new evidence or through reliance on historical authorities.

3. Historical agency, empathy and moral judgment –  Students’ ability to conceptualize people’s interaction with the social and cultural circumstances in which they found themselves.  Students’ ability to understand historical figures as agents who had to make decisions, faced conflicts, etc.  Students cannot construct meaning without making moral judgments – these also involve the judgments of historical progress and decline.

 The study reported on the results of 6 grade 11 students who exhibited various levels of historical understanding.  The lens of family experience was “often close to the surface” in terms of historical understanding for these students.

 The findings may nevertheless help suggest directions for a pedagogy that incorporates prior understandings of students in multicultural settings. In order to engage family stories, the study of history in schools would have to provide a common ground, with common ground rules, rules of evidence, of interpretation, explicitly taught. Otherwise, there are no means of assessing the multiplicity of myths and distortions that students are capable of presenting. Give a common framework of historical methodology, school might be a place where private and personal meanings drawn from stories of the past emerge in a broader, more systematically critical setting (p ).

 Professor in Division of Teacher Education at the University of Cincinnati.  Taught elementary and middle school in LA and San Francisco and served as president of teachers’ union in Bay Area.  Extensive research in the US and Britain on students’ historical understanding.  Teaches graduate courses to elementary and middle school teachers on education research in social studies

1. Primary sources are more reliable than secondary sources. 2. Primary sources can be read as arguments about the past. 3. Historians use a “sourcing heuristic” to evaluate bias and reliability.

4. Using primary sources engages students in authentic historical inquiry. 5. Students can build up an understanding of the past through primary sources. 6. Primary sources are fun. 7. Sources can be classified “primary” or “secondary.”

1. To motivate historical inquiry. 2. To supply evidence for historical accounts. 3. To convey information about the past. 4. To provide insight into the thoughts and experiences of people in the past. In this way, original sources are used not just to establish the existence of historical trends and events but to provide insight into the meaning they held for people who lived through them (Barton p. 753).

Each of these important goals of learning history depends on using sources within a context of inquiry. Such inquiry requires that students develop and pursue meaningful questions, that they make informed choices about the evidence that can be used to answer those questions, and they gain experience drawing conclusions from evidence… (Barton, p. 753)