HMCS Vancouver Pre-Deployment Brief - May 2024 (Web Version).pptx
Toronto stories we tell opening keynote
1. 1
Behind the Curtain: Historical
Thinking
Tom Morton (GuyLafleur64 - www.slideshare.net)
St. Clement’s, Toronto, June, 2014
www.heritagefairs.ca
2. 2
Histories are the stories we tell about the past.
(Introduction to The Big Six)
3. 3
Day’s Agenda
• Challenge of Teaching History and the Role of Historical
Thinking
• Significance
• Break
• Evidence
• Lunch
• Continuity and Change
• Teacher Planning
• Report Back and Reflection
4. 4
The Fourfold Challenge to Teaching
History: Purpose
I think that it is in the
curriculum because
people need to learn
about it.
If you want to do
something to do with
history it is important
but if you don’t I
don’t know.
I don’t know or care.
I don’t know, but it helps you on
quiz shows and pub quizzes.
They don’t tell us why.
Because it gives you an idea about
human nature, the same as
citzenship, and provides a basis for
understanding the way the world is
today.
5. 5
The Fourfold Challenge: Connection
• Canadians and Their Pasts, a telephone survey of
3,419 adult residents of Canada found that family
history was seen by Canadians as by far the most
important aspect of the past and "'autobiographical
memory,' a personal version of history is a first step
in the development of a 'usable past.'” Yet beyond the
primary grades it is not a feature of provincial
curriculum.
• Student understanding is often “piecemeal and
confused”, unconnected to the big ideas in history or a
larger narrative.
8. 8
What would make history meaningful,
coherent, and engaging?
• Students understand the purpose of a topic, project, or
learning goal (through concepts of historical significance and
cause and consequence among others).
• Students connect personal and local history to larger stories
and see the connections amongst events over time (change
and continuity, significance, cause and consequence).
• Students develop curiosity about the past and follow that
curiosity with increasing competence (evidence and more).
• Students study stories about people of the past and questions
of fairness that they care about (historical perspective taking,
ethical dimension, cause and consequence).
9. 9
Six Concepts of Historical Thinking:
To think historically, students need
to be able to:
• Establish historical significance
• Use primary source evidence
• Identify continuity and change
• Analyze cause and consequence
• Take historical perspectives, and
• Understand the ethical
dimension of historical
interpretations.
11. 11
Learning Intentions:
• I have a better understanding of
teaching and assessing historical
thinking
• I have a plan to decide what
concepts to teach and how to do so
• I have a strategy that I want to try
• I have a more clear understanding
of the purpose of learning history
12. 12
Introduction to the Concept of Evidence
and Inquiry: I Left a Trace
1. Jot down everything that
you have done in the last 24
hours.
(that would be appropriate for
discussion.)
13. 13
2. Make a list of traces that might
have been left from your life during
the past 24 hours.
3. Check ✓ those that were likely
to have been preserved.
14. 14
1. How well could a biographer 50 years from now
write the story of your 24 hours based on the
traces you left? How much of what happened
would be left out? What aspects of the story
might the biographer miss?
2. Where else could he or she turn for evidence?
3. How could readers of the biography know if it
was an accurate account?
4. What does this exercise tell us about the
challenges historians face when writing histories?
15. 15
“the past as a series of events is utterly
gone . . . some remnants remain like litter
from a picnic, but these material remains
never speak for themselves. In fact they are
inert traces until someone asks a question
that turns them into evidence.”
- Joyce Appleby, “The Power of History”
Editor's Notes
Welcome. Point to logos and students and the stories they tell.
This is the first sentence from our book. A narrative or story – though out of fashion for many historians and textbook authors – is certainly a common way to understand history. I like Chinua Achebe’s description in the Anthills of the Savannah:
« The sounding of the battle drum is important; the fierce waging of the war is important; and the telling of the story is important – each is important in its own way. I tell you there is not one of them we could do without. But if you ask me which one of them takes the eagle-feather I will say boldly: the story… Because it is only the story can continue beyond the war and the warrior. It is the story that outlives the sound of war-drums and the exploits of brave fighters… The story is our escort; without it, we are blind… It is the story that owns us and directs us… It is the mark on the face that sets one people apart from their neighbours. »
As teachers we want to excite kids with powerful stories. But do note that we use stories in the plural. Because there are lots of questions to ask about any story. But we also want to ask who is telling the story? Whose story do we not hear? What if there are competing stories? How should we remember these stories especially the difficult ones?
Here are responses to a recent survey of 1,700 English students aged 11 to 14 who were asked if they found history to be useful. The good news was that almost 70 percent said that it was. The bad news was that few could articulate why it was useful. Typical answers were like those above. A few schools, however, had answers such as the last one.
Students ought to know why they are studying something. Social Studies and history teachers know the purpose of learning history. Their reasons might include critical thinking, citizenship, a sense of identity, cultural heritage, and so forth. Yet to students these arguments hold little currency. They are either too abstract or explained in a cursory manner, maybe only in a course description, maybe not at all.
It is a fairly obvious failing that few departments get together to decide on purpose and then teach it to students not just in general but also the purpose of learning a specific unit topic.
A large number of Canadians do care about the past. They make conscious efforts to preserve family history by passing on heirlooms, preparing scrapbooks, keeping diaries, writing family histories, researching genealogies, or visiting places from their family’s past. They don’t have daily readings from their high school social studies text. On its own family history may not be meaningful when one considers the potential that history has to offer; however, as teachers we can use that identification and tie it to other narratives – national, social justice, environmental – a “usable past” that can inform the present and future as it does for the four students who we see here.
There are other well-known challenges to seeing history as meaningful: "history is one (favourite expletive) thing after another."
In Canada and many other countries, public debate about history education focuses on the factual ignorance of students. The Dominion Institute’s periodic polls are the usual occasion for editorializing. Most have two messages: “Get back to the facts” and tell the national story. There exists a belief that history education is letting us down and the nation deserves better.
Knowledge is, of course, essential. You can’t think about history without knowledge. However, the problem-solving or critical challenges that are key in historical thinking are also an effective way to engage students to learn the knowledge. At least some prior knowledge is also essential to begin the inquiry process although there is some artistry in deciding how much as is argued by the author of the book that poses still another challenge.
.
They don’t really dislike it so much as they tolerate it or they are mildly positive. Nonetheless, it is an underwhelming response. Most teachers I know enter the profession because they want to help their students feel the same excitement and passion for learning that they did. But they don’t.
One of the most relevant things Daniel Willingham has to say is about curiosity. Based on research in cognitive psychology, he argues that it is because contrary to popular belief, the brain is not designed for thinking. It’s designed to save you from having to think, because the brain is actually not very good at thinking. Thinking is slow and unreliable. Nevertheless, people enjoy mental work if they are successful. People like to solve problems, but not to work on unsolvable problems. If schoolwork is always just a bit too difficult for a student, it should be no surprise that she doesn’t like school much. The cognitive principle is that people are naturally curious, but they are not naturally good thinkers;. RE: Unnatural Acts (Wineburg) Unless the cognitive conditions are right, people will avoid thinking. There lies the artistry of the teacher.
To summarize and point to historical thinking concepts.
Skillfully taught, historical thinking can meet most of these criteria: purpose, connections, curiosity, empathy
How many of you have sat down with colleagues to set a school or department policy about the purpose of learning history? Mea culpa but I am proposing that for you to do better. The last goal will not be a direct topic of our two days together but we hope that you will make this an agenda item for your next teachers’ meeting.
My answers will not be conclusive. Good history education like good history is more of a conversation than a conclusion. Others say history is less a conversation and more an argument about the past. The same applies to teaching history! So I would be happy if you agreed with my conclusions that I will present today, but I would also be surprised.
Let’s start with our first activity.
Many stds show an unexamined faith in the trustworthiness of a source like the textbook or Wikipedia. I argue that our goal should be for students to understand the difference between the past and history. The past is everything – every event, thought, belief, vibrating atom, and tree falling in the forest while no one was there.
History is a selection of the past, made real by interpretation. As Ruth Sandwell puts it, “History is someone’s attempt to make sense and order out of the chaos of everything-ness” and its based on traces, whatever ones that survive and most don’t.
My purpose for this activity was 1) to give an example of students making meaning by connecting to students’ experiences as they study history and 2) to establish a foundational idea for teaching history: “History” does not equal “the past.”
The past is gone. So how do we know what we know about the past?
One of the basic ways that we can get to know anything about a past which is no longer here, is through the traces, the things that were created in the past and still remain – “like litter from a picnic.” We need traces but someone has to decide that they are significant enough to examine and then sort through them, deal with the inevitable gaps and contradictions, and in a collaborative dialogue among other historians among others, stitch it into a narrative. The morning’s presentations will focus on these two key elements of the choice of significance and interpreting evidence.
