What elements of historical thinking have remained at the heart of history teaching over the decades?
Historical thinking is the process of how we understand the past by using evidence to construct narratives. The foundation of historical thinking begins with content, the acquisition of knowledge about people, events and ideas from the past, whether through reading books, listening to lectures or watching films. Historical thinking also means analyzing and interpreting sources and evidence, and asking questions, like a detective searching for clues to figure out a mystery.
Over the decades, there are a few elements of historical thinking that have remained at the heart of history teaching. History as a subject in school has a reputation for being boring, dull, and dry. Students remember it best as memorizing names and dates, only to be recalled later for an important test. What has remained consistent is how teachers present the content of history, typically through the use of textbooks, because they are simply the most convenient way to get content across to students. The history of teaching history in the Unites States has relied upon the creation of a national narrative for the purpose of nation building, and for creating better citizens. Using the subject of history as a means for the crafting of a national story for nation building has been a priority.
Reliance on textbooks for content has been a consistent feature of teaching history over the decades. History textbooks are generally organized chronologically around political time periods or eras, showing proper sequencing of time and place. Textbooks typically will also present copies of primary source documentation, for students to learn that the narrative does come from sources from the past.
What has been a constant in teaching history in the United States has been a lack of teaching students how to interpret, analyze and question the evidence of the past. In addition to presenting content, historical thinking involves procedural knowledge, which means leading students to come up with their own interpretations of the past based on the evidence, or to debate and discuss various perspectives. By relying on textbooks because they are the most convenient for classroom teachers, students are presented with narratives that have been determined by others, without witnessing the historical thinking process that historians follow in developing their interpretation of events, people or ideas from the past. Instead, students have been presented with a narrative they accept as fact without debate. History in the classroom has not been presented as multilayered and ever changing, depending on discoveries of new materials and new interpretations, or being understood differently based on different perspectives.
In many ways, this is familiar to me, because it was how I initially learned history. I loved reading the textbook as a student and took it as fact. I did not learn about questioning the stories as presented, or how to analyze and interpret primary and secondary source material. I did not think about the silences of the past, or how the absence of written documentation could also reveal stories of how other people used to live. Given external constraints placed upon history teachers, will they be able to better apply the procedural knowledge that is the next step in the historical thinking process?