Carmel Young - USYD

Charting historical understanding

The big question confronting us in history education today lies in reconciling and balancing learners’ versions of the past with the ‘official’ histories they encounter in syllabuses, textbooks and classrooms, writes CARMEL YOUNG.

The last 20 years have seen a veritable explosion of international research into the teaching and learning of history in primary and secondary schools. As a result, we have a much clearer understanding of how young people learn about the past, the settings in which historical understanding flourishes and what engaging history teaching and learning looks like.

Research tells us that young people gain their knowledge about the past from a vast array of sources that include the media, commemorative events, film, historical fiction, computer games and family and community memories. Family and community histories are perhaps the most powerful of these sources because of the way in which they shape the learner’s own story and social identity. As such, ‘my story’ must be seen as the first step towards building historical understanding. The diagram below illustrates how starting with prior knowledge builds on and out from young people’s experiences, connecting them with the living memories of others and the distant past. Teaching in this way helps the learner develop an increasingly complex sense of the historical landscape by moving across time, visiting different people and places, and comparing and contrasting their own and others’ experiences. The diagram also suggests that tailoring history teaching through learners’ eyes positions their engagement with the past in the social world of the community and local area, and should involve them in working intensively with the visual, oral, auditory and physical dimensions of history.

While ‘my story’ is a powerful place from which to build historical understanding, good history teaching and learning also entails knowing and representing history as a unique form of knowledge with its own content, procedures, and ways of defining human experience. This means that history should be presented as a constructed and social activity that involves learners in working with the raw materials of the past and the historian’s tools, questioning, analysing and interpreting historical relics to gather evidence about past circumstances and players. These types of activities assist young people to appreciate the problematic nature of historical interpretation, and that many competing versions of the past exist. In addition, they gain a sense of history-making as a speculative and imaginative process that entails linking evidence, bridging evidential gaps, spinning theories and supporting and communicating these theories in a range of media.

Integrating learners’ prior knowledge with a disciplinary approach to history teaching builds a relevant context and scaffold for furthering historical learning and inquiry. Indeed, research suggests that such an approach not only constructs bridges between current understandings and new subject matter, but challenges learners to reflect on strengths, limitations and reliability of their own memories and viewpoints. In other words, productive history teaching and learning lies at the interface between ‘vernacular’ histories or the lived experiences of the child and the curriculum documents that we interpret on a daily basis. Keeping the learner as the focus for our activities actually challenges us to think about key issues in history teaching and learning: the significance or otherwise of subject matter, ways of connecting prior and new learning, and how we effectively model historical inquiry for particular groups of learners. Starting with the learner is the first and perhaps most important step to creating a supportive context for building historical understanding.

Research indicates that historical understanding begins with the learner’s own story. This diagram suggests how teachers can build effectively on and out from young people’s personal experiences to incorporate new subject matter, extend their understanding of time and chronology, utilise a wide range of source materials and involve learners in reconstructing the past. The diagram emphasises the importance of:

• Regarding the child’s personal prior knowledge as primary building blocks in the teaching learning process. Commencing and returning to the known allows them to reflect on the strengths, limitations and reliability of their own memories and experiences
• Learners developing a complex picture of the past by moving in, out and revisiting different times and places
• Learners engaging with multiple sources and representations of the past.

Carmel Young is a lecturer in history education, School of Policy and Practice, University of Sydney.