Understanding History: International Review of History Education 4 (Woburn Education Series)

UNDERSTANDING HISTORY What sense do children and adolescents make of history? How do they cope with competing historic...

Author: Ros Ashby

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UNDERSTANDING HISTORY

What sense do children and adolescents make of history? How do they cope with competing historical accounts in textbooks? How do they think historical or archaeological claims are supported or rejected? And whatever students think about history, how do their teachers see history education? The contributors to this fourth volume of the International Review of History Education discuss these questions in the context of their research. The book falls into two sections. The first part examines students’ ideas about the discipline of history and the knowledge it produces. The second part looks in detail at teachers’ own ideas about teaching. The book includes contributions from authors throughout the world, including the USA, Canada, Portugal, Brazil, Taiwan and the UK, providing interesting studies of how history is both taught and received in these different countries. Understanding History contributes to current knowledge of successful teaching: that teachers must take into account the preconceptions that students bring to the classroom as well as accept the complexity and importance of their own professional knowledge. The book will be of interest to anyone studying or researching history education as well as teachers of history throughout the world. Rosalyn Ashby is Lecturer in Education, Peter Gordon is Emeritus Professor and Peter Lee is Senior Lecturer in Education, all at the Institute of Education, University of London.

UNDERSTANDING HISTORY Recent Research in History Education Volume 4 International Review of History Education edited by

Rosalyn Ashby, Peter Gordon and Peter Lee

LONDON AND NEW YORK

First published 2005 by RoutledgeFalmer 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by RoutledgeFalmer 270 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10016 RoutledgeFalmer is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” © 2005 Rosalyn Ashby, Peter Gordon and Peter Lee for editorial material and selection. Individual chapters © the contributors. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN 0-203-34092-2 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 07130-0245-X (Print Edition)

Contents

Introduction: Research and History Education

vi

1.

Assessing the Status of Historical Sources: An Exploratory Study of Eight US Elementary Students Reading Documents Bruce A.VanSledright and Peter Afflerbach

1

2.

Students’ Approaches to Validating Historical Claims Rosalyn Ashby

20

3.

Digging for Clues: An Archaeological Exploration of Historical Cognition Linda S.Levstik, A.Gwynn Henderson and Jennifer S.Schlarb

34

4.

Taiwanese Students’ Understanding of Differences in History Textbook Accounts Yi-mei Hsiao

49

5.

‘Till New Facts are Discovered’: Students’ Ideas about Objectivity in History Isabel Barca

62

6.

Children’ s Understanding of Historical Narrative in Portugal Marilia Gago

77

7.

Between Reproducing and Organizing the Past: Students’ Beliefs about the Standards of Acceptability of Historical Knowledge Veronica Boix Mansilla

91

8.

History, Memory and Learning to Teach Peter Seixas, Dan Fromowitz and Petra Hill

107

9.

The Epistemological Reach of the History Teacher Maria do Carmo Barbosa de Melo

124

10.

Portuguese History Teachers’ Ideas about History Olga Magalhães

136

11.

Understanding the Knowledge Bases of History Teaching: Subject, Pupils and Professional Practices Anna Pendry, Chris Husbands and Alison Kitson

148

v

12.

Interpreting the Past, Serving the Present: US and English Textbook Portrayals of the Soviet Union During the Second World War Jason Nicholls and Stuart Foster

159

Notes on Contributors

173

Index

176

Introduction: Research and History Education

This volume of the International Review of History Education focuses on research.1 There is a sense in which research needs no justification: if we are serious about anything in education we should try to understand it better. However, in a climate in which accountability translates into short-term utility, the complex relationships between research and practice tend to be simplified into the question of whether research is useful. It is an important question, but as with historical questions, we may have to wait some time before we can give a secure answer. The key to understanding relationships between research and practice is to recognize the different kinds of claims each makes upon our thinking. The practice of teaching history is (consciously or not) guided by sets of aims, and it is only in the context of these that we can make any choices between methods. Talk about ‘best practice’ and the superiority of this or that ‘method’ without reference to what teaching is trying to do is meaningless. Indeed, much educational conflict is occasioned by the fact that aims that appear to be shared when phrased at a general level turn out to be contested once specified in more precise ways. An example of this might be the apparently unarguable goal of ‘knowing and understanding history’ in the English National Curriculum, a phrase that concealed a multitude of different aims. In the classroom, of course, there is seldom just one aim, or even a clear and static hierarchy of aims. Teachers juggle aims (their own and those inflicted on them by bureaucrats) continually as lessons proceed, and take up new ones as opportunities arise. ‘Being precise about aims’ is laudable, but is not so simple as it might appear to those judging teachers’ efforts from the chair at the back. This means that teachers’ reading of research findings must be subtle. ‘Findings’ can never be ‘applied’ in mechanical ways. However, this is not an argument for woolly aims. The clearer we can be about our goals, the more rationally we can judge methods, and the more intelligently we can make use of research. Research in history education is seldom funded on a scale that allows its results to be generalized without important qualifications. Its findings are likely to be tentative and cautious, are often partly speculative and are always provisional. However, the fact that researchers warn readers of the tentative nature of their findings, and explain that they cannot be simply ‘applied’, in no way

vii

weakens their claims on teachers. Research claims are grounded in more than individual experience, and can in principle be tested. Warnings are appropriate for all research in education, but even stronger warnings ought to apply to unresearched attempts to transfer ‘good practice’ and ‘best methods’. Unfortunately current professional ethics somehow fail to ensure that this happens.2 This is not the place to make general comments about research methodologies, and in any case the issue is not one of ‘methodologies’ per se, and especially not one of misguided arguments about which is ‘best’. The important distinction is arguably between research that fits into any coherent programme (even if informal), and opportunist approaches—‘have research skills, will travel’. These latter may be encouraged by current trends towards funding-led research, especially where money is centralized through government agencies and researchers have to bid to answer questions government thinks ‘central’ or ‘practical’. This is not to say that governments always choose the wrong research themes and questions, but merely to point out that they are not always right. Indeed, democracies that support ‘free’ universities have academic structures that have evolved precisely to allow open debate on what questions should be asked and what research should be funded. Questions that look sensible at one moment may look rather pointless at another, and free academic argument is more likely to get this right than a centralized system. It must be possible to follow through lines of enquiry unfashionable amongst those in power. This becomes all the more important when any particular question in education is often highly complex, and will therefore normally require several false starts and lead to only intermittent progress. Continuous shifting of priorities according to the whims of a centralized policy means that few questions are ever pursued long enough for real progress to be made. This is sad, because it is seldom any single piece of research that matters, but the congruent findings of a wide range of explorations, independently conducted but agreeing about the questions it makes sense to ask given our current knowledge. Another distinction that may be relevant to history education is between generic and ‘subject’ research. This is a crude and even misleading division, but will serve to raise one or two questions. It tends to be easier to pursue a programme of research that addresses generic matters, because more people have a stake in any outcome, and most policy issues are treated as if they are essentially generic. Money for investigations of ‘literacy’ or ‘thinking skills’ promises to be more cost-effective than money for history: they ‘cover’ history and much else besides. Generic organizational matters appear to be even more attractive: work on classroom size or school leadership may appear to offer an impact on both literacy and thinking skills. Of course generic research can be enormously important. An excellent example of this is the US National Academy’s How People Learn project, which distilled three decades of research on learning to offer some basic principles. It is worth noticing, however, that in stressing the importance of ‘deep understanding’ and ‘metacognitive strategies’,

viii

How People Learn emphasized that different disciplines organize their concepts in different ways, and recognized that generic approaches were not enough.3 It is sometimes said that only ‘classroom research’ can be useful. A UK example may serve to show that we have to be careful about easy moves here. It is sometimes assumed that because the large projects commenting on progression were not conducted during day-to-day history lessons, they have no connection with classroom teaching. In fact CHATA (Concepts of History and Teaching Approaches) had its origins in a three-year period of classroom-based research in which two teacher researchers taught two classes, videoing lessons and small group discussions between students on something approaching on a weekly basis. More importantly, and on a wider scale, Schools Council History 13–16 research was informed by a process of working with teachers and students in an everyday teaching context. And it is sometimes forgotten that the formal Schools History Project (SHP) research evaluated a taught course. Relationships between research and teaching are not simple. The complexity of the interaction between research and teaching shows up in another way. Teachers and researchers interested in the unusual trajectory of UK history education sometimes ask what the influence of research has been. It is hard to answer this question, since the research has never been a clear independent variable, but itself part of a matrix of change. It has been focused on the discipline and has tended—perhaps as much by accident as design—to be cumulative work. It has always been connected with the changes taking place in school history, partly following them, partly propelling them. In that sense it has largely been ‘use-inspired’.4 Most of the university researchers in the field came from school teaching, so their interests were usually derived from practical encounters with students’ learning. Moreover, teachers and examiners who stayed in the school system played a crucial role in the curriculum development that paralleled, informed and often inspired the research. The work of examiners like John Hamer and Henry Macintosh on SHP examinations, for example, provided informal but extensive evidence of the way in which students thought about history, and the kinds of assumptions that underlay their handling of historical tasks.5 Perhaps the main importance of the work was to help raise the level of teachers’ ideas. Resistance to difficult concepts fades when teachers can see students making distinctions and using ideas that they themselves have never thought through, or even thought about. Moreover, students’ ideas tend to generate teachers’ excitement more readily than the abstract claims of unmediated learning theory. But this assertion rests on experience, not research, and that takes us to the question of research agendas. While we need to continue research into students’ understanding of the discipline, we should begin to try to relate it to teachers’ understandings. There is already work on how teachers see history education, as is attested by four chapters in this book. This needs to be developed further, for example to see how far the findings of Pendry and her colleagues or the narratives of Seixas and his co-workers can be generalized, and to explore what underlies the factors in

ix

Magalhães’ work. But we also desperately need to know more about teachers’ understandings, and how they relate to those of their students, taking into account the curriculum context in which both teachers and students work.6 We do not know much about history teachers, but we know even less about students’ substantive pictures of the past. One paper in this collection, in focusing on textbooks, provides valuable pointers to such pictures, but we need more direct explorations of the kind of past that students draw on in orienting themselves towards the present and future. What picture of the past do students take with them when they leave school? Have they any coherent framework that they can use? What form should such a framework take? These questions urgently require both conceptual work and empirical research.7 Whatever directions future research in history education takes, it is already a thriving activity, exploring many central aspects of learning and teaching. The contributions in this book fall into two broad categories, the first concerned with students’ ideas about history and the second with teaching history. In the first section the key concepts are those of evidence and accounts. The second section deals mainly with teachers, but also with textbooks. The first three chapters focus in different ways on students’ understanding of what we call evidence (which students do not necessarily see as such), sometimes beginning to touch on the accounts the evidence is used to create or test. At first sight they appear to represent rather different methodologies. But there are dangers in treating particular pieces of research as separate entities. Much American work, for example, has taken the form of small-scale studies based on rich data and close to classroom work. But Bruce VanSledright and Linda Levstik have both produced a large volume of related research, so that their work fits into a pattern that makes it more than the sum of its parts. The research reported by Rosalyn Ashby is on a larger scale, and based On specially created tasks in a range of classrooms. But it was designed to fit the English National Curriculum, and (as with all the CHATA work) was derived from extensive small-scale classroom research. In the first chapter Bruce VanSledright and Peter Afflerbach report an exploratory study of a small group of 8- and 9-year-olds in the USA, who worked on developing evidence-based interpretations of ‘Bacon’s Rebellion’. The ‘think aloud’ methods adopted here have a considerable appeal for researchers exploring students’ ideas, offering an encounter between researchers and students different from those produced by interviews.8 The study was carried out in the context of formative assessment in the school, which increases confidence in (even if it cannot guarantee) the authenticity of student’s ideas. Rosalyn Ashby’s research on UK students’ understanding of historical evidence began long before Project CHATA, but the work she reports in this chapter was part of the cross-sectional phase of the project. She investigated the ideas that students aged 10–14 employed to choose between claims about King Arthur. Her work provides a uniquely high-resolution picture of students’ conceptions of evidence. In beginning to unpack ways in which students’ ideas

x

change under pressure from questions, it also has important consequences for our understanding of progression. Linda Levstik, Gwynn Henderson and Jennifer Schlarb focus on an aspect of archaeology education in a study involving collaboration between archaeologists, a fifth-grade teacher and a history education researcher. They explored the background knowledge fifth-grade students brought to their experience with archaeology, investigating misconceptions that arise even in the face of instruction intended to counteract misconceptions. Their data took the form of field notebooks, regular written and oral status reports on student work, artefact analysis, audio- and videotaped records of class- and fieldwork, and audiotapes of follow-up interviews with all student participants. The next three chapters are primarily concerned with understanding historical accounts. Yi-mei Hsiao discusses a small-scale pilot study of secondary school Taiwanese students’ understanding of why there can be differences in textbook accounts of the Japanese invasion of China in the 1930s. Although the research was influenced by CHATA work on students’ ideas about accounts, it deliberately eschews specially produced material, and instead examines what trust students were prepared to place in actual textbook accounts, and the criteria they employed in assessing them. Isabel Barca asks on what grounds students decide among competing explanations, and examines the justifications given by 12–18-year-old students in northern Portugal for deciding whether one explanation can be better than another. Her study is part of the project ‘Cognition and Learning in History and Social Sciences’ and is an extension of her earlier interest in students’ ideas about provisional historical explanation. Barca’s work is an example of research that pursues related questions over a series of investigations, and also fits into a wider international pattern. In her research into Portuguese students’ understanding of historical narrative, Marilia Gago investigates 10–13-year-olds’ ideas. Working from a concept of structure-oriented, descriptive and explanatory historical narrative within a framework of critical objectivism, Gago derives a model of progression of ideas about narrative from a qualitative analysis of her data. She relates her findings both to Isabel Barca’s proposed model and to CHATA’s picture of English students’ ideas. Veronica Boix Mansilla examines American students’ beliefs about the standards by which historical narratives can be deemed acceptable. In an innovative research design, she confronted a sample of American high school students who were award winners in national history and science research project competitions with the task of determining the trust-worthiness of two conflicting historical accounts. Boix Mansilla illuminates students’ ideas about historical accounts and simultaneously provides evidence for the importance of recognizing discipline-specific ideas. In the following five chapters the focus shifts to the teaching of history. Peter Seixas, Dan Fromowitz and Petra Hill explore how individual and social

xi

memories are re-worked in the crucible of a teacher education programme, as student teachers prepare to teach history in a democratic, multicultural and multinational state. Their methodology juxtaposes inter-twined autobiographical narratives so that memory figures in the chapter both as methodology and as research topic, as they recount their experience prior to the teacher education programme and then through the programme and into the schools. As part of a larger project currently being carried out in Brazil, Maria Carmo Barbosa investigated ways in which Brazilian teachers relate epistemological issues to historical understanding in the history classroom. In her study history teachers working in private and public middle schools in Recife, with between one and thirty years of experience, reflected on the question of what is most important for rethinking the teaching of history. The teachers gave little emphasis to epistemological understanding in their prescriptions for improving history education. Olga Magalhães’ study of Portuguese history teachers was a relatively largescale survey, allowing quantitative analysis and licensing a degree of generalization. Like Maria Carmo Barbosa’s Brazilian research, it investigated teachers’ ideas about the nature of historical knowledge and their concerns about the ways students learn history. A picture emerges from the research that suggests strains in the way teachers try to reconcile possible conflicts in their views of history and history education. The author makes it clear that (as is often the case with large surveys) many questions are raised about the complex meanings hinted at by teachers’ responses. Anna Pendry, Chris Husbands and Alison Kitson share some research concerns with Olga Magalhães and Maria Carmo Barbosa, but adopt a very different methodology. Spending a great deal of time with eight secondary school history departments in the UK, they sought to explore the expertise that underpins history teachers’ professional decisions. They examine the sorts of knowledge and understanding embedded in day-to-day practice in history classrooms and in the ways in which teachers construct the history curriculum in their schools. The stance of this particular small group of UK teachers towards the nature of the discipline contrasts with that of the Brazilian teachers in Maria Carmo Barbosa’s chapter. The final chapter moves from teachers themselves to one of their classroom tools, reporting a study of UK and US textbooks. Teachers may have different ideas about what textbooks can and cannot do, and they may treat them in very different ways. But textbooks play a central role in most systems of history education, even if it is not always easy to pin down exactly what effect they have on students. Jason Nicholls and Stuart Foster examine the portrayal of the Soviet role in the Second World War in school history textbooks from England and the USA. They investigate the way knowledge is selected, and how historical content is presented. It may be appropriate to see Nicholls and Foster’s work as taking us full circle, because it suggests questions about how we equip students to cope with

xii

alternative accounts of history (questions of the kind discussed by Hsiao, Gago and Barca). To answer those questions we need to understand what conceptual apparatus both students and teachers already bring to history. If we are to equip students with an intellectual tool kit for handling such differences historically (the kind of ‘deep knowledge’ we want our students to have) we must take account of their prior conceptions, but we must also understand our own. NOTES 1. This introduction is written from a UK perspective. Apologies are in order if it seems to readers elsewhere too parochial in its interests: the excuse is simply that the author cannot claim the depth of knowledge required to attempt a grander international picture. 2. Teachers in the UK are even bombarded by government with algorithmic prescriptions for ‘good lessons’, in which performance characteristics and adherence to plans stand in for learning, thought and flexibility. 3. Bransford, J.D., Brown, A.L. and Cocking, R.R. (eds), How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience and School (Washington, DC: National Academy Press, 1999), p. 143; Donovan, M.S., Bransford, J.D. and Pellegrino, J.W. (eds), How People Learn: Bridging Research and Practice (Washington, DC: National Academy Press, 1999), p. 15. 4. Donovan, Bransford and Pellegrino, ibid., p. 31. 5. Macintosh, H., ‘Testing Skills in History’, in C.Portal (ed.), The History Curriculum for Teachers (London: Falmer Press, 1987), pp. 183–219. 6. The CHATA data here was sufficient only to suggest possible links between student progress and the presence in their school of explicit and visible history, as opposed to ‘topic’ in primary curricula or ‘integrated humanities’ in secondary school. 7. For a conceptual discussion, see Shemilt, D., The Caliph’s Coin’, in P.Seixas, P.Stearns and S.Wineburg (eds), Teaching, Learning and Knowing History (New York: New York University Press, 2000); for pilot empirical explorations, see Lee, P.J.,‘“Walking Backwards into Tomorrow”: Historical Consciousness and Understanding History’ at the Centre for the Study of Historical Consciousness, University of British Columbia, www.cshc.ubc.ca 2001. (The latter paper also attempts to connect this agenda with Rüsen’s ideas about historical consciousness, which have had such a powerful impact in many parts of Europe and Asia.) 8. See Wineburg, S., ‘Reading Abraham Lincoln: An Expert/Expert Study in the Interpretation of Historical Texts’, Cognitive Science, 22, 3 (1998), pp. 319–346.

1 Assessing the Status of Historical Sources: An Exploratory Study of Eight US Elementary Students Reading Documents BRUCE A.VANSLEDRIGHT AND PETER AFFLERBACH

In Virginia Colony in 1676, an armed uprising occurred, led by a wealthy Virginian named Nathaniel Bacon. This uprising is frequently referred to in the history books as Bacon’s Rebellion. Despite his family’s wealth and social position, Bacon was able to marshal the forces of poor frontier planters, first against native Indian tribes, who were alleged to have practised indiscriminate raids on the planters and their families, and later against the then Virginia Governor William Berkeley. Bacon appeared to whip up a campaign against Governor Berkeley by claiming that he had refused to use his power to charge the Virginia militia with defending the poor frontier planters against the alleged Indian attacks. Berkeley, Bacon argued, was deaf to the needs of the poor class, had populated the Virginia House of Burgesses with his wealthy friends and had ignored the ‘intrusions’ of the natives against the frontier planters, causing them unwarranted grief and contributing to their grinding poverty. At one point, Bacon’s ‘army’ laid siege to Jamestown, the colonial capital, effectively driving Berkeley into hiding. Then Bacon died, probably of disease, abruptly ending the campaign against Berkeley and the ‘offending’ natives. Historical investigators have puzzled over these events. They have asked questions about what caused the rebellion. In particular, they have been interested in Bacon’s motives, whether he himself had designs on the governorship and whether he used class conflict as a method to further dissension in order to meet his desire. These investigative interests have turned sometimes towards understanding the role social class may have played in the development of democratic institutions and practices in early American culture. In this particular case, Bacon’s abrupt death has left these questions open to various interpretations. The writings that remain, from Berkeley and Bacon especially, fail to provide a trail that would lead to a clear understanding of Bacon’s Rebellion. So how are investigators to make sense of these events in 1676? The remaining accounts speak in somewhat convoluted ways, reflecting differing publicly expressed interests and commitments, and they seldom convey the private motives and intentions of the agents. As a result, a close examination of the documentary sources would appear to be in order. Reading ‘below the surface’ of these textual sources in search of clues that could reveal hidden motivesto the extent that this is possible—would also be necessary.

2 UNDERSTANDING HISTORY

Assessing the Status of Sources A pivotal feature of the historical cognition that could lead to a better understanding of Bacon’s Rebellion involves assessing the status of the documentary sources. Knowing something about the nature of a source helps situate it within an array of different types of historical evidence that can be used to build an interpretation of the events under investigation. Some might argue that assessing the status of sources is the sine qua non of historical understanding because access to the past is largely, perhaps solely mediated by evidentiary accounts and artefacts. But what does it mean to assess the status of sources? The process of assessing source status is not fully understood. However, researchers in North America and Europe, particularly in Great Britain, have made progress in sorting out its complex cognitions among young children, older grade-school students, college students and historians.1 In what follows, we draw from this work to construct a portrait, however incomplete, of the process of assessing the status of historical sources as a means of framing an exploratory study of eight US 8- and 9-year-old children, who read aloud several sources as they attempted to address the question, ‘What caused Bacon’s Rebellion?’ For our purposes here, we confine our primary consideration of sources to those accounts that appear in the written form or in image form (drawings and/or paintings) because they are most relevant to the present study. Assessing source status draws on at least four closely interconnected cognitive activities that begin with close, critical reading. These activities include attribution, identification, perspective and reliability. Attribution involves recognizing that a source is an account constructed by an author or artist (hereafter, simply author) for a particular purpose or purposes. It also requires locating the author within his or her historical context. These claims are not as selfevident as it might seem. Children, adolescents and adults often approach sources as decontextualized, disembodied, authorless forms of neutral information that appear to fall out of the sky ready-made.2 Recognizing that an author with a historicized position constructed an account for a purpose and that it can function as evidence in building historical understandings is an important cognitive first step. Identification involves knowing what a source is. This requires a series of steps in which the source is effectively interrogated by a collection of questions such as: What type of account is this—a journal, a diary, an image, a newspaper article and so on? What is its appearance—does it seem older or newer; is the paper brittle; is the handwriting clear; is the drawing faded? What is the date it was created? What is the grammar, spelling and syntax? Would I classify this as a primary or secondary source? The last question, although perhaps useful, turns out to be less so than the other questions because it often depends upon understanding beforehand that answering it is relative to the investigator’s purposes. Novices, by definition, typically have less clear purposes that they can use to interrogate sources. However, knowing what a source is, combined with

ASSESSING THE STATUS OF HISTORICAL SOURCES 3

clear investigative purposes, does help an investigator determine how it can be interrogated and therefore what sorts of evidence claims and interpretations can be drawn from the account.3 Perspective requires a careful reading of an account followed by a set of judgements as to the author’s social, cultural and political position. Making these types of judgements is difficult because the author is absent, unavailable for direct questioning about his or her intent. To engage in this cognitive activity well involves studying a fair amount about the historical context in which the account was authored and waiting to render judgements until a variety of accounts have been read. Making sense of the author’s perspective or positionality often takes the form of reading between the lines, or below the surface of the text.4 This perspective-assessment effort has frequently been termed judging bias. Among young learners who are taught to look at author perspective, bias detection appears to be a considerable preoccupation.5 However, it differs from perspective judgements in that bias detection takes on the character of a good-bad dichotomy (telling the truth or lying), whereas the former is concerned with understanding authorial intent in its fullest sense, with bias assumed to be a natural by-product of the author’s historicized positionality. Bias detection alone turns out to be a weak, and perhaps misleading form of judging perspective.6 Reliability also requires judgement. It is a corroborative activity in which a cluster of related accounts are assessed for their relative value as strong or weak forms of evidence used in making claims about what has occurred in the past. Judging the reliability of an account involves comparing it to other accounts from the period or context. The investigator attempts to understand if an author’s assertions and statements can be corroborated elsewhere among documentary sources. Time scale is important here. Judging reliability, because of its cognitive complexity, is almost always a relative accomplishment even among experts, because reliability is not inherent in a source. Rather, as noted, it is relative to a set of questions an investigator poses and to other sources that can speak to those questions. A source that may be germane to a given historical event being investigated, for example, cannot necessarily address all questions posed to it. In this regard, it could be unreliable. Yet, this does not mean ipso facto that the author’s perspective is unreliable, especially given different questions. The elements can be distinguished as we have done here. However, evidence from the research work suggests that they are not so easily teased out. At best attribution and identification appear to work together, with an investigator sometimes beginning by identifying a source, other times starting with attribution. How much prior knowledge an investigator possesses and the nature of her questions appear to play a role, something also the case with perspective and reliability judgements. Attribution and identification usually precede perspective and reliability assessments, especially among those more expert in assessing source status.7


The Study The exploratory study reported here was concerned with the academic development of novices in the domain of history.8 We purposefully selected eight young US students to participate in an assessment designed to understand how they would deal with conflicting source accounts as they attempted to piece together a response to the question of what caused Bacon’s Rebellion. Specifically, we were interested in the following questions: In what ways do these novices assess the status of sources they are examining? In what ways do they make use of procedures and practices—attribution, identification, perspective and reliability judgements—on a path towards constructing defensible interpretations? More generally, we focus on the foregoing questions because we are interested in addressing concerns about how assessing the status of sources can be taught to novices, what procedures best facilitate its learning and how to assess that learning.9 We would argue that, although assessing the status of sources is a valuable and perhaps necessary ingredient in developing deep historical understandings among learners, it also has profound implications as a practice for its use in everyday life. Participants in democratic, information-rich cultures frequently encounter situations in which competing claims and assertions about evidence require careful readings before informed decisions can be made. Learning to think historically has the added benefit of preparing such thoughtful, critical readers. We would like to think that it is never too early to begin teaching these criticalreading protocols in school. School context and curriculum

The elementary school in which this study took place was large and contained multiple classes of students at each grade level from kindergarten through fifth. This study focused on fourth graders who are typically 8 and 9 years old. The school is located about five miles from the city line in a large school district that abuts a dense urban environment. It draws upon a diverse population, socioeconomically, ethnically, racially and in terms of physical and socio-emotional disabilities (designated as one of several schools in the district that serves large numbers of these students). The sample of eight reflected gender, race, ethnic and class diversity but did not include students classified with disabilities. Four were girls and four were boys. Two of the girls were African American (Carrie, Judy), one boy was Latino/Filipino (Jamelle), one girl was a Latina (Vania) and the remaining four were European Americans (Brent, Helen, Kent, Terese). The students’ teacher helped us select the sample. We sought the participation of two readers reading somewhat above grade level (Carrie, Kent) as measured by standardized reading tests, four in the middle range or on grade level (Brent, Helen, Judy, Terese) and two reading slightly below grade level (Jamelle, Vania). The school district had recently revised its fourth-grade social studies curriculum to include more on United States history and embed state history


(common to fourth grade in the US) within the national historical chronology. The curriculum was innovative in that it included a much larger emphasis on doing investigative work and focusing on teaching students to learn to think historically than is common in US school curricula. The curriculum proved challenging for both teacher and students because professional development efforts designed to assist teachers in learning how to teach the new curriculum were constrained by budget reductions. Anticipating this eventuality, the curriculum revisionists scripted the curriculum more heavily than they had in the past and provided a host of ancillary support materials. Nonetheless, the teacher we observed for four months was often challenged by the investigative work and historical-thinking components it included. In effect, she was learning along with the students most every day. Materials

At the conclusion of each of the three large units forming the social studies curriculum was a summative assessment the teachers were asked to conduct with their students as a means of assessing their knowledge. The second unit contained the performance assessment on Bacon’s Rebellion. Students were asked to examine a picture, read five documents, judge whether these sources were primary or secondary accounts and then build an interpretation of Bacon’s Rebellion specifically addressing the question about what caused it. See the Appendix (p. 18) for document copies. This Bacon’s Rebellion performance assessment became the principal source of our data. For our purposes here, we confine ourselves most specifically to students’ dealings with the five documents, which include (1) a fictional letter by a Virginia planter, ‘William’, detailing his participation in Bacon’s Rebellion (authored in 2001 by staff in the school district’s central curriculum office); (2) an excerpt from a frontier planters’ petition to Governor Berkeley for protection from Indians (1676); (3) an excerpt from Bacon’s ‘Declaration in the Name of the People’ (1676); (4) an excerpt from Berkeley’s response to Bacon (1676) and (5) a hybrid document culled together by authors in the curriculum office (dated 2001) from dispatches by William Aylesbury, a fur trader, who had interactions with Doeg and Susquehannock Indians. Documents (2) through (4) also contained modern translations located just below a separator line on the same page as the original primary source excerpt. The purpose was to assist readers who had difficulty making sense of the original language contained in the source. All five documents contained bold-faced attributions (author, title) and origination dates across the top of the page. Procedures

We asked the students to read their way through the five documents aloud as we tape-recorded the process. We coached each of them on unrelated text excerpts about how to read aloud while occasionally stopping to tell us what they


were thinking. We put red dots approximately every two sentences in each text to signal them that they needed to stop and tell us their thoughts. After reading each document, the students addressed, again aloud, three questions that were built into the school district assessment packet: What is the source of the information? Is it a primary or secondary source? What could you estimate as to the possible causes of Bacon’s Rebellion from reading the document? Because this was an exploratory study, we examined the transcripts holistically for evidence of how the students assessed the nature and status of the sources as they built up an understanding of Bacon’s Rebellion (to the extent that they could) and its possible causes. We were interested in the processes by which the students judged the accounts as differing types of sources after they had completed their reading. We looked for examples of students’ uses of identification, attribution, perspective and reliability, and how students worked with them singularly or in combination. The students are novices and generally inexperienced with assessing the status of historical sources. Given our focus on academic development and the location of students at the novice end of the progression continuum, we sought to understand the range and nature of what the students were doing as they assessed the sources, rather than impose a top-down coding rubric rooted in what experts do in order to calculate frequency distributions. The results follow in this vein as we attempt to show what students accomplished in the face of convoluted and varying sources. Reading and Assessing Five Documents Prior to taking on the performance assessment, students studied some of the early colonial developments in class. In particular, they examined some of the difficulties that arose in relations between the English colonists and Indians in Virginia. Students held a generalized sense that the Indians and the English settlers, although occasionally cooperating with each other via trading arrangements, were engaged more often in land disputes that resulted in bloodshed. This type of prior knowledge was voiced frequently when students worked with the source documents. Students began the assessment by examining an image that appeared to depict a small group of colonists engaged in an armed skirmish with a group of Indians. Students were asked to make a prediction about the possible nature of Bacon’s Rebellion by examining the picture. All eight made some reference to the disputes between the English settlers and the Indians, predicting that Bacon’s Rebellion probably had something to do with them. Jamelle, for example, suggested that there were unfriendly relations between the two groups, that the English were in the habit of taking land from the Natives, and that this caused ‘some battles and wars’. Kent argued that ‘it’s gonna be about when they came from England to America… about all the bad things that happened…like some of the wars that happened between the Indians and the settlers’.


Students then turned the page to read aloud The Revolt of 1676, a fictional letter from ‘William’, a planter, who had fought with Bacon during the rebellion, written to his family in England. The letter was rooted in a number of evidencebased facts about the rebellion. The author was concerned about his fate now that Bacon had died and the revolt had ended. Students were prompted by the assessment task to use this text to confirm or disprove their prediction based on the examination of the image. The curriculum writers attempted to write this first text in a way that the fourth graders would find reasonably accessible. The more sophisticated readers (Carrie, Kent) and the on-grade readers (Brent, Helen, Judy, Terese) moved through the text with good fluency, occasionally stumbling when they encountered challenging vocabulary such as ‘succumbed’ and ‘pinnacle’. The less-accomplished readers (Jamelle, Vania) had greater difficulty especially with vocabulary, but nonetheless were able to maintain some fluency as they moved through the letter. After they completed the reading, students turned to address how the document stood in relation to their initial prediction about what Bacon’s Rebellion entailed. They also were asked to describe how the conflicts identified in the letter reflected what was going on between the settlers and the Indians during this period. Carrie decided that this letter gave her nothing to confirm or deny her initial prediction. She seized on the letter’s description of how Bacon burned down Jamestown and suggested that all the letter conveyed was that Bacon ‘was mean and they didn’t trust him’. Jamelle stated that it confirmed his prediction because the letter ‘told him what really happened’, without noting its fictional nature. Helen provided a very long reinterpretation of the letter, in which she noted the ongoing conflict between the settlers and the Indians, that Bacon was at the centre of it, and that ‘he [the letter writer] really didn’t—it wasn’t really a choice for him; Bacon forced him, because in the passage it starts to talk about… like he’s [Bacon] a wealthy man, and he wanted to do it’. She then noted that the letter’s author felt remorseful for his involvement with Bacon, but that Bacon, because of his wealth and social position, may have forced this lowly planter to rebel. Judy said that reading the letter changed her initial prediction that Bacon had led a war to an understanding that the rebellion was about the Indians. Approximately three weeks prior to engaging the performance assessment, students had undertaken a similar investigation into the starving time in Jamestown over the winter of 1609–1610. Their teacher taught them about assessing the status of sources by focusing on how to identify the nature of the source (either primary or secondary labelled by type of document) and about rendering reliability judgements based on identifying facts and fictions in a source. Because the teacher was to a degree unsure about these aspects of assessing the status of sources (as we noted, she was learning along with the students), neither identification nor reliability judgements were unpacked in much detail for the students other than having her note that reliability had to do with understanding the perspective of the author, the relationship of fictions to facts represented (how to nail this down with certainty proved elusive), and was


related to a source’s primary or secondary account status (determined by knowing whether it was a diary or journal or a textbook or fictional account). The students, therefore, were aware of source-assessment concepts and were capable of using a general language for identification, perspective and reliability. Relying on this vocabulary surfaced unprompted in two of the students’ initial assessments of The Revolt of 1676. Brent observed that this letter was a fictional account but said nothing more about how this influenced his thinking about what the account conveyed. Helen went straight to the issue of her judgement of the perspective of the author vis-à-vis Bacon: When it says, ‘Bacon is dead, I am sorry at my heart that lice and flux should take the hangman’s part’, I think what it’s trying to say is that people since Bacon’s dead; I mean, people might have wanted him to die ‘cause he was killing all the Indians and forcing people into battle, which they probably really didn’t want to do. So, it’s sort of being sarcastic. And on the first page, where he says that he’s spellbound by the words of Mr. Nathaniel Bacon—same thing. Noting what she perceived to be sarcasm in the author’s description, despite whether one agrees with that assessment or not, is a relatively sophisticated cognitive judgement for an 8-year-old and an important initial step down the path towards reading below the surface of the text. However, her assessment of the author’s (ostensible) sarcastic perspective did little to aid her understanding of the causes of Bacon’s Rebellion. This first fictional text was written in a narrative style that the curriculum writers had said was designed to build students’ initial knowledge of the rebellion’s details and outcome. The text’s ordinal position among the five documents was therefore intentional. It was intended to reveal, although tacitly, some of the socio-political conflicts embedded in the struggle between the poor planters and the wealthy governor. The next three primary source documents were designed to portray the positions and perspectives of the antagonists or protagonists, depending on the side one takes. The fifth text (fiction but based on primary source records) was used to suggest the position of the Native Americans. These texts’ ordinal positions were also intentional. To expert investigators, assessing the status of the sources with particular regard to surmising the authors’ socio-cultural positions and political agendas and how these agendas contributed to the Bacon-Berkeley conflict could have been possible without extraordinary effort. However, for these novices, understanding those perspectives and building a defensible argument about what caused Bacon’s Rebellion from among the given sources would prove difficult. The second text, Frontier Planters Petition Governor Berkeley to Commission Volunteers Against the Indians, Circa Spring 1676, presented the eight with a serious reading challenge. The text was seven lines long (on a standard sheet of paper) and was essentially one large run-on sentence with very little punctuation.


All eight students struggled with the text, its structure, lack of punctuation, spelling and somewhat arcane vocabulary. Several opted to read the modern translation. When instructed by the assessment to identify the source as either primary or secondary, Brent, Jamelle and Kent chose the latter. Vania initially identified it as a primary source and then promptly changed her mind, noting that the text was ‘so old’ (pointing to the date it was written) that it could not have survived intact and must have been copied from an original. Brent, Carrie, Judy and Terese immediately offered a rationale for their identifications. Brent said the document was a secondary source because ‘it may have really happened, but it says transcript at the top’. He then expressed doubts about its authenticity because, he suggested, ‘it could have been changed’. Carrie pointed to the attribution at the top of the page and reread it, observing its date and authorship. Judy noted the spelling and said, ‘…that’s how they wrote back then’. She followed with, ‘It’s a primary source because it explains a lot.’ Terese argued that ‘it was copied from a diary’, and that the use of old English words made it difficult to read, a common feature of primary sources she said that she had encountered. Helen, Jamelle and Kent needed to be prompted about why they made the choices they did. Helen identified this second document as a primarysource letter, attributing it to an author who wrote it ‘to get their side out there’. She did not comment on what that side was but she appeared to detect a clear perspective present in the ‘letter’ and seemed to be hinting at a reliability judgement (too much biased perspective, making it potentially untrustworthy). Jamelle maintained that that the source did not come from a journal and so therefore could not be identified as a primary source. He did not attempt to attribute or identify it by rereading the title or observing the date. When prompted, Kent, who identified the source as secondary, indicated that ‘it doesn’t sound like it came straight from the person; it sounds more like an essay or a biography’, the essay claim being an interesting judgement in that the text served as a collective argument for action. Although several students commented about the perspective embedded in the document, none spontaneously volunteered reliability judgements with the exception of the hints Helen registered and Brent’s concerns about the document’s authenticity. The third document, Nathaniel Bacon’s Declaration in the Name of the People (1676), represents a partial list (points 2, 5, 6 and 7 are not presented; see the Appendix, p. 19) of grievances Bacon claims the poor planter class had suffered under the governorship of Berkeley. Bacon never mentions Berkeley by name in the original, but the curriculum writers put him into the opening line of modern translation to identify the target of Bacon’s complaints. The original document, like the one that preceded it, proved challenging for these 8- and 9-year-olds. The more-accomplished readers managed to read through the text, occasionally rereading segments and asking questions about words they did not understand. The less-accomplished readers opted to turn to the modern translation.


When prompted by the assessment task to identify the source as primary or secondary, six of the eight (Brent, Carrie, Helen, Jamelle, Judy, Kent) chose the former. One of the exceptions, Terese, returned to the top of the source and reread the attribution. She concluded that she was not sure whether it was primary or secondary and left it at that. Vania claimed the source was secondary. She seized on the capitalized word, ‘Monopoly’, in the sixth line and asserted that she had grave doubts about this document’s authenticity, because ‘I’m sure they didn’t have Monopoly back then’, apparently making reference to the board game. She implied that the source’s reliability was suspect and essentially dismissed it. Brent compared this third document to the second one (potentially exercising a reliability judgement without saying so directly), identifying what he called the ‘fancy language’ (spelling) and rationalizing that it had to be a primary account. Carrie did not provide a rationale for her choice. Later she said that she was not sure who wrote the account, observing that the perspective failed to be clear. Helen identified the source as a letter, claiming that it warned ‘…you’re going to get kicked out of office…because of what you’re doing’. She then indicated that the focus of the warning was Berkeley and his misdeeds, but she did not indicate that Bacon was the author. Jamelle identified the source by its date and attributed it to Bacon, noting Bacon’s arguments against Berkeley. He maintained that it was a primary source because ‘it’s from a real declaration’. Judy identified the old English spellings as the rationale for her selection. She made no attribution to the author or identification by the date. Kent suggested that the source was detailed and drawn directly from the voices of the people, making it clearly a primary source. He also assessed the perspective to be that of the people who were aggrieved because Berkeley had taken the side of the Indians against them, without commenting on evidence the author may or may not have had for the claim. The fourth document, The Declaration of Sir William Berkeley (1676), like the preceding two, created added reading challenges for the students. Eight lines long, it contained limited punctuation and can be described as one lengthy run-on sentence akin to the second source. Berkeley directly accosts the character and leadership skill of Bacon, claiming that Bacon, unlike Berkeley, had surrounded himself with the ‘lowest of people’, who could not provide him adequate counsel. He brands Bacon as a lawless scoundrel. Most of Berkeley’s retort is unambiguous in its charges. The claim about Bacon’s cavorting with the ‘lowest people’ provides what might be construed as a sub-textual clue to a class struggle permeating the conflict. After some struggling through the reading of the text and resorting to the modern translation occasionally, five of the eight identified it as a primary source. Of the other three, Jamelle said he could not identify it either way. Helen argued that she had doubts about the source’s authenticity (reliability judgement), wondered aloud if Berkeley (attribution) was lying (perspective assessment), and stated that Berkeley’s claims did not depict what really happened (reliability


judgement) without stipulating how she could know for sure one way or the other, all of which made her think it was a secondary source (identification). Judy claimed that it provided very little information and so had to be classified as a secondary source. She did not note its attribution or say anything about its perspective or reliability as she made her decision. Here, Helen’s rationale juxtaposed against Judy’s, for example, indicates an interesting difference in how students approached the task of assessing the status of sources. Helen appears to have begun to construct an incident model that allows her to judge the reliability of the Berkeley source. She assumes one can know the past with certainty, may be premature in her judgements, and could benefit by learning to unpack her rationale, but she does engage in all four elements of the process. Judy, by contrast, simply dismisses the account because it contains little information she can use, a rationale common to novices who are inclined to work from an information-quantity criterion when assessing source status. Brent, who tagged the fourth document as a primary source, attributed it to a diary taken ‘from a real person’, which ‘makes it more reliable’. Carrie, as was her custom, reread the attribution and date at the top, declared it a primary source, and then made clear that the perspective here was Berkeley’s and he was angry at Bacon for ‘being sneaky’. Carrie observed that Bacon claims that he, Berkeley, had sided with the Indians, and ‘Bacon just doesn’t approve’. Kent argued that the source shows ‘wording that comes from the person who wrote it’. He attributed authorship to Berkeley but did not identify the date it was written. Terese focused on the appearance of the words and text to identify it as a primary source and followed with a description of Berkeley’s perspective and his charges against Bacon. Vania simply reread the title and date to identify it as a primary source without additional elaboration. The final text, Report of Watchonoet…to William Aylesbury: Fictional Report Based on Fact, 2001, provided students with a look at the Native perspective on the events. However, it was relatively long and introduced Watchonoet and Aylesbury and the Doeg and Susquehannock tribes, two names and groups not familiar to the students. Although the narrator, Watchonoet, was a Susquehannock, the narrative explained what happened to the Doegs as a result of skirmishes with English settlers on the Virginia frontier. Students had to sort through these additional details on their way to constructing their interpretation of Bacon’s Rebellion. All but Jamelle identified this source as secondary. Jamelle thought the account ‘sounds true’ and so it would be a primary source, without saying why it sounded true. We can speculate that the narrative nature of the account held the ring of verisimilitude for Jamelle, what Barthes calls the referential illusion historical narratives impart.10 It may be that for this novice, how the text sounded foiled his source-assessment efforts. Brent noted that the text had been copied off something someone had written and that it could be distinguished from the preceding primary sources by its appearance (size of font). Carrie, who had become habituated to studying the


attribution lines in the title, observed that the document had been rewritten by the curriculum writers, as was indicated in the title, and declared it a secondary source. Helen, rereading the attribution in the title, said she was not sure who wrote it exactly but that it was obviously ‘relayed’, making it a secondary source. Judy noted the date and the word fictional in the title line as she assessed it as a secondary source. The perspective, she said, was all about how the Indians had suffered land losses at the hand of Bacon, aligning Berkeley with the Indian cause in the process. Kent volunteered that he did not trust the source (reliability judgement) because it was a fictional, secondary account. Vania assessed the source as did Kent. Terese, like Brent, used the text’s appearance to argue that it was a secondary source. She then interpreted the source to say that the settlers had taken Indians’ land and the Indians sought revenge. Without saying she necessarily agreed with this interpretation, she argued that Berkeley had done nothing to help the settlers, causing Bacon’s Rebellion. These seven students seemed to allude to the untrustworthiness of this source largely because it either was clearly fictional and the title said so, or its appearance distinguished it as a secondary source. In general, the seven appeared to believe that secondary sources were suspect and that primary sources were preferable because they held more promise for telling things as they really were.11 Our observation data indicates that the teacher had implied this distinction during classroom exercises on ‘separating fact from fiction’, as students studied documents related to the Jamestown starving time, for example. Several questions that followed the document readings and status assessments were designed to entice the students to offer interpretations of what caused the rebellion. We lack the space to explore them in detail here. However, suffice it to say that the students generally offered explanations that referred to Bacon as the ‘bad guy’ who attacked the Natives and burned Jamestown. There were no comments or hints about Bacon’s motives or about the class struggle and how Bacon may have manipulated it in his conflict with Berkeley. Source Assessments and Interpreting Bacon’s Rebellion It is important to stress that this school year presented the students with their first opportunity to examine historical sources as evidence and to learn to assess them as such. And the students’ teacher also was limited in her own experience of engaging this process. As a result, the practice of assessing the status of sources was rarely teased out beyond asking students to identify documents as either primary or secondary sources, to begin the process of attribution by attending to titles and dates of authorship, to explore author perspective via searching for the relationship between the representation of facts and fictions in a source and to render reliability judgements based on identifications and fact-fiction decisions. Students were effectively working with a limiting set of binary distinctions as they assessed sources. Despite this, the eight showed signs of being initially able


to work on some relatively sophisticated cognitive landscape as the data suggest. A common refrain in US schools is that young children are incapable of learning to read and think in this manner because they are simply too young and the work too complex. Our data suggest that even with some limited experiences provided by a teacher who also was learning to think historically for the first time, students were able to make important strides with complicated second-order concepts (evidence, sources, reliability, perspective) and put them to use in an activity that required them to assess sources. Such thinking is clearly not beyond these novices’ reach. However, the trajectory these students are on is a complex one fraught with the potential for misleading ideas to inhere in their thinking. If the work in England on the Chata project is any indication, teaching novices to assess sources using binary distinctions has clear limits.12 Our work on this study bears out the results generated across the Atlantic and generally coheres with Project Chata’s descriptions of progression among novices learning to think historically about the source status.13 According to this work, novices in Great Britain initially approach documents as stories that are given or correspond to something ‘out there’. With a bit more learning and experience, they argue that one cannot know the past because we were not there, that differences in sources appear as a consequence of a lack of direct access. We would term these two locations as a realist position, that is, there is a real past out there which is either given or inaccessible or both. The middling position occupied by learners in this progression turns on thinking that accounts of the past are stabilized by information available and/or that differences among accounts of the past arise because of author bias. The latter marks an important shift in understanding that accounts have authors and authors may have historicized perspectives. However, such cognition left unattended can leave learners with the mistaken idea that all accounts reflect someone’s opinion and that one opinion is pretty much as good as another because everyone is entitled to an opinion and all are more-or-less biased anyway. Such a stance renders sound perspective and reliability judgements virtually impossible. We would refer to this as a naïve relativist position. Higher levels of cognitive sophistication along the progression are marked by (a) an understanding that accounts are authored and authors make selections– depending on their purposes—among various forms of evidence in choosing what to report, and/or (b) that accounts will differ because of this selection process. We would term this a criterial position. Expert historical investigators work from criteria about what counts as suitable evidence under assumptions (a) and (b), and therefore how evidence can be used (by account type, perspective, subtext and evidence preponderance) and to what end in building an argument about what may have occurred in the past. The data we presented indicates for the most part that the eight fourth graders occupy the middling or naïve relativist position. This is an important accomplishment, in that they have moved generally beyond the simplistic belief


that the past is inaccessible to us and towards becoming more critical readers. Nonetheless, the students appear to be working on the assumption—based in good part on being taught this in class—that authors have crafted these sources but do so in a way that makes them more fact and less fiction or vice versa. At the same time, they lack sufficient criteria for deciding with some precision which is which. They have some difficulty getting past binary bias distinctions (e.g. primary—as ‘it really was’/ secondary—distorting the truth, fiction/fact). Therefore, reading ‘between the lines’, and making reliability judgements that will help them forge an evidence-based argument about, say, what caused Bacon’s Rebellion, are presently beyond their reach. This should not be too surprising given that this historical study unit was the fourth graders’ initial experience of learning to assess sources. Making Progress with Students’ Criterial Thinking To move the students to greater cognitive sophistication would involve teaching them about the criteria investigators use to assess sources’ reliability. This would require shifting them away from assessments based on binary distinctions and toward observations that historical accounts embody perspectives and subtexts that reflect authors’ historicized positions. These positions most always reveal something concerning the question at hand (assuming they derive from the historical context being examined), but they cannot reveal everything. Additional accounts are needed, those that can be intertextually compared in a process of corroborating testimony from a variety of historical agents. Attempting to sort out agents’ intentions, motives and positions is central here. The degree to which various accounts begin to cohere around a particular way of understanding events becomes a pivotal criterion in building an interpretation that addresses an investigator’s question, such as what caused Bacon’s Rebellion. When the evidence does not speak in ways that allow neat corroborations, then the investigator is obliged to show that differing perspectives exist, that therefore one can understand an incident variously and then to offer an interpretation that may make the most sense based on a careful assessment of all the available evidence. This is a powerful way to think, to read and to understand with broad applications in democratic cultures. All are worthy of teaching to students early. However, to teach this sort of criterial thinking to students as early as fourth grade means that their teachers would already know how to think that way. In the United Kingdom many teachers have opportunities to learn how to think this way as part of their preparation to teach.14 Teachers in the United States by contrast rarely get such opportunities.15 Teachers who are prepared to teach the elementary grades, even those who will teach older students in grades 8–11, seldom if ever, learn about the sort of criteria historical investigators use to analyse and assess sources as they build interpretations. To its credit, the school system in which the study took place had ambitious intentions to educate teachers to the


new curriculum that focused on teaching students to think historically. They cannot be expected, though, to accomplish this task entirely on their own. Teacher preparation programmes must also play a role. And states might do well to re-examine their teacher-licensure policies and student-assessment practices. Finally, this also could become a central focus of the Teaching American History grant programme currently funded by the US Congress and supervised by the US Department of Education. The students are able and waiting, even the young ones. NOTES 1. See Ashby, R. and Lee, P., Information, Opinion, and Beyond, paper presented at the American Educational Research Association (San Diego, CA, April 1998); Perfetti, C., Britt, M., Rouet, J., Georgi, M. and Mason, R., ‘How Students Use Texts To Reason About Historical Uncertainty’, in M.Carretero and J.Voss (eds), Cognitive and Instructional Processes in History and the Social Sciences (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1994), pp. 257–284; Shemilt, D., ‘Adolescent Ideas about Evidence and Methodology in History’, in C.Portal (ed.), The History Curriculum for Teachers (Lewes, UK: Falmer Press, 1987), pp. 39–61; VanSledright B.A. and Frankes, L., ‘Concept-and Strategic-Knowledge Development in Historical Study: A Comparative Exploration in Two FourthGrade Classrooms’, Cognition and Instruction, 18 (2000), pp. 239–283; Werner, W., ‘Reading Authorship Into Texts’, Theory and Research in Social Education, 28 (2000), pp. 193–219; Wineburg, S., ‘On the Reading of Historical Texts: Notes on the Breach Between School And Academy’, American Educational Research Journal, 28 (1991), pp. 495–519. 2. See Ashby, R. and Lee, P., Information; Wineburg, S.,‘On the Reading’. 3. Ashby, R. and Lee, P., ibid. 4. See VanSledright, B.A., ‘On the Importance of Historical Positionality to Thinking about and Teaching History’, International Journal of Social Education, 12 (1998), 1–18; Wineburg, S., ‘On the Reading’. 5. For example, see Ashby, R. and Lee, P., Information; Barton, K., ‘“I Just Kinda Know”: Elementary Students’ Ideas about Historical Evidence’, Theory and Research in Social Education, 24 (1987), pp. 407–430; VanSledright B.A. and Kelly, C., ‘Reading American History: The Influence of Using Multiple Sources on Six Fifth Graders’, The Elementary School Journal, 98 (1998), pp. 239–265. 6. Ashby, R. and Lee, P., Information. 7. Wineburg, S., ‘On the Reading’. 8. See Alexander, P., ‘Toward a Model of Academic Development: Schooling and the Acquisition of Knowledge’, Educational Researcher, 29 (2000), pp. 28–33, 44. 9. Ibid. 10. Barthes, R., ‘The Discourse of History’, The Rustle Of Language, translated by R.Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1986). 11. See also evidence on this result in Ashby, R. and Lee, P., Information. 12. Ashby, R. and Lee, P., Information; Lee, P. and Ashby, R., ‘Progression in Historical Understanding among Students Ages 7–14’, in P.Stearns, P.Seixas, and


S.Wineburg (eds), Knowing, Teaching, and Learning History: National and International Perspectives (New York: New York University Press, 2000), pp. 199– 222; Lee, P., Ashby, R. and Dickinson, A., ‘Progression in Children’s Ideas about History’, in M.Hughes (ed.), Progression in Learning (Clevedon, Bristol: Multilingual Matters, 1996), pp. 50–81; Lee, P., Dickinson, A. and Ashby, R., Some Aspects of Children’s Understanding of Historical Explanation, paper presented at the American Educational Research Association (San Francisco, CA, April 1995). 13. Ashby, R. and Lee, P., Information. 14. See Shemilt, D., in History 13–16: Evaluation Study (Edinburgh: Holmes McDougall, 1980). 15. See VanSledright, B.A., In Search of America’s Past: Learning to Read History in Elementary School (New York: Teachers College Press, 2002).

APPENDIX Document 1: The Revolt of 1676 (Fictional Letter Based on Fact, 2001)

My dear Mother, I hope this letter finds you well, and my sisters and uncles as well. I write this with the purpose of relating to you the remarkable events of the past year here in our Royal Majesty’s colony of Virginia. In late winter my indentured servitude reached its final days, and I was given land along the James River on which to grow tobacco for my own profit. I cleared several acres, which was difficult work, but my years of labour benefited me for I was able to fell the trees without bringing much suffering upon my self. At first there was an Indian settlement nearby, but as more farmers moved in and cleared the land, the Indians left their settlement. I and the other young farmers and indentured servants were expectant about profiting from our first tobacco harvest. We were so glad to be out from under the heel of our former owners—who did nothing but profit from our hard work. The growing season provided ideal conditions for our crops and our profits might have been great if it had not been for the unfortunate events which followed—A rebellion took place—and I was in it. I am sorry to say I fought against the King’s governor, Mr. Berkeley, but like many others I found myself spellbound by the words and actions of a Mr. Nathaniel Bacon. Perhaps you have heard of him, Mother, as his father is a wealthy gentleman in England and he was a relation of Governor Berkeley himself. Mr. Bacon gathered a large group of farmers with the purpose of taking his revenge on the Indians. Nathaniel Bacon was a strong leader—He understood that rich men like the Governor and his wealthy friends care nothing about us hard working migrants to the lands of wilderness and Indians. The action of the rebellion was terrible. I vow you have never seen anything so awful in our fair homeland. Bacon led us to capture and kill Indians in retaliation


for their raids and massacres. Nathaniel Bacon next turned his attention to showing Governor Berkeley that his inaction concerning the Indian problem would not be tolerated. Bacon did this by leading us to march on the capital of Jamestown. The Governor and his troops fled to the river for their safety and survival. We were triumphant! However, when the Governor tried to come back, Bacon burned Jamestown to the ground. It was a sad, confusing day. However, what is most remarkable is that one month after the burning of Jamestown, Mr. Nathaniel Bacon succumbed to attacks of lice and the bloody flux, and died. It is unimaginable that only one month after his great victory, at the pinnacle of his leadership, he has perished. I fear that his rebellion has collapsed. The Governor’s men are now capturing and hanging the other leaders. We hear them singing as they go on their way Bacon is dead, I am sorry at my heart that lice and flux should take the hangman’s part. I pray that I am not persecuted for helping Mr. Bacon. For now, looking back on all the bloodshed, and having turned against the King, I find myself wondering, ‘What caused Bacon’s Rebellion?’ Please see what you can do for me. Best to you Mother, With regards from your devoted, misguided son, William Document 2: Frontier Planters Petition Governor Berkeley to Commission Volunteers Against the Indians, Circa Spring 1676 Transcript

… The Humble petition of the poore distressed subjects in the upper parts of James River in verginia Humbly Complain that the Indians hath allready most barberously and Inhumanly taken and Murdered severall of our bretheren and put them to most cruell torture by burning of them alive and by cruell turturing of them which makes our harts Ready to bleed to heare and wee the poore subjects are in dayly dandger of loosing our lives by the Heathen in soe much that wee are all afraid of going about our demesticall affaires. Wherefore we Most Humbly request that your gracious Honor would be pleased to grant us a Committion and to make choice of Commitioned Officers to lead this party now redy to takes armes in defence of our lives and estates… Modern English Version

This petition is being submitted by the poor residents of the upper parts of the James River in Virginia. We hereby complain that the Indians have been murdering some of our residents and torturing others by burning them alive. Hearing this torture makes our hearts ache!


We, the poor residents, are in daily danger of losing our lives to the Indians. We fear going about our daily business. We therefore request of the Governor that you allow us to commission officers to fight the Indians so that we might protect our lives and our land. Document 3: Nathaniel Bacons’ Declaration in the Name of the People (30 July 1676) Transcript

1. For having upon specious pretences of publiqe works raised greate unjust taxes upon the Comonality for the advancement of private favorites and other sinister ends, but noe visible effects in any measure adequate, For not having dureing this long time of his Gouvernement in any measure advanced this hopefull Colony either by fortificacons Townes or Trade. 2. … 3. For having wronged his Majesties prerogative and interest, by assumeing Monopoly of the Beaver trade, and for having in that unjust gaine betrayed and sold his Majesties Country and the lives of his loyall subjects, to the barbarous heathen. 4. For having protected, favoured, and Imboldned the Indians against his Majesties loyall subjects, never contriveing, requireing, or appointing any due or proper meanes of sattisfaction for theire many Invasions, robbories, and murthers comitted upon us. 5. …, 6. …, 7. … 8. For the pervencon of civill mischeife and ruin amongst ourselves, the whilst the barbarous enimy in all places did invade, murther and spoyle us, his Majesties most faithful subjects. [Note: Modern translation was deleted here to preserve space.] Document 4: The Declaration of Sir William Berkeley his most sacred Majesties Governor, 1676 Transcript

…Now my friends I have lived 34 yeares amongst you, as uncorrupt and dilligent as ever Governor was, Bacon is a man of two yeares amongst you, his person and qualities unknowne to most of you, and to all men else, by any virtuous action that ever I heard of, And that very action which he boasts of, was sickly and fooleishly, and as I am informed treatcherously carried to the dishonnor of the English Nation, yett in itt, he lost more men then I did in three yeares Warr, and by the grace of god will putt myselfe to the same daingers and troubles againe when I have brought Bacon to acknowledge the Laws are above him, and I doubt not but by Gods assisstance to have better success then Bacon


hath had, the reason of my hopes are, that I will take Councell of wiser men than my selfe, but Mr. Bacon hath none about him, but the lowest of the people… Document 5: Report of Watchonoet, Susquehannock Chief to William Aylesbury, Fur Trader (Fictional Report based on fact, 2001)

This story was relayed to me by Watchonoet, leader of a small band of Susquehannock Indians, formerly friendly with the Governor of Virginia. Watchonoet had long worked out a deal with the Governor to exchange beaver furs for powder and shot for his guns. This had long kept Watchonoet’s people well fed and at peace with the English settlers of Virginia. However, the numbers of settlers kept growing and were ruining the beavers’ woods as they cut down trees to grow tobacco. This did not bother Watchonoet, though. He was far away from the white man. It was his friends of the Doeg tribe who were being impacted by the new settlers. The Doeg tribe said the settlers were taking over their lands. However Watchonoet’s feelings changed one day when he and a band of his hunters were visiting the Doegs. A group of well-armed settlers crept into the Doeg’s camp and attacked. They shot and shot and shot. It wasn’t until Watchonoet himself came out shouting that the settlers finally stopped. It was too late, many Doegs had been killed, and so were many of Watchonoet’s own warriors. Watchonoet asked the settlers why they had attacked. The angry man in charge declared he was seeking revenge for settlers who had been killed. Watchonoet explained that he had been on peaceful terms with the settlers of Virginia, but that would be no more as he must honour the proud hunters whose spirits had been stolen in a sneak attack for something they did not do.

2 Students’ Approaches to Validating Historical Claims ROSALYN ASHBY

Introduction If a history education is to include an understanding of history as a discipline then central to that understanding is a concept of evidence. It supports our ability to examine the material the past has left behind in order to generate hypotheses and validate historical claims. Of course, it is no easy task to develop such understandings in the classroom. However, knowledge of students’ likely preconceptions and difficulties can support teachers in this enterprise.1 Through an analysis of data from one aspect of the ESRC Project CHATA (Concepts of History and Teaching Approaches) this chapter offers some insight into student ideas, specifically their approaches to validating historical claims, and their understanding of the nature of historical sources.2 The Sample Written responses to a task designed to access student thinking were collected from years 6, 7 and 9, a total of 265 students between the age of 10 and 14, and 67 follow-up interviews were conducted. (There is not space in this chapter to discuss data collected from the year 3 students, 7- and 8-year-olds.) The task was constructed to be self-standing, providing students with the necessary material for them to respond. The purposive sample was drawn from three primary and six secondary schools (see Table 2.1, which gives the ages of students in UK year groups). Presenting the Materials and Task The students were presented with three different historical claims identified as Story A, Story B and Story C and a set of six sources identified as clues.

STUDENTS’ APPROACHES TO VALIDATING HISTORICAL CLAIMS 21

TABLE2.1: PHASE I SCHOOLS School School A School B School C School D

Phase and type

Primary Primary Primary Secondary comprehensive School E Secondary comprehensive School F Secondary comprehensive School G Secondary comprehensive School H Secondary selective (girls) School I Secondary selective (boys) Total in each year group

Intake

Y6

Y7

Y9

urban small town rural urban

29 18 28 24

24

suburban

24

25

urban

23

small town

10

urban +

14

16

suburban +

15

15

75

100 90 N=265 Mean age of year groups: Y6:11 years 2 months; Y7:12 years 1 month; Y9:14 years 1 month

(See Appendix 1. The version presented to the students was on an A3 sheet, and clues 4, 5 and 6 were in colour.) They were given background information that reminded them of the Roman invasion and settlement of Britain already encountered on a previous task, and provided with a temporal frame of reference for the Saxon invasion and settlement. (There is insufficient space here to explain the thinking behind the construction of the task, which was based on extensive trials, but study of the Appendix material alongside the discussion of pupil responses to the questions is likely to reveal its rationale.) The students were asked to study the background information, the clues and the stories, and to respond to a number of questions. The analysis provided here is confined to responses to the opening three questions. In the first question, students were asked to make a choice between the stories, on the basis of the clues in the context of the background information, and to explain their choice. Question 2 asked whether any clues were particularly helpful to them in coming to their decision and if so to explain why, and question 3 asked whether any clues were not particularly helpful, and if so to explain why. The second and third questions were intended to act as a check on the thinking behind student responses to the first question, and as one method for examining the stability of student ideas in the face of further confrontation about the decision they had made.


In presenting the materials to the students decisions had to be made about what to call the claims and what to call the sources. The materials identified the sources by the use of the word clue. This decision was made in recognition of the lack of familiarity year 6 students might have with the word source, an issue which became apparent during the trial phase. The word ‘clue’ appeared to carry with it at least some form of relationship to the claims, and a recognition that these clues were from the past. For students from years 7 and 9, an explanation of the use of the word ‘clue’ was given. It was explained to these older students that although they might be more familiar with the word ‘source’ younger students would be using these materials and might not be familiar with this term. Where students in the older age groups were not familiar with the word ‘source’ this approach would not preclude them from making sense of the task while those familiar with more sophisticated terms would not feel patronized by the use of less sophisticated ones. The historical claims were presented as Story A, Story B and Story C for the same reasons. Calling these ‘statements’, ‘claims’ or ‘accounts’ would not have been feasible. It was unlikely that all year 9 students would be familiar with these terms, let alone those in year 6. It was therefore pointed out to all students that people sometimes argue about what happened in the past, and to signal a distance between the claims and the sources, they were told that one of the reasons for these disagreements is the difficulty of working out what could be said on the basis of clues from the things that the past had left behind. This was intended to support the understandings of younger students in particular and those not familiar with this type of relationship. Student Approaches to Selecting a Story Student rationales for their choice of story revealed four main approaches described here, through the use of examples, under four categories. The first of these is Story focus. Figure 2.1 gives the percentage of students from each age group who used the nature of the story itself to justify their choice and who initially showed no indication of having considered the clues. The second category picked out on this figure, Matching, shows the percentage of students in each age group who responded to the opening question by matching information in their chosen story with information in one of the clues. The third category, Collecting and counting, picks out those students who used two or more clues to either collect different information or identify information clues had in common. (There are clearly conceptual differences between collecting and counting information but, as the discussion will reveal, these were often difficult to decouple.) In both the Matching and Collecting and counting categories students treated the information in clues at face value and there is no evidence to suggest that they questioned the status of this information, by reference either to the tone of writing, or to the circumstances or purpose of the authors.


FIGURE 2.1 RESPONDING TO QUESTION 1 (PERCENTAGES OF RESPONSES BY YEAR GROUP)

The fourth category, Questioning, incorporates a range of responses where students raised questions about the credibility or status of the information provided by the clues. Figure 2.1 shows the percentages from each year group of students who treat the clues in this way. This category actually covers a range of different ideas but the responses have in common the students’ ability or willingness to think beyond the information given. Responses in this category recognized that the clues may differ in value according to the tone of their reporting, the time of their production or the ability of one clue to challenge the claims being made by another. Some students recognized the power of one source, given its status, to challenge the validity of another and therefore the validity of a particular story. Not surprisingly there is a larger percentage of year 9 students in this category, but some examples of more complex thinking can be found among younger students. The remainder of this chapter will unpack and exemplify the range of ideas in each of these broad categories, and identify the extent to which further questions revealed either the stability of students’ ideas or more complex thinking. Story Focus For some of these students the worth of a story did not lie in its validity as an historical claim but in its ability to project certain qualities of excitement and adventure. Other students focused on specific aspects of the substantive content as a basis for their choice, while a considerable number of students across all age groups were concerned with the quantity of information a story provided. More complex responses suggested that imprecision and lack of detail gave a story status because it would be more difficult to challenge, while for some students the plausibility of a story mattered. Responses that focused on the story in a student’s initial response have been differentiated in Figure 2.2. These sub-categories are given meaning below through an examination of example responses.


FIGURE 2.2: STORY FOCUS: DIFFERENTIATED SUB-CATEGORIES (PERCENTAGES OF RESPONSES FROM ‘STORY FOCUS’ BY YEAR GROUP)

Personal attraction

For a very few students ‘I like it’ was sufficient justification for their choice. Others based their decision on a story’s ability to suggest ‘adventure’ or ‘excitement’. Substantive content

This sub-category picks out choices that rested on specific aspects of a story’s substantive content, or, using the students’ own word, what the story was ‘about’. For Lucy, year 7, ‘King Arthur’ was the focus and for Colin, year 6, ‘the Saxons fighting the Britons’. There was some evidence here to suppose students were testing particular content against the touchstone of their own prior knowledge. Expectations of this historical story may well have played a part in students’ choice. If this was the case it is conceivably linked to a concept of truth rather than how the story made them feel. For students like Lucy, prior acceptance of the existence of King Arthur was apparent and in further questions clues were rejected because ‘they didn’t tell me anything about King Arthur’, or were not needed ‘because I already know about King Arthur’. Volume and detail

Responses falling into this sub-category of Story focus gave status to a story for its length or detail. A story had to ‘say more’ or ‘be longer’ than other stories. For these students Story C had validity. Rachel, year 6, chose Story C because it ‘says more about everything’. Gareth, year 7, was more expansive, choosing Story C ‘because it tells you more about the battle, like who fought and


where and also what happens’. Story B stood little chance with students who took this line. Some students talked about the detail of a story as opposed to its volume of information, particularly older students. The word ‘detail’ was exclusively used by year 7 and year 9 students. Ruth, year 7, claimed Story A was best because it ‘gives you the time, it dates back the king. Etc. It has all the details’. Some students were explicit in labelling this kind of detail as fact. Daniel, year 7, chose Story A ‘because it was very factual. It gave the year, who was involved, where it happened and what happened’ and Stuart, year 9, ‘because it has names and numbers’. Certain information spoke for itself, and its validity was assured by its existence. Imprecision

Imprecision was the test of validity for some students and here Story B came into its own. The word ‘imprecision’ is not being used to suggest vagueness but to classify responses where the restriction on the claim being made was recognized. Graham, year 7, decided on Story B because he ‘saw that it did not have figures like the other story making it more reliable’, and David, year 9, chose Story B because it was ‘more inconclusive. There doesn’t always have to be dates, numbers and names.’ Layla, in year 6, recognized the likely survival qualities of Story B under test conditions, pointing out that ‘it did not give many definite dates or anything. This meant not much of it could be wrong.’ Plausibility

Responses were classified here where students explained their choice on the basis that the story ‘does not exaggerate’, or gave it credence on the basis of what was possible or conceivable in terms of human capacity or statistical likelihood. Story B was chosen because it did not make grandiose or exaggerated claims. Caroline, year 9, used this idea to support both her choice of Story B and her rejection of the other stories, explaining ‘Story A is very unrealistic, in that it said that one man managed to kill a thousand men himself. Story C is quite realistic but not so much as Story B.’ Plausibility has been placed last on Figure 2.2, but this is not to assume it is a more sophisticated rationale than that provided by students who validated their choice on the basis of imprecision. However, students in both these categories were undoubtedly working with ideas that enable them to make important and critical distinctions. Matching Aspects of a Story to Aspects of a Clue Responses in the second of the four main categories made reference to a particular aspect of the story and matched this to what was said in one of the clues. Matching of this kind can be seen clearly in Christine’s response (year 7).


She ‘saw that in clue 2 the name and the number of Saxons he killed were exactly the same’ as her story. Her response to question 2 showed the stability of her thinking. She told us that clue 2 was helpful because ‘it said about how many Saxons he killed which was the same and about him having the same name’. ‘He’ was clearly Arthur, the focus for her story. There is some persuasive evidence here that students chose the story first and then scrutinized the clues to find specific information to support that choice. This post hoc justification was apparent in both the way students subsequently explained their choice of helpful clues and the reasons given for rejecting others. Gary, year 7, explained that clue 2 helped because ‘it was the only one that corresponds with Story A’ and Martin, year 6, rejected clue 6, ‘because it has nothing about King Arthur in it’. Other students in this category, more notably the younger ones, suggested a match between the story and a clue but gave little indication of the specifics of the match, explaining only that the story ‘goes with’ or ‘matches’ a clue. Subsequent questions however, suggested that these were content matches. Thomas, year 9, initially chose Story A ‘because it matched up to the clue I read’ and in response to question 2 identified clue 2 as helpful, ‘because it used some of the words that the story used’. His response to question 3 was consistent with this matching approach and clue 3 was rejected ‘because it didn’t say much and most of the information wasn’t what I used’. For students like Thomas information was dismissed because it had little to do with the focus of their attention. There was also a hint in Thomas’s case (given the information-rich nature of clue 3) that the phrase ‘didn’t say much’ was a criticism of the clue’s inability to say what he wanted it to, rather than the lack of information in the clue. Although these students used a testing strategy, it seems to have begun with them finding a point of reference in a story as a secure point from which to explore the material—a reasonable strategy for coping with the quantity of material available. Conflict or repetition in the material introduced complications the students may have been unable or unwilling to deal with. Collecting and Counting Information A common characteristic of responses placed in this third main category was the students’ ability (or willingness) to use a wider range of sources and to arbitrate between the stories on the basis of this range. However, in coming to conclusions about the information available in the sources, there was nothing to indicate that information about the sources had been given any consideration. In the context of this treatment of the sources, two very different ideas appeared to be at work. One idea, prevalent in the year 6 responses of this category, but also present in many of the year 7 and in some of the year 9 responses, was the value students placed on the amount of information available in the sources. In contrast, the idea that where sources made common claims what they said was


likely to be true was more common among year 7 and 9 responses than those of year 6. In the first of these ideas clues were distinguished only by the amount of information they could provide, or whether they provided further information not given in other clues. Sophie, year 9, rejected Story B because it ‘did not say how many people he killed at Badon Hill, or anything about his armour’. Clue 1 was valued ‘because it said that both sides won some of the battles and clue 3, because it tells about the armour’. Clue 5 had limitations because although it ‘tells me that the battle took place’ it did not tell me ‘who won or lost’. Clue 6 was given the same treatment: ‘it tells me what a soldier might have looked like but not what Arthur was wearing’. Sophie’s ability, like many students in this category, to arbitrate between all the stories and take account of all the clues was impressive, but all these moves treated the information as a given. However, her selection of information was not just arbitrary; some sense of relevance was at work. This approach was not so much a test of validity but an explanation of where the information in the chosen story came from. For other students in this category there was an assumption that information was more likely to be secure if it was repeated in more than one place. Sources were treated as though they were independently produced, but no questions were raised about who produced them, why or when. A story was chosen for its consistency with information provided by more than one source. The fact that ‘two clues said the same thing’ or that ‘all the clues agreed’ was important. Phillip, year 7, chose Story C simply ‘because clue 2 and 3 both say the leader was called Arthur’ and although Adam, year 9, used the word ‘agree’ in his response, the idea was the same. He claimed ‘clue 2 and 3 were helpful, because they agreed about the name of the king, approximately how many people he killed and where the fight was at Mount Badon’. Although responses here picked out specific information in the way that responses in the matching category did, the validation came from the match between sources in relation to the story, rather than a direct match between a source and a story. Many of the students worked with ideas about quantity and verification of information in tandem, so decoupling such ideas is not always easy. For example, Stephanie, year 9, chose Story C and claimed that ‘clue 2, 3 and 5 are particularly helpful because they all agree with each other, and tell you the most information’. Clue 6 was then rejected because ‘it only shows a soldier and not much else’. The collecting and counting responses (and in some cases the matching responses) showed students willing to ignore conflicts between the sources. Robert, year 6, claimed ‘there are two clues, clue 2 and clue 3 saying that Arthur killed 960 men’. However, other responses provided evidence of students’ attempts to accommodate these conflicts. While Robert was happy to ignore the number discrepancy in making his claim, Adam, year 9, was able to deal with this particular conflict in his choice of language, arguing that ‘clue 2 and clue 3


were helpful, because they agreed about the name of the king, approximately how many people he killed and where the fight was’ [author’s emphasis]. A further age-related shift in this category was apparent in the use of the word ‘agreement’ which was mainly used by year 9 students and by only one year 6 student. However, it is difficult to be sure how this word was being used. For some students it stood in for ‘two clues say the same’, but for others it could indicate more complex ideas about consistency, coherence or consensus. Questioning A number of students went beyond the face-value acceptance of the sources and recognized that the circumstances of their production should be taken into account in their deliberations. A higher proportion of year 9 than year 7 students, and a smaller proportion of year 6 than year 7 students took this approach. There are distinctions in this fourth main category, however, in the way in which the sources are called into question and in the validity of students’ conclusions. Some students questioned the author’s intentions, the tone of their claims or their position to know. James, year 7, was keen to place value on clue 1 ‘because this is a man of God who wouldn’t lie and his parents would have told him on his birthday’. Emily, year 9, checked the credibility of clue 1 for both its tone and the circumstances of its production, showing how the author of this source would have been made aware of the battle at Mount Badon as a child. She chose Story B because ‘it doesn’t say anywhere that he won all of his battles, and the monk who was born around that time (clue 1) said that both sides won battles’. She argued that ‘the monk was born at the time, and although it would have been a few years before he could understand what happened he would still be around when the original story was being told’. George, year 6, also chose Story B on the basis of clue 1, but unlike Emily, his response provided no mechanism for knowing, beyond being ‘around when it happened’. His rejection of clue 2 and the paintings because they were ‘done a long time after’ was consistent with this thinking. Katherine, year 7, recognized that the problem with the paintings was not just a question of them being ‘drawn a long time afterwards’ but also that they were ‘pictures in the imagination’. Some students, in questioning the status of the clues, made complex disconfirmatory moves, giving weight to the evidence available from the archaeological find in clue 6 to challenge the ‘heavy armour’ claim in Story C and in sources 3, 4 and 5. In his initial response Craig, year 9, gave status to clue 1 on the basis of the author’s proximity to the event, in claiming that Story B ‘fits best with clue 1, the story that was written by someone who lived in the era’, and added ‘because of this it is more likely to be correct’. He explained that clue 6 was particularly helpful as it enabled him ‘to eliminate clue 3 and so also Story C because this mentions him wearing heavy armour which was not used at the time’. Laurence, from year 9, declared that ‘the clues I have seen best fit Story B as being the most accurate of the three stories’ justifying this by


explaining that ‘clue 1 is the more primary source of the three accounts and because clue 6 discounts Story C by having no picture of Mary on the armour and the armour being not too heavy and based on primary finds’. Clues 4 and 5 were not helpful to Laurence, because ‘they are not primary sources and do not contain any primary evidence, so they are probably not very reliable’. In these examples the students’ reasoning in support of a clue was consistent with their reasons for rejecting clues. The clues were either reliable or unreliable authorities on the events picked out. A few students however, did take things further recognizing the further claim being made in Story B. These students pointed out that it was not necessary to reject clues 2 and 3, or 4 and 5, as they actually provided evidence for the last part of Story B’s claim, that ‘He became a hero’. William, year 9, rejected Stories A and C because ‘both of them seem exaggerated’ and explained that clue 1 ‘was written by a British monk who lived at the time this happened’, claiming ‘he is obviously not biased in any way as he is not putting down either the Britons or the Saxons’. He acknowledged the evidence value of later clues, explaining that ‘all the other clues were still useful, even if they were biased, because they show that he was a hero, as they all show him killing or winning fights or tell the tale of how great he was’. Tony, also in year 9, in a similar vein, reported that clue 2 ‘seconds the fact that he became a hero, by telling us that he won all his battles’. There is an important conceptual difference here between those students who, when interrogating the circumstances surrounding the production of a source, conclude that it has no value, and those students who, working with a concept of evidence, recognize that this context does not prevent its use as evidence, but only what it may count as evidence for This kind of understanding may well be difficult for many students to apply in the context of the task. The skill level needed to handle three stories in relation to six clues may explain the propensity for students in this and other categories to isolate singular statements in both the story and the clues, rather than consider a story as a whole and the clues as a set. Concept development is likely to be hindered by information overload and has to be a consideration if progress in students’ conceptual development is to take place. Stability and Shifts in Understandings between Question 1 and Question 2 Question 2, in asking students whether any of the clues were particularly helpful to them in making their choice, was designed to act as a check on students’ understanding and to provide further opportunity for students to consider the clues. Figure 2.3 shows the percentage of students who, in response to this question, remained in the same category they were assigned to in question 1. From this it is clear that the stability of students’ responses appears to be greater the younger the students are. For example, the year 6 students classified as Collecting and counting in response to the first question all remained in this


FIGURE 2.3: STABILITY: PERCENTAGE OF STUDENTS REMAINING IN THE SAME CATEGORY BETWEEN QUESTION 1 AND QUESTION 2 (NOTE: PERCENTAGES ARE OF STUDENTS IN EACH CATEGORY IN QUESTION 1, NOT OF EACH YEAR COHORT.)

category when their responses to question 2 were analysed. Fewer year 7 students remained stable in this category between question 1 and question 2, and even fewer in year 9. The shift that year 7 and year 9 students, classified under Collecting and counting, made was to Questioning. In order to provide a picture of the shifts that did take place between question 1 and question 2, the percentages in Figure 2.4 offer some insight. From this set of graphs it is possible to see that the shift is greater the older the students are, and the older the students are, the more likely that shift will leap across more than one of the categories. For example, the main shift that takes place among year 6 students is between Story focus and Matching, although there was some movement by a few year 6 students from Story focus into Collecting and counting, and into Questioning. Year 9 students on the other hand were almost twice as likely to shift from Story focus to Collecting and counting or Questioning than they were to move from Story focus to Matching. (Interestingly, responses that moved from Story focus into Collecting and counting were likely to be those from the sub-category Volume and Detail and those that moved to Questioning to be from the sub-category Imprecision.) Year 9 students were more likely than year 7 students to raise questions about the status of the clues in response to question 2, regardless of which category their initial response was in. Question 3 asked students to consider clues that may not have been helpful. In most cases responses to this question were consistent with their responses to question 2. However, this question played an important part in prompting some students into making the point that all the clues were useful as they provided evidence of ‘a hero’. There are two main points worth making about the stability and shifts in students’ understanding explored here. First, there may be some sense in talking of ‘dynamic triangulation’. It is clearly possible to use different questions to disturb students’ ideas, but there are grounds to suppose that ideas are relatively stable, even when they are disturbed. This can be seen particularly in the way the movement between categories takes place between question 1 and question 2.


FIGURE 2.4: CATEGORY SHIFTS BETWEEN QUESTION 1 AND QUESTION 2, YEARS 6, 7 AND 9 (NOTE: COLUMNS ABOVE ‘QUESTION 2’ IN THIS SET OF GRAPHS SUM THE PERCENTAGE OF STUDENTS WHO REMAIN STABLE IN A PARTICULAR CATEGORY, OR SHIFT TO THIS CATEGORY, IN RESPONSE TO QUESTION 2. PERCENTAGES IN EACH GRAPH ARE OF THE WHOLE YEAR COHORT.)

Second, the statistics showing the percentage movement across categories demonstrate that when student thinking does change (at least with this particular task), it does so in patterned and not random ways. What is also apparent, from a close examination of these figures, is that the movement in thinking between questions is greater and at higher levels among older students as opposed to younger ones.3 Conclusion This very detailed, high-resolution study confirms the propensity of many students to treat sources as information. Even where students operate with a sophisticated


concept of a test and make important disconfirmatory moves, their treatment of the sources as information leads them into coming to invalid conclusions. Where students do challenge the information provided by the sources by appeal to provenance (treating sources as testimony) they still face difficulties in validating claims. This study highlights the importance of the conceptual leap from understanding sources as testimony to working with a concept of evidence where sources are given recognition of their value as evidence for specific kinds of claims. It also shows that teaching needs to pay attention to the nature of historical claims alongside the work students undertake with sources. If students are to develop a concept of evidence they need to understand the evidential relationship between a source and the claim it is testing or supporting. The study also revealed the complexities of concept development in the context of specific skill demands, reminding us that understanding of the more generic psychological issues about cognitive development raised by Brunerian and Piagetian work (for example, ‘going beyond the information given’ and centration) remain important aspects of teachers’ professional knowledge. Finally, although there is no space here to enlarge upon these conclusions, the questions raised by the research about degrees of stability in students’ ideas may suggest implications for progression and its links with Vgotskian notions of a ‘zone of proximal development’. NOTES 1. How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience and School Bransford, J.D.Brown, A.L. and Cocking, R.R. (eds), (expanded edition) (Washington, DC: National Academy Press, 2000), pp. 14–16, 19; Donovan, M.S.Bransford, J.D. and Pellegrino, J.W. (eds), How People Learn: Bridging Research and Practice (Washington, DC: National Academy Press, 1999), pp. 10–12. 2. Project CHATA was designed to explore students’ ideas about evidence, accounts, cause and rational understanding. For an interim comment on ideas about evidence, see Lee, P.J., Ashby, R. and Dickinson, A.K., ‘Progression in Children’s Ideas about History’) in M.Hughes (ed.), Progression in Learning (Clevedon: Multilingual Matters), pp. 50–81. 3. Talk about shifts in this chapter may seem to beg the question whether students’ ideas change in the face of new questions or whether these questions reveal ideas that were already there. There is not space in this chapter to argue for either of these positions and nothing that is argued here would be compromised by a decision in favour of either position. However, the series of questions following question 2 suggests there is some movement in children’s ideas under questioning. This is perhaps unsurprising given that students do not normally have to think these matters through. Interview data from other phases of CHATA also suggest that real shifts occur.


APPENDIX 1 The claims Story A

About the year 500 there lived a very brave king of the Britons called Arthur. He fought the Saxons and won all his battles. In his twelfth battle at Mount Badon he killed 960 Saxons himself. Story B

About the year 500 a leader of the Britons fought the Saxon invaders and defeated them several times. One of his battles was at Badon Hill. He became a hero. Story C

About the year 500 there lived a King called Arthur and his knights fought a big battle at Mount Badon. Arthur wore heavy armour with a picture of Mary, mother of Jesus, on it. This helped to make him very brave when he rode into battle. At the battle he killed many Saxons. The historical sources Source 1. Written in 540 by a British Monk called Gildas

Some Britons were murdered by the Saxons, some were made slaves. Some fought back under a leader called Ambrosius. Sometimes the Britons won the battles and sometimes the Saxons won. There was a big battle at Badon Hill. I know about this because I was born in the year it happened. Source 2. Written in 800 by a Welsh Monk called Nennius

The war leader was called Arthur. His twelfth battle was on Mount Badon. At the battle Arthur killed 960 Saxons on his own. He won all the battles he fought. Source 3. Written in 1125 by a Monk called William

At the battle of Mount Badon, Arthur killed 900 Saxons all on his own. He had a picture of Mary, mother of Jesus, on his armour. Source 4. A painting done in 1400 showing King Arthur killing Mordred Source 5. A picture of King Arthur and his knights fighting the Saxons, drawn about 1400 Source 6. A drawing of a soldier of the 400s and 500s (based on finds dug up by archaeologists)

[The three colour pictures are omitted here for reasons of space.]

3 Digging for Clues: An Archaeological Exploration of Historical Cognition LINDA S.LEVSTIK, A.GWYNN HENDERSON AND JENNIFER S.SCHLARB

In the late 1980s in the United States, concern for the protection of cultural resources spurred archaeologists to attend to K-12 archaeology education.1 The overriding purpose of archaeology education focused on three areas: convincing archaeologists and educators of the importance of teaching archaeology, developing resource guides, curricula and lessons for use in the classroom and presenting testimonials as to the effectiveness of these materials and programmes. Student learning was not really assessed and to date, few efforts in the United States have investigated the impact of archaeological study on children’s historical thinking.2 Although we sympathize with the desire to preserve and protect evidence of the material past, this goal alone cannot justify the inclusion of archaeology in already-crowded school curricula. Archaeology education can, however, be justified on more substantial and educationally sound grounds: its analytical emphasis on the deep past, on collective rather than individual behaviour and on understanding behaviour as including both people and objects acting on each other in particular socio-cultural and historical contexts.3 To the extent that students incorporate these understandings into their thinking, we argue that they are more likely to value common as well as individual good; collective as well as individual behaviour. Further, they are more likely to recognize the ways in which culture shapes and is shaped by human/object interaction. And, finally, broader, deeper understandings of human variety and change over time should better prepare citizens to understand and respect the perspectives of their fellow citizens, inclining them towards negotiation rather than confrontation. As Gaddis suggests: You can hardly do without history as a discipline, because it’s the means by which a culture sees beyond the limits of its own senses. It’s the basis across time, space, and scale, for a wider view. A collective historical consciousness, therefore, may be as much a prerequisite for a healthy wellrounded society as is the proper ecological balance for a healthy forest and a healthy plant.4 By extending the potential for collective consciousness further into the past, archaeology expands students’ opportunities to learn from past experience, to

DIGGING FOR CLUES 35

become ‘prepared to respect the past while holding it accountable… less given to uprooting than retrofitting…[valuing] a moral sense over moral insensibility’.5 While neither historical nor archaeological study inevitably or exclusively produces such outcomes, we consider it worthwhile to investigate the ways in which archaeology contributes to students’ historical thinking and, ultimately, to their preparation for citizenship. To this end, we investigated a group of fifthgrade students’ archaeological background knowledge, and the impact of schooland field-based archaeological experiences on their conceptions of archaeological questions, processes and interpretations, and their perceptions of the purposes underlying archaeological studies of the past. Our study involved a collaborative effort among a team of three archaeologists, a history education researcher, three research assistants and a classroom teacher. For five months, 74 fifth-grade students (aged 10–11) at Sylvan Elementary School studied archaeology in a unit combining lessons from Intrigue of the Past, lessons developed by the teacher and class visits from archaeologists who led students in artefact analysis activities and showed them tools and slides of archaeological fieldwork in preparation for their visits to the historic archaeological site and the museum.6 Sylvan fifth graders are urban/suburban elementary public schoolchildren experiencing an in-depth introduction to archaeology for the first time. Of the 78 students in the fifth grade, we collected data on 74–38 males and 36 females—at three sites: Sylvan Elementary School, a historic archaeological site and an anthropology museum. Sylvan houses 607 students from kindergarten to fifth grade in a middle-class neighbourhood in a mid-size city in the Upper South. School records identify 77.3 per cent of the students as ‘White’, 15 per cent ‘Black’, 0.5 per cent ‘Hispanic’, 1 per cent ‘Asian and Pacific Islander’ and 6.3 per cent ‘Other’. Of this population, 32 per cent are enrolled for free or reduced lunches and 19 per cent for extended day services.7 The Henry Clay Estate, Ashland, served as the historic archaeological location. Archaeological research at Ashland began in 1990 with the goal of collecting information about the lifeways of the plantation’s former inhabitants.8 Education of school-age children is a formal component of archaeological work at Ashland. In Spring 2002, when the students in our study visited the site, excavation focused on remnants of possible slave quarters. Students worked under the guidance of archaeologists at several of the excavation units using trowels to uncover artefacts, screening soil for artefacts and placing findings in labelled bags. In addition, they washed artefacts and toured the restored/reconstructed nineteenth-century home on the grounds of the estate. The third site, the nearby university’s small anthropology museum, offered exhibits of prehistoric and historic inhabitants of the region.


Method In order to make sense of students’ constructions of archaeology in the context of this multi-site study, we used an observation and interview-based design, collecting data during and shortly after students took part in the unit on archaeology. All class sessions and fieldwork were audio- and videotaped; interviews (three to four students per group) were audiotaped. We first analysed data by identifying a set of thematic strands in transcripts of participants’ responses in interviews and discussions, and subjected the transcripts to a systematic content analysis, categorizing responses/ discussions according to those strands. Coding included a systematic search across data sources for negative or discrepant evidence. We then analysed the coded data, using crosscase analysis (in which we group answers responding to the same items or topics in the tasks and interview) and constant comparison (in which we compare students’ responses across data sources). This resulted in a set of descriptive generalizations regarding students’ prior knowledge and their conceptions and misconceptions regarding archaeology and the relationships among archaeology, history and understanding the past. In the discussion that follows we focus on students’ background knowledge, as well as their definitions of archaeology, the work of archaeologists, the purposes of archaeology, the evidential nature of artefacts, the creation of evidence-based archaeological interpretations and the significance of context. Finally, we discuss some of the implications of these findings for supporting students’ engagement with historical study in pluralist democracies. A Meagre Supply of Background Knowledge Students at Sylvan Elementary report no prior experience with the formal study of archaeology. What several of the male students do report is an early interest in digging—in suburban gardens, amongst the buried remains of construction work, and in sandboxes. Jim captures some of the boys’ fascination: ‘I like to dig’ he begins. ‘I don’t know if I would have called it archaeology before this year… when I would dig I would think either someone buried something really deep or it was really old.’ When the interviewer asks Jim exactly where he digs, Jim explains: ‘I dig in like my friend’s backyard and my backyard and well, at my old house there’s this one place where they’d dug up the yard and it was just like sand and there were tons of rocks and we weren’t sure if these were bones and we thought they were bones and we could break them really easy, so we weren’t sure.’ These boys do not, however, separate archaeology from other forms of ‘digging’, for rocks, mammoth bones or fossils, for instance. Both boys and girls report watching television shows about archaeology, largely about ‘Old World’ civilizations—Egypt, Greece and Rome—or early hominid discoveries. Although their out-of-school experiences are relatively few, it is worth noting that they incline students to view the field with interest and considerable enthusiasm.


Defining Archaeology Because students regularly review definitions of terms introduced in the unit we analysed patterns and variations in their definitions across data sources, probing for explanations of and elaborations on the definitions they recited with such fidelity. References to study, the past, culture and humans/people occurred most often as elements in students’ definitions. Nonetheless, considerable variation appears, especially in the final interviews. All but one of the 20 interview groups started out responding to the question ‘What is archaeology?’ with some version of ‘studying the past’. At their most basic, these definitions recognize archaeology’ s link to studies of the past, but do not distinguish archaeology from other ways of studying the past, emphasize the role of material objects or assign purpose to archaeological work: Callie: [Archaeology is] the study about the past. Alyssa: Of people who lived before us. Doug: It’s the study of past life. Merrit: I think it’s the study of the history of the past. The way people used to live. In all but two groups, students gradually built more elaborate definitions. In their first elaborations students refer to culture as a defining attribute of archaeology: ‘Archaeology is the study of the past and past culture’, one student suggests. While culture is certainly a feature of archaeological investigation, students provide very vague descriptions of this concept: ‘The way people used to live’, for instance. In three groups, students elaborate by explaining that culture refers to how people in the past ‘got their food, their different traditions, their legends, religion’ and ‘how they did things, what they did, how they made things, how they lived, basically’. Another student in a fourth group provides an interesting— and unique among study participants—commentary on culture as ‘how [people] adapted’. In three other groups, some variation of ‘how they did things’ appears in response to questions about what culture means. Overall, students use the term as analogous to lifestyle. Interestingly, though, they do not connect material objects very directly to culture, only occasionally referencing ‘how they made things’, focusing instead on folkways—legends, foods and the like. All but three groups also include artefact analysis in their definition of archaeology. As Cleo explains, archaeologists search out artefacts and ‘figure out how old they are and how people from the past…make [them]’. Students could rarely, however, identify what resources might have been used in the production of particular artefacts. Indeed, students are generally uninformed about the make-up of common items: glass, nails or textiles, for instance. As a result, they often struggle to understand the connections among artefacts, the technologies necessary for their production and the kinds of cultures that these artefacts imply.


Overall, student definitions rarely attend to such distinctive features of archaeology as materiality or context, or to the connections between these features and evidence-based interpretations. Their understanding of culture emphasizes the customs, foods and costumes approach found in many schools. Even for adults, of course, culture is a slippery term, so it should come as no surprise that 10- and 11-year-olds struggle with it. Rather, what is important here is that telling students that archaeology involves studying past cultures tells them very little. If they understand culture in non-material ways, and archaeology focuses on material objects, students cannot but be confused about how archaeology connects to culture. Students’ definitions also suggest that they struggle to fit archaeology into a familiar narrative of progress over time, although with an interesting twist. The dominant narrative in the US depicts history as a march of progress: over time the world improves, challenges are met and overcome and Americans can expect to continue to solve problems and improve their lives. Studies in the US find that students attribute past beliefs, goals, values and choices, whether in regard to race, gender or fashion, to ignorance.9 According to the students in our study, however, people in the past may have more to offer than object lessons in bad judgement. Instead, the past might inform the present—by finding cures for diseases or learning how to be more peaceful—in order to generate further progress. Students’ willingness to consider that the past might have something to teach—aside from avoiding mistakes—suggests potential for richer and deeper historical and cultural studies than currently existent in many US schools. Asking students, not only what archaeology is but also what archaeologists do, provides further evidence of student thinking in this regard, especially as that thinking relates to the processes and purposes of archaeological work. Tools and Tasks: Processes for Solving Archaeological Puzzles Across the activities in the archaeology unit, instruction focused on the work of archaeologists. At one point, for instance, an archaeologist brought to class some of the ‘tools of the trade’—trowels, measuring tapes and the like. Later, at the excavation site, students saw these tools in use and used some themselves. At another point, archaeologists in the classroom introduced various tools for establishing context, including grids and stratigraphy. Again, students saw grids in use at the excavation site and, in at least one excavation unit, used a grid. Archaeologists at each unit also pointed out stratigraphy—generally less clear on site than in the diagrams used in class activities. Students also engaged in some interpretative tasks and visited the anthropology museum to see other interpretative displays based on anthropological and archaeological data. These activities did not, however, all link one with the next. While classwork used historic artefacts related to the same time period as Ashland and students recovered historic artefacts during their fieldwork at Ashland, all but one


museum display focused on interpretations of prehistoric objects related to indigenous people. As a result, students were exposed to archaeological processes in the context of an historic site and archaeological interpretations in two different contexts: historic artefact analysis during a classroom activity and prehistoric artefact analysis in the anthropology museum.10 They never saw welldeveloped interpretations about Ashland that were direct outgrowths of the processes they observed. Not surprisingly, they struggled with some of the connections between processes and interpretations, and, when asked what archaeologists do, focused more on processes—tools and tasks, active investigation, solving puzzles—than on interpretation or reporting results. When questioned about archaeologists’ work, students first mention tools used and tasks performed in fieldwork. Initially, they simply list tasks— sometimes in rather disjointed and non-specific ways—that they observed archaeologists do or engaged in themselves: Liz: They dig up dirt. First they get some mud strained and have little mounds, and squares, and they shovel, and dig, and you have a little brush, and you want to dab and you have a little table, and put dirt in, dirt goes out and artefacts stay in. Over the course of the study, too, students distinguish between the active work of archaeologists and ‘just thinking, just making inferences about’ the past—the processes they describe as characteristic of historians. In these cases, they describe archaeologists operating as do forensic scientists. In four interview groups, for instance, students refer to piecing together the past—literally, as when Fred explains that archaeologists ‘look for missing pieces, and the pieces that they find, they have to put together’, and more metaphorically as when Millie says that the whole process is ‘like a puzzle’. ‘You can take a piece of something’, she explains. ‘It’s like missing the piece of the puzzle that you’re putting together.’ Archaeologists, students explain, search out artefacts—the puzzle pieces—in order to tell ‘the whole story’ of the past. The end product of archaeological work, then, is a story. Finally, students recognize archaeologists’ reporting function. As Bailey explains, archaeologists are supposed to make their work known to the public: ‘They write a report—that’s recording.’ Overall, though, students provide only intermittent evidence that they understand the nature or function of those reports, or that they understand that the reports relate to the ‘story’ archaeologists are supposed to be putting together. Learning from the Past: The Place of Purpose in Archaeology Because the archaeology-education literature makes a number of claims regarding the purposes of archaeology in the classroom, and because what educators intend may differ markedly from what students comprehend, we asked students to consider the purposes of archaeology. ‘Why’, we asked them, ‘do


people do archaeology?’ Overall, student responses parallel findings from studies of children’s and adolescents’ historical thinking: People study the past to connect themselves to ancestors, understand other people, prepare for further study, improve the present and satisfy personal interest.11 Most groups begin by explaining that ‘understanding the past’ and especially ‘our’ [United States] past constitutes the primary purpose of archaeology. Sam explains that people do archaeology ‘to find out about the past of America’. Casey and Tucker suggest that people study archaeology ‘so we can know more about our past’ and ‘learn about ancestors and stuff’. For the most part, students appear to refer to collective ancestry: all ‘Americans’ rather than a student’s particular genetic ancestry. However, when students respond in these ways, they rarely refer to the power of archaeology to bring to light the lifeways of ‘ordinary’ and often unnamed people. This was the case even though the curriculum to which they were exposed involved excavating the material culture of those who left few written records of their experiences—the enslaved people living on the Ashland Estate. Students also suggest that studying archaeology provides information on how differently people live over time and in other places. Trey, Cal and Rory, for instance, think it is important to know that many people ‘do things different from the way we do things’. Perhaps, too, people’s ‘ancestors did something and they might compare it to how we live today’, explains Lena, and Leah adds, ‘we want to know this because everybody has a different culture—how they did each thing, like how they made their food, how they made their friends’. After listening to his peers, Alex adds something familiar from other studies of historical thinking: People learn about the past ‘so they can teach kids, so we can grow up and go to college’. When pushed to explain why knowing about the past might be worthwhile, students most often respond by claiming that learning about the past helps us avoid repeating past mistakes. Some of these ‘mistakes’ are quite specific—‘putting poison in our food’, ‘stumbling into dangerous places’ and ‘going back to the seventies’. Other students suggest that archaeologists might find that ancient people knew cures helpful to people in the present. In addition, if archaeologists found that people were more peaceful in past times, Judy wonders if we ‘maybe can do what they did’. And, again, students argue that studying the past shows progress over time: ‘better graphics in video games’, ‘some of the clothes’, ‘things that would make our lives easier’. In two groups, students return to the forensic analogy, arguing that archaeology assists in discovering causes of death. ‘If I were to die’, Millie explains, ‘my mom would know who I was and how I died.’ Among this array of utilitarian reasons for studying the past, only Martin suggests that not knowing about the past might leave people ‘believ[ing] things that aren’t true’. ‘It could wreck history’, he declares. Several students also agree that people do archaeology because ‘it’s just interesting’. While this response appeared in only four groups when the interview question related specifically to archaeological purpose, across all the data


sources, the majority of students report that they find their own experiences with archaeology intrinsically interesting. They enjoy finding other people’s material culture, enjoy the element of mystery or puzzlement, revel in sorting and washing artefacts and enthusiastically engage in speculating about the lifeways of past people. And, while they can generate a variety of purposes that might motivate others—particularly adults—to engage in archaeological study, the fascination of discovering pieces of the past is the purpose that they find most personally motivating. How Artefacts Tell Us about the Past The initial lesson plan in Project Archaeology’s Intrigue of the Past defines three terms: archaeological site, archaeology and artefact. After explaining that an archaeological site is ‘a place where human activity occurred and material remains were left’, and archaeology is ‘a method for studying past human cultures and analysing material evidence (artefacts and sites)’, the lesson plan defines an artefact as ‘any object made or used by humans’. The lesson plan then calls for students to bring ‘an object (artefact) or photograph from home that tells about their own or their family’s past’.12 At first glance, this seems a fairly straightforward introduction to archaeology. The lesson appears to emphasize the investigative nature of archaeology while introducing students to the concept of material remains as evidence of past human activity. In addition, this first lesson links students’ personal or familial material world to archaeological reconstructions of the past. History educators, among others, have long advocated just this kind of engagement with personal history.13 As the data from this study suggests, however, this lesson also may inadvertently support misconceptions and confusions about the nature of artefacts and evidence-based archaeological interpretation. When asked to explain what artefacts have to do with understanding the past, students make sense of artefacts as story elements, as evidence, as clues in a mystery and as embedded in a context. Artefacts as elements in story construction

Students most commonly describe artefacts as elements in a single ‘whole story’. Rafe, for instance, not only explains that each artefact ‘gives new meaning’ to the stories told by other artefacts, but claims that an individual artefact also ‘tells one story’. Millie adds that ‘the story’ of the past is composed of multiple artefacts found in context. She suggests that once artefacts are taken out of context ‘you can’t really tell the story because you don’t know the location, so you can’t really tell if they go together’. This conception of the relationship between artefacts and story sometimes appears as a puzzle metaphor. Students explain that artefacts are ‘pieces of a puzzle’ that can be put together to tell ‘the story of the past’. Cleo describes this process quite clearly: ‘If they found something and it was in all little pieces you could try to put those


pieces together’ and then, she says, you might know ‘how it relates to the past’. As they use the story metaphor, students discuss the partial and ambiguous nature of archaeological stories. They describe how careful observation of artefacts— the puzzle pieces—leads to better inferences and a more complete— but singular—story. Students understand that removing artefacts from a site can ‘mess up the story’ a site might tell—one student says it would be the same as tearing pages out of a book—but they struggle to explain context as it relates to archaeology. For some, context is the array of artefacts that allows archaeologists to discover the ‘real story’ rather than simply make ‘educated guesses’. Others describe some version of a classmate’s analogy: ‘Artefacts are like the characters in a story. The context is like the plot, so without the plot, you don’t have a story.’ Artefacts as evidence in solving mysteries

At no point did students use the word evidence in relation to artefacts. The Intrigue of the Past materials to which they were introduced make only occasional references to artefacts as evidence.14 There are lessons that imply that artefacts are evidence, but no instructional chain explicitly addresses what artefacts are evidence of. Despite this lack of curricular attention, some students do connect artefacts to emerging conceptions of evidence, though they never use the word evidence. The forensic references mentioned earlier, for instance, indicate that at least some students understand that artefacts might become evidence under certain circumstances. Students’ language does reflect an understanding of archaeology as detection and speculation. Qualifying words appear regularly in their descriptions: maybe, sort of, I guess, we don’t know, somehow, could have been and the like. The following conversation about a bone implement captures the students’ communal inference-making and the tentativeness of their conclusions: Rory: It looks like it was a little kid’s blowgun, or something like that. Jackson: Animal. Rory: Or it could be an animal. Hedda: The bone of an animal that was one day a spear or something because it’s sharp so they could get the animals. Rory: They probably used it so often that it dulled down. This type of speculation appears in each of the interview groups and was a regular feature of class- and fieldwork. In the following exchange, students interpret a set of artefacts, offer alternative possibilities and call background knowledge into play as they speculate, first about a projectile point, and then about an accompanying set of artefacts: Mitchell: I say spear. Joshua: ‘Cause if you look at an arrow, what’s usually its size? This one’s big. Harley: Yeah, yeah. You wouldn’t want to carry that around.


Mitchell: They could have eaten fish. They could have speared the fish. Soon, the group moves on to a small mortar. Mitchell: They must have eaten wheat and corn to make it into cornmeal and stuff like that; they’d have to grind it. Interviewer (Circling the indentation in the mortar with her finger): Now this is a very little space here. Harley: I know! Joshua: That was exactly what I was thinking! … Harley: So maybe wheat? Mitchell: No. Harley: Like maybe crack nuts and that? Joshua: Small plants. Mitchell: Maybe it’ s a nutcracker! Joshua: So how would archaeologists know? Mitchell: It must have been a hard life. Joshua: No, because. Harley: Because we’re lazy! Mitchell: Exactly! We can go to a store. Harley: We just chow down. Mitchell: It would be hard. Harley: It would be awesome. As the conversation continues, students consider how easily evidence might be overlooked or inadvertently removed from a site, and Joshua raises an even more important question regarding the nature of artefacts: Joshua: I have a question. How can you tell if some of this stuff is artefacts? You really have to have some background ‘cause if I was like digging and I saw this, well, I might keep it because it was a pretty rock and I wouldn’t think it was like an axe. Historical Thinking in Archaeological Context Student responses to this experience with archaeology indicate that archaeological study can contribute to many of the goals of both archaeology and history educators. At least in the context of this study, students do understand archaeology as an activity motivated by questions about how people lived in the past. They understand that the material remains of the past help answer archaeological questions, that those remains are partial and that, given more artefacts in less disturbed sites, archaeologists can construct more complete accounts of past cultures. This view of archaeology as an open-ended, ongoing inquiry represents a sharp contrast with their descriptions of history—a subject they perceive as largely a completed, non-negotiable narrative. And, while


students do not always make clear connections between material remains and the cultures that produce them, or describe behaviour as a function of human/ material interaction, they do recognize that careful observation of artefacts leads to better inferences and a more complete ‘story’. A word of caution is in order here. Because of its materiality, archaeology would appear to offer students concrete opportunities to create multiple, evidence-based interpretations. We find little evidence, however, that the students in our study understand that an archaeological story represents one among several possible, plausible, evidence-based interpretations. Rather, they see artefacts as elements in a single, whole story. Moreover, when asked to explain what ‘story’ a group of artefacts might tell, students tend to create interpretations that rely more heavily on familiar narrative structures— problem, climax, resolution—than archaeological evidence, often abandoning evidence in favour of maintaining a story line. This pattern also appears in other studies of historical thinking. We suspect that equating ‘story’ with interpretation contributes to this problem, but evidence from this and other studies also suggests that building evidence-based interpretations requires more than a change in metaphor. Rather, interpretation requires considerable scaffolding. While existing research is more suggestive than definitive in this regard, it is clear that students as young as fifth grade recognize multiple perspectives and the possibility that multiple interpretations might result from these perspectives.15 In the curriculum to which these students were exposed, however, little attention focuses on multiple, evidence-based interpretations or ‘stories’. Indeed, in an early lesson in Intrigue of the Past the authors explain that ‘[a]rchaeologists use observation and inference to learn the story of past people’ (emphasis added). In a later lesson in which students excavate wastebaskets, the authors explain that the artefacts in the wastebaskets represent only ‘a small piece of our culture’. There is nothing, however, to suggest that these artefacts might support various interpretations of ‘our’ culture. There is little or no attention to the provisional or perspectival nature of artefactual interpretation. Rather, artefacts are presented as having some inherent meaning—a singular meaning that can be read correctly by knowledgeable archaeologists. Students are encouraged to imagine artefacts as ‘messengers from the past’.16 There is poetic appeal to this approach; unfortunately, its unintended consequence is to support misconceptions about the nature of archaeological and historical interpretations. Similarly, while piecing together a puzzle captures some features of archaeological work—archaeologists do piece artefacts together—this metaphor works best at the artefact rather than larger interpretative levels. An array of sherds may end up as an identifiable pot that is, at a very literal level, complete. The same cannot be said of any assignment of meaning to the pot. At best, archaeologists develop multiple evidence-based interpretations of the past and spend years arguing over which constitute the best explanations—stories, perhaps, but not a story. To the degree that students conceive of artefacts as elements in a story, pieces of a puzzle or points of forensic evidence, they tend to


conclude that a single explanation is theoretically, if not practically, possible. Moreover, they really do not connect the completed stories, puzzles or mysteries very closely to their other ideas about culture. These results are not surprising. First, the curriculum to which they were exposed did not focus on how tools shape behaviour, on the technologies that produce particular tools or on multiple interpretations. Second, during their study of archaeology, students had opportunities to talk to archaeologists about their work and to participate in some of that work themselves, but they did not engage in the full range of archaeological activity, especially in regard to interpretation. This is not to say that the activities in which they engaged could not accomplish some of these goals, only that these activities illuminate some aspects of archaeology while obscuring others. Why do Archaeology in Schools? The answer to ‘why do archaeology in schools?’ is not a simple one. Recently, archaeologists, like historians, have begun to more explicitly consider the purposes of archaeology, its values and the benefits it provides, and to debate its goals.17 As a result, practitioners in the field are beginning to recognize that archaeology provides benefits not only for archaeologists but for the many participants and publics who use it. To the extent that archaeology’s primary social contribution is seen as the production and dissemination of new information about the past based on the systematic study of the archaeological record, archaeology education’s purpose becomes one of engaging students in ‘exploring the history of humanity, and appreciating the value of our collective experiences over the millennia’.18 While we agree that these are worthy goals, they miss a connection we want to make between valuing collective experience and intelligent participation in a pluralist democracy. R.A.Wertime comes closest to our conception of purpose when he suggests that ‘by virtue of its mission—recovering the past and articulating it to the present—[archaeology] embodies the concept of the common good. Archaeology is a mirror held up, not to nature but to humanity. To excavate the past is to polish that mirror, that we may better see ourselves and know more clearly who we are’.19 We would add two caveats to Wertime’s statement. The first is the concern we have expressed throughout our discussion regarding making clear the tentative nature of ‘recovering the past’. The second concern focuses on pronouns and perspectives. It seems to us that in polishing Wertime’s metaphorical mirror, we would be best served to see—and help our students to see—not just ourselves, but others, and know more clearly who they are and were. To the extent that archaeology education does this, archaeological inquiry can provide insights important not only to understanding human experience, but to deliberations about the common good. To accomplish this, students need a variety of carefully planned experiences. These include attention not only to archaeological processes (deposition,


disturbances and the like), and the processes of archaeologists (scientific method, excavation, analysis, interpretations), but to a humanistic study of the past in all its diversity and time depth, emphasizing: • The longevity of human experience; • That over this long span of time, humans developed and continue to develop complex systems of beliefs, goals, values and behaviour; • That these cultural patterns are not inevitable, but change over time; • That because material culture shapes and is shaped by human activity and agency, material remains—artefacts—illuminate human behaviour; • That archaeological interpretations provide evidence-based, tentative and perspectival descriptions of human/material interactions over time that can help us consider our own interactions with the material world, as well as what cultural patterns and practices we might want to keep, alter or discard. Given this kind of focus, archaeology would be contextualized as crucial to understanding the full scope of human experience, providing material evidence of human agency, as well as of the materiality of human behaviour, within the widest possible array of topics, issues and problems. It would be conceived of as linked, not only to the disciplinary study of history and the social sciences, but to the preparation of citizens better able to live and work in a pluralist democracy and more willing to act for the common good in an interdependent world. NOTES 1. Friedman, E., ‘Preface’, in K.Smardz and S.J.Smith (eds), The Archaeology Education Handbook: Sharing the Past with Kids (Walnut Creek, California: Altamira Press, 2000), pp. 13–26; Little, B.J., ‘Archaeology as a Shared Vision’, in B.J.Little (ed.), Public Benefits of Archaeology (Gainesville, Florida: University Press of Florida, 2002), pp. 4–19. 2. For further discussion of the development of archaeology education, see Higgins, P.J. and Holm, K.A., ‘Archaeology and Precollege Education: A Literature Review’, Practicing Anthropology, 86, 3–4 (1986), pp. 24–28; For discussion of the goals of archaeology education, see McManamon, F.P., ‘The Many Publics for Archaeology’, American Antiquity, 56, 1 (1991), pp. 121–130: and Jeppson, P.L. and Brauer, G., ‘“Hey, Did You Hear About the Teacher Who Took the Class Out to Dig a Site”: Some Common Misconceptions about Archaeology in the Schools’, in L.Derry and M.Malloy (eds), Archaeologists and Local Communities: Partners in Exploring the Past (Washington, DC: Society for American Archaeology, 2003), pp. 77–96. 3. See Trigger, B.G., A History of Archaeological Thought (Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989); LaMotta, V.M. and Schiffer, B.M., ‘Behavioural Archaeology: Toward a New Synthesis’, in I.Hodder (ed.), Archaeological Theory Today (Cambridge, England: Polity Press, 2001), pp. 14– 64; Schiffer, M.B., Behavioural Archaeology (New York: Academic Press, 1976);


4. 5. 6.

7.

8.

9.

10. 11.

Schiffer, M.B., Formation Processes of the Archaeological Record (Albuquerque, New Mexico: University of New Mexico Press, 1st edition, 1987); Hodder, I., The Archaeology of Contextual Meanings (Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987); Hodder I. Interpreting Archaeology: Finding Meaning in the Past (London, New York: Routledge, 1997). Gaddis, J.L., The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 129. Ibid. Smith, S.J., Moe, J.M., Letts, K.A. and Paterson, D.M., Intrigue of the Past: A Teacher’s Activity Guide for Fourth Through Seventh Grades (Washington, DC: US Department of the Interior, Bureau of Land Management, 1996). Demographic data was provided by administrative personnel at the school and school district. All children participated in the instructional aspects of the archaeology unit; four students did not have permission to participate in the study. An additional twelve students’ audiotaped interviews could not be used because of technical difficulties. These students are, however, represented in audio- and videotapes of other study-related activities. Extended Day Services are provided for students whose performance falls below grade-level expectations. Services include tutoring, homework assistance and academic and/or health evaluations. The archaeologists worked for the Kentucky Archaeological Survey, an organization jointly sponsored by the Kentucky Heritage Council and the Department of Anthropology at the University of Kentucky. The Survey’s mission is to provide a service to other state agencies, to work with private landowners to protect archaeological sites and to educate the public about Kentucky’s archaeological heritage. Information on on-going investigations can be found in W.S.McBride, ‘Archaeology of Henry Clay’s Ashland Estate: Investigations of the Mansion, Yard, and Privy’, Archaeological Report 281. Program for Cultural Resource Assessment (Lexington, Kentucky: University of Kentucky, 1993); McBride, W.S. and McBride, K.A., ‘Preliminary Archaeological Investigations at Ashland, 15FA206, Lexington, Kentucky’, Archaeological Report 245 (Lexington, Kentucky: University of Kentucky, 1991); McBride, W.S. and Esarey, M., ‘The Archaeology of the Ashland Privy, Lexington, Kentucky’, in K.A.McBride, W.S.McBride and D.Pollack (eds), Historical Archaeology in Kentucky (Frankfort, Kentucky: Kentucky Heritage Council, 1995), pp. 265–295; and O’Malley, N., Linebaugh, D.W., Duwan, J.W. and Clay, R.B., ‘“A Brilliant and Pleasant Light”: Nineteenth-Century Gas Lighting at Ashland, Lexington, Fayette County, Kentucky’, Technical Report 413 (Lexington, Kentucky: Program for Archaeological Research, Department of Anthropology, University of Kentucky, 1999). See Barton, K.C., ‘Narrative Simplifications in Elementary Students’ Historical Thinking’, in J.Brophy (ed.), Advances in Research on Teaching, Vol. 6: Teaching and Learning History (Greenwich: JAI Press, 1996); and VanSledright, B.A., In Search of America’s Past: Learning to Read History in Elementary School Classrooms (New York: Teachers College Press, 2002). While the museum included some historic exhibits, student activity centred on prehistoric artefacts and exhibits. See Levstik, L.S. and Barton, K.C., Doing History: Investigating with Children in Elementary and Middle Schools (Mahwah, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2001);


12. 13.

14. 15.

16. 17.

18. 19.

Seixas, P., ‘Historical Understanding among Adolescents in a Multicultural Setting’, Curriculum Inquiry, 23 (1993), pp. 301–327; Seixas, P., ‘Students’ Understanding of Historical Significance’, Theory and Research in Social Education 22 (1994), pp. 281–304; VanSledright, B.A., ‘And Santayana Lives On: Students’ Views on the Purposes for Studying American History’, Journal of Curriculum Studies, 29 (1997), pp. 529–557; VanSledright, B.A., ‘“I Don’t Remember—The Ideas Are All Jumbled in My Head”: 8th Graders Reconstructions of Colonial American History’, Journal of Curriculum and Supervision 10 (1996), pp. 317–345. Smith, S.J., et al., Intrigue of the Past, 1996, p. 9. See, for instance, Tunnell, M.O. and Ammons, R., The Story of Ourselves: Teaching History Through Children’s Literature (Portsmouth, New Hampshire: Heinemann, 1993). Smith, S.J., et al, Intrigue of the Past, 1996, p. 9. The challenges of engaging fifth graders in historical interpretations are vividly clear in B.A.VanSledright, In Search of America’s Past (New York: Teachers College Press, 2002); and Levstik, L.S. and Smith, D.B., ‘“I’ve Never Done This Before”: Building a Community of Historical Inquiry in a Third-Grade Classroom’, in J.Brophy (ed.), Advances in Research on Teaching, Vol. 6: Teaching and Learning History (Greenwich, Connecticut: JAI Press, 1996), Vol. 6, pp. 85–114. Smith, S.J., et al., Intrigue of the Past, 1996, p. 9. See LaMotta, V.M. and Schiffer, B.M., 2002, p. 41; Little, B.J., 2002; Smardz, K. and Smith, S.J., 2000; Derry, L. and Malloy, M. (eds), Archaeologists and Local Communities: Partners in Exploring the Past (Washington, DC: Society for American Archaeology, 2003). Smardz, K. and Smith, S.J., 2000, p. 376. Wertime, R.A., ‘The Boom in Volunteer Archaeology’, Archaeology, 48, 1 (1995), pp. 66–69, 71–73.

4 Taiwanese Students’ Understanding of Differences in History Textbook Accounts YI-MEI HSIAO

Introduction Over the last three decades there has been a strong debate and substantial changes concerning the major paradigms in history teaching, particularly in the UK, where, as a result of several new perspectives and concepts, history teaching is now seen in a different manner. The essential feature of the new paradigm is a strong concern with students’ understandings about the discipline of history. Researchers are now aware that students have implicit ideas about the nature of history and that it is crucial to be familiar with these conceptions.1 Hand in hand with this, there is a growing acceptance that students should be acquainted with important second-order concepts, in order to set the basis for understanding history. There has been a rich vein of research into many aspects of second-order concepts in history, but recently there has been an increased interest in investigation related to historical accounts.2 The influential work undertaken as part of Project CHATA (Concepts of History and Teaching Approaches) focusing on children’s ideas of historical accounts suggests a model of progression in students’ ideas on this issue.3 Although research in this area has recently accelerated, students’ tacit concepts of historical accounts in textbooks have not been explored. Textbooks are not the only medium used in history classes but play, nevertheless, a fundamental role, and the effect of this ‘official’ account on children’s ideas should not be neglected. In some countries, such as Taiwan, there was until recently only one standard historical textbook.4 Although teachers can use extra material in classes, the government regulates textbook publication and its content has to be memorized by students. Under these circumstances, it would be interesting to know how students see historical accounts in textbooks. Understanding students’ views on historical accounts in textbooks is fundamental if we want to develop students’ historical thinking. Furthermore, one could argue that, for teachers, the most important benefit from this extra insight will be a more effective use of textbooks in classes.


Understanding that this is an important and yet little-explored field, this chapter presents and discusses the results of a small-scale study that examines 13–15-year-old Taiwanese students’ concepts about the historical accounts presented in textbooks they are presently using. Additionally, it analyses students’ reactions to different accounts of the same event given in other countries’ textbooks. Three different aspects of the problem are explored: students’ confidence in and attitudes to historical accounts in textbooks; students’ reactions and explanations when facing different accounts of the same event in history from different textbooks and whether students are able to choose between accounts according to their credibility, and the criteria they use in making those decisions. Methodology Task design

I chose to use a questionnaire employing open-ended questions in order to obtain students’ initial ideas and then, according to their responses, to probe deeper in follow-up interviews with approximately 10 per cent of the sample. This reduces as much as possible eventual inaccuracies in the analysis of responses and allows the examination of a larger sample than would be possible with interviews alone. The data presented was collected in a public junior high school in a predominantly middle-class suburb of Taipei. The size of the school, the numbers of pupils in each class and the ability of pupils are similar to other areas in Taipei. Although the data was only collected in one school, the character of this sample school is quite similar to typical junior high schools in Taiwan. Therefore, though it will not allow generalization to other junior high Taiwanese students, I believe we can use the results of this small-scale study as a basis for further investigation in subsequent work when the opportunity arises. I selected one class from each grade and access was negotiated informally. A total of 94 pupils participated in the written task: 33 pupils of age 13, 33 pupils of age 14 and 28 pupils of age 15. Responses to the written task were examined to look for different patterns of ideas. Some individuals producing clear or creative answers, or appearing to exemplify different groups of ideas, were selected for deeper probing. Time restrictions prevented me from interviewing all 94 pupils. Three pupils of each age group were selected for the subsequent interview. I tried to ensure a gender balance for the nine interviewees by choosing five male and four female students. Procedure

The written task was divided into two parts. Part I

TAIWANESE STUDENTS’ UNDERSTANDING 51

The first part of the task was intended to explore pupils’ ideas on the subject of historical accounts presented in the textbooks that they were currently using. There were no reference sources for this part of the study, mostly because its aim was not to focus on any particular events but on children’s general ideas about these accounts. Part II

The second part of the study posed questions about the children’s ideas on historical accounts regarding the same historical event from different countries’ textbooks. Considering similar textbook usage and access to resources, I decided to use Taiwanese, Chinese and Singaporean history textbooks. (See Appendix A, p. 66.) The goal in selecting the focus issue was to find an event that is mentioned in all these three textbooks with not too diametrically opposed points of view and minimal differences in the information presented. This was done in order to reduce the possibilities of pupils jumping to the conclusion that a given account is simply not true. The procedure of selecting an example was not an easy task because, in each textbook, the same matter was presented in a different manner and given different significance. For example, an issue taken as important in one textbook would be regarded as not so significant—and sometimes only mentioned in one sentence—in another textbook. In order to avoid these problems as far as possible, the outbreak of the war between China and Japan (1937) was selected as a case study for the task. The texts were copied directly from the textbooks and were not adapted to a similar length since I preferred to present the actual text, not considering at this point the hypothesis that the length or detail of the text would have any major effect on the result. The origin of these texts was not mentioned in the written task in order to avoid children’s possible prejudice. The text from the Chinese textbook is more extensive and detailed, while the text from the Singaporean textbook is illustrated with a picture. Year 9 students (age 15) were already acquainted with the Taiwanese account because it is included in the textbook they are presently using and they had already studied this lesson. This was done intentionally in order to see how far familiarity would affect their views on the textbook accounts. A trial was performed two days before the formal written task. Three 13-yearold pupils were chosen arbitrarily for the trial. After that, I decided to rephrase some questions in order to make them clearer and changed the order of the procedures. In the first part of the formal written task, each pupil was given one sheet of white paper. They were asked to answer one question without sources in ten minutes: ‘Do you believe the historical accounts presented in the textbooks that you are using? Explain your reasons.’ Following this, in the second part, each pupil was given two answer sheets and three reference sources. All of the three texts are about the outbreak of the war between China and Japan. They were asked to read these three texts and answer four questions on the answer sheets in 40 minutes. The order of this procedure is


crucial: the two parts of this task should be done separately and not assigned simultaneously. Otherwise, children could get the wrong idea and answer the first part according to the reference material presented in the second part. I designed a semi-structured interview schedule after reading the responses given on the second written task. I decided that the origins of these three texts would be mentioned in the beginning of the interview in order to see if it would affect students’ reactions. Some of the questions would be similar to the ones in the written task. Two days later, I conducted interviews individually with the nine pupils. Each interview took approximately 20–30 minutes, and was recorded to be transcribed later. Data analysis

The data was interpreted through a process of inductive coding. I decided to code the responses to the interview on a question-by-question basis in order to get initial systematic ideas of pupils’ thinking on each question. In each case I summarized each response and categorized them using an inductive category set (see next section). The categories were examined again to make sure every response was properly considered individually. A few categories were combined because of their similar characteristics. When it seemed reasonable, an answer would be categorized in more than one group. Since one answer could be categorized in more than one group, the total number of answers in the different categories will be more than the number of students participating in the study. Inevitably, there were some methodological issues to be addressed. For instance, the coding and classification for qualitative data analysis is somewhat problematical, for being interpretative. Another question is that the selection of students for the interview was not performed in a random manner. Running the risk of introducing some type of bias, I chose students that would be representative of all the categories I had detected in the written task. Results Students’ views on textbook accounts

The question in the first part of the task enquired into students’ confidence in the historical accounts presented in school textbooks. The responses to this question were grouped into six categories (and one for non-responders), according to the attitude towards these accounts. A. Accept as true, because historical accounts in textbooks should be true. B. Accept as true, since there are similar descriptions from other sources. C. Accept as true, because photographs support the accounts. D. Sceptical, due to lack of direct evidence. E. Sceptical, because it is more credible to hear from those people who have experienced the events.


FIGURE 4.1: DISTRIBUTION OF RESPONSES (N=108)

F. Sceptical, because historical accounts in textbooks are selective. G. No answer. Most students trust historical accounts in textbooks and do not appear ever to have questioned them (Table 4.1, Figures 4.1 and 4.2). However, most students hesitated when asked if they actually believe accounts in textbooks. Some of them told me that they have never thought about this matter and that the idea of challenging authority (in the form of a history textbook) makes them feel uncomfortable. Some students would even feel betrayed and deceived if accounts of textbooks were not true. As one student said: The accounts in textbooks are expected to be true because our government is supposed to teach students the right stories. If the stories in our textbooks are not true, why do we have to memorize them and be tested several times? Older students in the sample have more tendency than younger students to question the accounts in textbooks. Some of them recognize that the TABLE 4.1: NUMBERS OF RESPONSES IN EACH CATEGORY BY YEAR GROUP (STUDENTS HAVE RESPONSES IN MORE THAN ONE CATEGORY) Response Category

Year 7

Year 8

Year 9

Total

A B C Trust (total) D E F Sceptical (total) G (no response) Total

15 8 1 24 1 2 3 6 5 35

14 6 4 24 1 1 5 7 5 36

9 4 6 19 3 3 11 17 1 37

38 18 11 67 5 6 19 30 11 108


FIGURE 4.2: ATTITUDE TOWARDS THE ACCOUNTS, GROUPED BY YEAR (N=97, EXCLUDES ‘NO RESPONSE’)

accounts in textbooks are selected and interpretative. However, these students explain in different ways the reasons behind the authors’ points of view and selectiveness. This could mean that, although the Taiwanese educational system may have a repressive effect on independent thinking, some students are still able to develop some historical thinking and understand some fundamental aspects of history as a discipline. Explaining different accounts

Question three (of part II) enquires about students’ views when facing different accounts of the same event in different national textbooks. Not surprisingly, most students regard this as a normal phenomenon, easily explained by national pride or author bias. However, some of the students are rather disturbed by this situation. They regard history as merely a set of fixed facts, and different accounts would imply different ‘facts’. This would be, to a certain extent, uncomfortable because the students would like to know the ‘real facts’. The students mentioned various reasons explaining the differences in the accounts. The reasons could be grouped into four categories: A. Author perspective: different authors’ opinions and biases, and the way the information is selected. B. Inadequate knowledge: different methods, access to data and quality or quantity of information. C. Writing style: different styles and ways of transmitting the information. D. Unidentified. (This includes those who were unable to give an explanation.) These results suggest that students have a rudimentary understanding of the processes behind the historical accounts, even if they cannot totally grasp the nature of the accounts (Table 4.2, Figures 4.3 and 4.4). Apart from giving different explanations it appears that when students face different accounts from different textbooks, there are two main attitudes. Some students will regard this situation as perfectly normal and somehow related to basic human nature. They think that people and states


FIGURE 4.3: GLOBAL DISTRIBUTION OF STUDENTS (N=91)

FIGURE 4.4: DISTRIBUTION OF RESPONSES BY YEAR (NUMBERS OF STUDENTS) (N (YEAR 7)=32, N (YEAR 8)=32, N (YEAR 9)=27)

TABLE 4.2: DISTRIBUTION OF STUDENTS Group

Year 7

Year 8

Year 9

Total

A B C D Total

12 6 4 10 32

16 10 2 4 32

18 4 1 4 27

46 20 7 18 91 (N=91)

will see things from their own position and defend their points of view. In contrast, some other students feel uncomfortable and even angry and think that this should be corrected. They see history as a set of facts and one ‘fact’ can only have one logical value: true or false. If there are different accounts, someone must have told a lie. Deciding between accounts

Most students (80 per cent) were able to decide between the three accounts (Table 4.3 and Figure 4.5). The criteria students used to justify why a certain account is more believable than the others may be grouped into four major categories, plus one category for students that presented no justification.


FIGURE 4.5: GLOBAL DISTRIBUTION OF RESPONSES (N=72, EXCLUDES RESPONSES OF THOSE WHO WERE UNABLE TO DECIDE)

A. Specificity: the account offers more detailed and clearer information. B. Deliberation: the account is more careful and judicious. C. Familiarity: the account has been heard or read before. D. Evidence: evidence is presented with the account. E. No justification. Table 4.4 presents the students’ choices regarding each account. Some of the students chose two accounts, so the totals will be slightly different from the previous table. TABLE 4.3: DISTRIBUTION OF RESPONSES ACCORDING TO CATEGORY AND YEAR (N=72, EXCLUDES THOSE WHO WERE UNABLE TO DECIDE) Category

Year 7

Year 8

Year 9

Total

A B C D E Able to decide

4 3 8 0 8 23

16 1 7 0 2 26

7 3 7 3 3 23

27 7 22 3 13 72

TABLE 4.4: STUDENTS’ PREFERRED ACCOUNTS (N=72, EXCLUDES RESPONSES OF THOSE WHO WERE UNABLE TO DECIDE)

A1 (Singapore) A2 (China) A3 (Taiwan) Total

Year 7

Year 8

Year 9

Total

6 9 8 23

3 15 8 26

4 7 12 23

13 31 28 72


Discussion and Conclusion The results provide some valuable information on Taiwanese students’ views and ideas about textbooks. The following may be considered the most important findings for most students: • Students have an authoritative view of textbooks. • Students rarely mention the use of evidence when evaluating historical accounts. • Students have, at least, some basic notions regarding the procedures behind historical accounts. The results present some clues on how we might use these findings in history classes. These are the most relevant implications for practical teaching. Understand the role of textbooks

Textbooks are one of the most important tools in a classroom and, like any tool, can be used in a helpful or in a negative manner. First of all, we have to be aware that students’ ideas are indeed affected by the use of textbooks. Next, as teachers we are not powerless when facing standard textbooks. We can still encourage students’ enquiry rather than reinforce the idea that history is merely a set of facts to be learned and memorized. A standard history textbook is used in junior high school in Taiwan and most teachers use it as the only material in history classes. Clearly, as the results show, students have implicit ideas on the nature of textbook accounts and most have an authoritative image of textbooks. How can we change students’ preconceptions about historical accounts in textbooks, and increase their discernment and critical view of history? If students uncritically trust their textbooks, this could be a major obstacle to practical history teaching and the role of the teacher becomes almost meaningless. If they passively accept the accounts offered by their textbooks, students will not understand history as a discipline and will not develop historical thinking. Present different accounts

The results show that most students see as natural the existence of multiple accounts of the same event in history. Nevertheless, some students cannot hide their discomfort when confronted with different versions of the same piece of history. On the other hand, are we able to guarantee that pupils can develop historical thinking if they are given different accounts? The answer might be negative because there is a clear danger that when pupils face different accounts, they will feel helpless. They do not know how to judge and select from different and even disparate accounts, and they may jump to the conclusion that it is worthless to learn history because those are only historians’ opinions. It is dangerous that we teachers only give pupils these different accounts but do not explain how these accounts are formed and their nature. Pupils may be led to


think that only one account is right and that the others are wrong. Or pupils may think that because historians are from different areas, they stand in different positions and these accounts are just their personal opinions. Some students will assume that the fact that they heard a similar account from other sources will increase the reliability of a given account. It is the task of the teacher to explain that this assumption, although not totally groundless, is based on a simple fallacy. In the information age and with the emergence of the Internet, it becomes hard for students to distinguish between adequate information and background noise. Obviously, we should strongly encourage students to look for other sources of information (including the Internet), for this promotes critical enquiry. However, we should explain to them in a simple and clear manner that, instead of merely counting how many times we come across an account, we should check the origin of this information and, most of all, verify if the account is supported by evidence. Promote the use of evidence

Some students doubt the historical accounts because the authors did not experience the events—they did not witness history. This attitude may be changed by the recognition that people in the past may have left some evidence like written documents, architectural traces, clothes, etc. Historians can access the past using evidence, even without eyewitnesses. Obviously, we should also make the students aware that we can only partially understand the past; that many old documents will have strongly biased or fantasized accounts; that some explanations are stronger than others and that there are many historical events that are really unknowable. We should also make clear that we cannot grasp events in history in their totality, their causes and consequences. Undoubtedly, it is not an easy task helping students to develop more powerful ideas in making sense of history. However, I believe that this is essential to make students understand that history is much more than a sequence of facts to be memorized and to make students feel more confident and motivated when studying history. The most important aspect we have to be concerned with is the conceptual basis of our task as history teachers. Before anything else, we should fully apprehend the basic nature of our job. What are we really trying to accomplish? The awareness of our goals and the perception of what we want to achieve is at the heart of our mission as history teachers. Comparison with the CHATA Project This study did not try to build a model of progression in students’ ideas about accounts due to the size of the sample. However, there are some commonalities between the response of Taiwanese students in my study and the results of CHATA. From the responses to the written task, we notice that some of the


students regard history as copies of a fixed past. Another group of students will also attribute the reasons for different accounts to different access to information. Finally, a few students recognize that history is not a copy of the past, and that the accounts are influenced by the authors’ position and selectiveness. However, I was not able to detect any students that reached the highest level of progression referred to in Project CHATA. This could be related to the small sample size and the fact that I used standard textbook accounts. NOTES 1. This does not just apply to history, of course. For a discussion of what is supported by the evidence of thirty years of research, see Bransford, J.D., Brown, A L. and Cocking, R.R. (eds), How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience and School (Washington, DC: National Academy Press, 1999). 2. Chapman, A., Accounting for Interpretations/Interpreting Accounts (London: Institute of Education, unpublished EdD Institution Focused Study, 2001); Liu, C.C. and Lin, T.S., Children’s Ideas about Historical Narrative: Understanding Historical Accounts (Taiwan: Soochow University, unpublished initial report, 2002); Mckeown, M.G. and Beck, I.L., ‘Making Sense of Accounts of History: Why Young Students Don’t and How They Might’, in G.Leinhardt, I.L.Beck and C.Stainton (eds), Teaching and Learning in History (Hillsdale: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1994); Seixas, P., ‘Popular Film and Young People’s Understanding of the History of Native-White Relations’, The History Teacher, 26, 3 (1993), pp. 351–370; Wineburg, S., The Cognitive Representation of Historical Texts’, in G.Leinhardt, I.L.Beck and C.Stainton (eds), Teaching and Learning History (New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1994). 3. Lee, P.J., ‘“None of Us Was There”: Children’s Ideas about Why Historical Accounts Differ’, in S.Ahonen, P.Arola, C.Karlegärd, A.Køhlert, S.Lorentzen and V.O.Nielson (eds), Historiedidaktik, Norden 6, Nordisk Konferens om Historiedidaktik, Tampere 1996 (Copenhagen: Danmarks Laererhøjskole, 1997), pp. 23–58; Lee, P.J., ‘Children’s Ideas About the Nature and Status of Historical Accounts’, in Y.Chan and L.Chou (eds), Proceedings of the International Conference on Methodologies: Historical Consciousness and History-Textbook Research (Hsin Chu, Taiwan: Institute of History, National Tsing Hua University, 1998); Lee, P.J., ‘History in an Information Culture’, International Journal of Historical Learning, Teaching and Research, 1, 2 (1998); Lee, P.J. and Ashby, R., ‘Progression in Historical Understanding among Students Ages 7–14’, in P.N.Stearns, P.Seixas and S.Wineburg (eds), Knowing, Teaching, and Learning History (New York: New York University Press, 2000), pp. 199–222; Lee, P.J., Dickinson, A. and Ashby, R., ‘Researching Children’s Ideas about History’, in J.F.Voss and M.Carretero (eds), International Review of History Education, Vol. 2: Learning and Reasoning in History (London: Portland: Woburn Press, 1998), pp. 227–251. 4. This policy was abolished after September 2002. Now schools can choose between four or five different textbooks written according to national curriculum guidelines.


APPENDIX A Written Task QUESTIONNAIRE First part

1. Do you believe the historical accounts presented in the textbooks that you are using? Explain your reasons. Second part (Please answer these questions after reading the references below.)

1. What are the differences among these three historical accounts? (Except for the length.) 2. What do you think when you see different accounts of the same event in different national textbooks? 3. Is it possible that all these three accounts are true? Please justify. 4. Can you choose the account you believe the most? If you can, please explain your reasons. If you cannot, please explain your reasons. Account 1 (from the Singaporean textbook)

The years after 1937 were ones of great suffering for many of the people in China. Scenes such as those in the photograph on the next page were common wherever fighting took place between the Chinese and the Japanese forces, which were trying to take over China. Within a year of the outbreak of full-scale war between China and Japan in 1937, 60 million Chinese people had been driven from their homes. Countless numbers were also wounded and killed. The scene in the photograph took place in Shanghai. The Japanese attacked this city in 1937 in the early stages of the war. There was fierce resistance by the Chinese to this assault on one of their main cities. However, after months of struggle, Shanghai finally fell to the Japanese. The Japanese army then pushed westwards and southwards, capturing other important cities such as Nanjing and Guangzhou. Japanese armies behaved with great brutality, for example in the attack on Nanjing in which civilians, including women and children were beaten and killed. Account 2 (from the Chinese textbook)

The second day after the Marco Polo Bridge Incident, the Chinese Communist Party appealed to the whole country to increase the resistance against the invading Japanese army and urged the Nationalist Party to work closely so as to create a mighty force to evict the invader. A few days later, in Lushang, Chiang Kai-Shek also made the same appeal to fight the Japanese. On 13 August, in order to force surrender from the National Government, the Japanese army invaded Shanghai and threatened Nanjing. This incident was known as ‘the 813 event’. On the second day, the National Government insisted


on sovereignty and vowed to fight the invasion. After this event, an agreement between the two parties led to the transfer of the north-western division of the ‘farmer-worker-red army’ to the ‘eighth unit of the National Revolutionary army’. Zhu De and Peng De-Huai were appointed the chief and assistant leaders respectively. After that, the red army from the southern eighth provinces were regrouped as the new 4th unit of the National Revolutionary army with Ye Ting and Xiang Ying as the chief and assistant captain respectively. In September, the National Party announced the cooperation with the Communist Party. From then on, the joint effort of the two parties to fight the Japanese was officially established. After the Japanese capture of Beijing and Tianjin, the ambitious Japanese army decided to invade both the northern and eastern parts of China with the intention of conquering China within three months. The Nationalist Government established pockets of local resistance against the invaders. In order to counter-attack the Japanese invasion of Shanghai, the two armies engaged in intense fighting for three months in Shanghai and its surrounding areas. This was known as ‘the Shanghai battle’. In November 1937, Shanghai fell and the battle ended. During the fight, the Japanese army marched into Shanxi with the aim of capturing Taiyuan. The Nationalist government organized the Taiyuan resistance battle. Zhu De and Peng De-Huai ordered Lin Biao to lead Unit 115 in a successful ambush of the Japanese at the Pingxing Gate. This was the first success for the Chinese army. The Nationalist army fighting the Japanese army at Shanxi faced a tough battle. Not long after that, Taiyuan fell to the Japanese. In December 1937, the Japanese army captured Nanjing. As a result, the Nationalist Government changed their headquarters to Chongqing. In Nanjing, the Japanese carried out a great atrocity, killing over 300,000 people. Account 3 (From the Taiwanese textbook)

When the war first broke out, northern China was attacked by the superior forces and weapons of the Japanese army. At the end of July 1937, the teachers and students in Tianjing and Beijing finished ‘the last class’. On 13 August, the Japanese army started the war in Shanghai. The Chinese army resisted for more than three months, ending the Japanese dreams of capturing Shanghai within one week and of conquering China within three months. The emotive story of ‘eight hundred heroes’ of Shihung warehouse illuminated the Chinese army’s strong resistance. In the middle of December, the defeated Chinese army withdrew from Nanjing. The Japanese army entered the city and exposed their viciousness by massacring over 300,000 Chinese. The violations by the Japanese army included the following: the Nanjing massacre, the use of Chinese from the North-eastern parts by Division 731 of the Japanese army as biochemical experiments, and the exploitation of Korean and Taiwanese women as ‘comfort women’.

5 ‘Till New Facts are Discovered’: Students’ Ideas about Objectivity in History ISABEL BARCA

People tacitly assume some notion about objectivity in history even when they are not challenged to think about this issue. At a commonsense level one may remain at the surface of such assumptions, either taking a dogmatic attitude (asserting that the most convenient historical explanation will be the only truth) or resting on an easy-going position (stating that explanations are just a matter of personal opinion). These thoughts presupposing an explanatory element in historical accounts led to questioning as to what views historically literate adolescents actually take about the idea of objectivity in historical explanation.1 This question provoked the following problem explored in this study: • To what extent do adolescent students operate with notions about objectivity in historical explanation? • What meanings do they assign to it? Following the line of research conducted in the UK by Dickinson and Lee, Shemilt, and Lee and Ashby, it is assumed here that (a) children and adolescents employ tacit second-order ideas of history and (b) these ideas can be traced from less-coherent to more-sophisticated patterns, in a model of progression.2 Ideas about Objectivity in History Assumptions about the objectivity or the relativity of historical explanation are not single-track conceptions. The intense theoretical debate currently in progress has provided diverse arguments for stressing either the objectivity or the relativity of historical productions. Taking the first position, Dray has argued that there are specific methodological standards intersubjectively shared by historians and Martin has analysed some of these standards, namely the criteria of explanatory consistency.3 Assumptions of a critical realism underlie this position. Dray has argued that historical explanation is always tied to a valuejudgement and it is still objective because it is a partial reconstruction of a real past. It is partial in the sense that it explains part of the reality from a specific standpoint, and this is a genuine feature in history not a methodological weakness. Martin has defended the possibility of a better explanation since

STUDENTS’ IDEAS ABOUT OBJECTIVITY IN HISTORY 63

FIGURE 5.1: APPROACHES TO OBJECTIVITY IN HISTORY Perspectiveless Neutrality+Realism→ Positivism Perspectiveless Neutrality+Sceptcism→ Subjectivism Perspectiveless Neutrality+Sceptcism→ Relativism Perspectiveless Neutrality+Realism→ Objectivism

competing interpretations have become more accurate, more comprehensive, better balanced and better justified.4 This has encouraged some convergence and consensus although consensus in history does not mean the hegemony of, or universal agreement on just one theory: some interpretative divergences have helped create a better understanding. From the opposite direction, Certeau has emphasized the role of the social constraints in the historian’s craft of explaining the past and Hayden White has especially discussed the subjective nature of historical production, the narrative.5 Within this trend, the subjective element of historical interpretation is stressed. Methodological criteria required for distinguishing between a better or worse explanation are put in shadow although they are not broadly denied. This underlying subjectivism assumes or subsumes an epistemic gap between reality and historical explanation, so that little space remains for discussing which methodological criteria history shall meet in order to produce more valid accounts of the past. Certeau has deconstructed the nature of the social context of production, its specific interests leading to certain highlights and omissions. White has stressed the contingency of historical representations looking at historical narratives as ‘verbal fictions’.6 Historical sequences can be employed in different ways and this is essentially a ‘fiction-making operation’: stories are constructed as ‘we do not live stories’.7 How does this controversy echo among students? Research carried out in the UK and now beginning to be developed in Portugal has provided evidence about some objectivist or relativist views of historical (explanatory) accounts.8 For some students history has little value since the past is gone forever and/or we were not there. The ideal of non-mediated knowledge provokes a sceptical view of history. Some other students conceive historical explanation as built upon a plain aggregation of facts. These ideas may reveal naïve approaches to the problem of objectivity (about history and about current society). But research has also shown more sophisticated ideas concerning the same issue: some students claim that different questions can be genuinely considered in history according to different frameworks and different audiences.9 These views open the possibility of considering different explanations, not only recognizing their different presuppositions but also assessing them by means of specific methodological standards. Entangled in students’ ideas referred to above are assumptions about access to truth and the criteria for a valid historical account. Assumptions about whether we


can know the past may run in two (parallel) strands, a realistic one if an epistemic bridge between history and the past is implied, and a sceptical one if an epistemic gap is stressed. Criteria for assessing better explanations may consider the nature of methodological detachment and related notions of perspectiveless or perspectiveful neutrality. Connections between ideas about methodological detachment and access to truth can lead to positivist-objectivist or subjectivistrelativist approaches as mapped in Figure 5.1. Notwithstanding the views mapped above, criteria for assessing better explanations may alternatively focus on the relative scope and power of actual explanations, weighing their consistency with evidence and logic (plausibility and completeness). The main conceptual clusters considered in this study, implying different approaches about objectivity, could be synthesized as follows: • Access to truth; • Methodological detachment; and • Explanatory consistency. Research Context and Method Data discussed here were collected in order to investigate adolescents’ ideas about the provisionality of historical explanation.10 This former study explored related notions of explanatory structure, evidential and logical consistency, and methodological detachment assuming a model of logical progression. A sample of 270 students ranging from 12 to 20-year-olds, attending the seventh to eleventh grades, provided data for a mainly qualitative analysis across several phases. In the final phase, 119 students attending the seventh, ninth and eleventh grades from classes randomly selected in two schools (urban and rural) responded to five written tasks (during a two-hour period) based on historical materials designed for purposes of answering a central question: ‘Why did the Portuguese manage to establish a maritime empire in the Indian Ocean during the sixteenth century?’. Four historical versions (see Appendix, p. 82) were selected and adapted: two recent versions (A and B) conveying different perspectives may be seen as competing historical explanations; another version (C) is a nationalistic explanation written in 1946; the last version (D) is a descriptive account. A set of historical sources (justifying mainly versions A and B) was also given to the students. The written tasks were followed by an interview conducted with 12 students to clarify or better justify the written answers. The model of grounded theory provided the analytical procedures for making sense of data in terms of students’ conceptions.11 Results suggested that, entangled in ideas of explanatory consistency and methodological detachment, trends towards objectivism or relativism could emerge. Seeking to bring to light those different views on objectivity in history, partial data from the final phase of the research were re-examined in more detail. The written responses and follow-up interviews analysed here were linked to the


FIGURE 5.2: VIEWS ABOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF A BETTER EXPLANATION (PERCENTAGE)

following questions about deciding whether one explanation can be better than any other. 1. Do you think that one of the explanations can be considered better than any other? Justify your answer. 2. Rank the four versions given. 3. In what respects do you consider the first better than the second in explaining why the Portuguese managed to control the Indian Ocean? 4. Justify your last two choices. Can One Historical Explanation be Considered Better than Any Other? Students suggested various patterns of ideas either within an objectivist or a relativist trend about historical knowledge. The question ‘Can one explanation be considered better than the others?’ required a categorical yes/no response followed by a justification. In a first reaction most of the youngsters responded affirmatively about the possibility of deciding for one explanation, while some others denied such a possibility and a few showed a somewhat undecided ‘not sure’, ‘maybe’, ‘don’t know’ response (conflated in a ‘not-sure’ category) or even did not respond at all (no-response category) as shown in Figure 5.2. The analysis of responses by age-group through the chi-square test revealed statistical differences at the 5 per cent level: students appeared more assertive (yes or no) across age, the older group (16–19) seeming the most confident in affirming the possibility of a better explanation.12 But the possibility of choosing a better explanation was accepted or rejected according to diverse reasons, some


FIGURE 5.3: ARGUMENTS FOR A BETTER EXPLANATION (PERCENTAGE)

of them bringing a moderator element into the first yes-or-no reaction. The reasons given by the students were coded into two sets of categories.13 Hence for some students an explanation can be better because ‘it is more concrete’ or ‘it conveys more data’, or it is better justified, but a few claimed that it must be considered only ‘within a given point of view’: • • • • • • •

One explanation is more concrete (Concrete); One explanation is more correct (Correct); One explanation has more data (Data); They would be better if added together (Sum); The most recent, skilled author is better (Recent); One explanation is more logical/more confirmed (Consistent); and One explanation can be better within each point of view (Point of view).

The reasons for a better explanation given by students were distributed as shown in Figure 5.3. The possibility of giving a better explanation was rejected for relativist reasons but also for a somehow objectivist idea since the sum of all the versions would be better: • • • • • •

Explanations are all the same thing (Same); We don’t know which one is true (Doubt); There is not enough data (No data); All explanations are important (All); They would be better if added together (Sum); and It depends on the point of view (Point of view).


FIGURE 5.4: ARGUMENTS AGAINST A BETTER EXPLANATION (PERCENTAGE)

Those reasons against a better explanation were distributed as shown in Figure 5.4. The justifications given by students for ‘theoretically’ deciding whether one explanation can be better than the others appear to indicate different levels of sophistication, and the same occurred with justifications for their actual choices about better- and worse-given explanations. However, if arguments given by students suggested different levels of ideas their practical choices converged towards the descriptive and longer version.14 The different levels of ideas related to notions of objectivity in history gave rise to a model of logical progression sustained by the criteria of explanatory consistency and methodological detachment. The discussion that follows offers some evidence of patterns running from an information-based mode (‘versions are all the same thing’) to a perspectiveful view (‘a provisional explanation’) with intermediate levels of ideas tied to a naïve realism or scepticism (‘a more correct version’), factorial aggregation (‘a more complete version’) or a positivist, sometimes impossible quest for consensus (‘a definitive explanation’). Each level suggested trends of either objectivism or relativism about historical knowledge. Versions are all the same thing

There is a single past and versions about it may vary in form, not in content. Bits of substantive information are the focus of attention and the distinction between specific meanings does not appear. Second-order reasoning, when it emerges, is mainly related to description.


Some students did not accept the idea of a better explanation since all of them ‘lead to the same’, as Cláudia argued. Cláudia did not accept the possibility of a better explanation because differences among historical versions are just different ways of telling the same thing: ‘No, all of them said different things but after all they all refer to the same thing.’ During the follow-up interview she insisted on that position: ‘Versions are the same but told…by other words… There are different writers and each one tells her/his own story about how they were told but everything leads to the same thing.’ Cláudia understood the versions as essentially conveying the same information. It seems that her answers are based on a naïve realistic assumption (there is one reality) but she might be taking a naïve sceptical view as well since she is not disposed to discriminate between better and worse descriptions. Contradicting this position in the ranking task she assigned a different value to the four versions given. When arguing for her ranking, Cláudia assessed the evidence for and the plausibility of the four versions in terms of their factual status rather than in terms of their explanatory consistency.15 Version D (is better). It says that the Portuguese were discovering the maritime route to India, by conquering…while in version A it was the Moslem challenge against the Portuguese. Versions B and C are worst because the Portuguese were somehow bad to the Moslems when these were good since they let the Portuguese settle there. Some other students while showing a descriptive thought and arguing for the same realistic assumption (versions only vary in form) opted for accepting that there can be a better version. Paulo (14 years old, grade 9) discussed the ‘explanations’ by quoting fragments of the information given (suggesting a descriptive mode) and when arguing that ‘each one has a way of explaining an event’ (he used the explanatory vocabulary given by the questions) he asserted several times that one is better explained. He justified this in terms of the ‘way’ of explaining, maybe referring to the formal clarity required for an understandable version: ‘Yes, one person can have a way of explaining better; he is more capable than another who explains worse.’ A more correct version

Versions (descriptions or explanations, as these concepts may not be distinct) are judged in terms of truth/falsity. The demarcation criterion is the proximity to the situation: we can know what we see. In one trend versions can be accurate if proved by testimonies, in another trend only witnesses can know the truth. Some students used the criterion of accuracy based on the realistic assumption that direct observation provides the proofs for an explanation (an overlapping of


description and explanation seems to be at work here). Hermínio (13 years old, grade 7) while defending the idea that ‘a witness gives a more truthful explanation because s/he saw’ also applied notions of factual proofs for a better historical explanation: ‘Yes, version D is better justified by records of those who navigated and who used to write about them. Some explanations fit better into that time.’ His arguments for version D showed a distinction between evidence and explanation, and the economic factor favoured in his various responses was discussed in terms of everyday plausibility: The Portuguese wouldn’t go fighting due to their great leaders’ morals only [version C], but also due to the spice route and trade.’ Although using the same criterion of direct observation, some other students assumed a subjective or a sceptical attitude towards historical knowledge, asserting as Sérgio and Lia (both 14 years old, grade 9) did: ‘No, all of them are mere speculations’ (Sérgio); ‘I don’t know, because I didn’t live at that time, I cannot explain or decide about anything’ (Lia).16 A more complete version

There are different facts, different ways of grasping them, and considering all this is required for knowing the total past. Adding together factors or versions is the criterion for a better explanation. Evidential consistency and plausibility are discussed as related to explanation. In a sceptical direction, different versions are explained as due to lack of data. Some students showed confidence in the growth of historical knowledge in terms of its completeness. Carla (13 years old, grade 7), for example, valued a more complete, logical explanation: ‘Yes, it can contain more information, being more complete or explaining the facts in a more clear and logical way.’ Carla used criteria of completeness in terms of evidence (as the sum of data) and logic. Coherently, she chose the longer, descriptive version converting information into explanatory factors and valued the quantity of factors for a plausible explanation: Version D explains better because it explains better the steps done by the Portuguese and the conditions… Version A is too summarized and it only narrates the enemies encountered by the Portuguese. Version C speaks only of the moral correctness and the sacrifices made… That is not enough for explaining, more things are necessary. Some other students while operating with the same criterion of completeness treated it in a sceptical direction. Miguel (17 years old, grade 11) explained the existence of different versions as a consequence of lack of data, which causes uncertainty: ‘No, there are no concrete data about this time so many theses are made with little material, guessing what it was like.’


A definitive explanation?

Perspectiveless neutrality and completeness are the main criteria for achieving an explanation. Different points of view are recognized but not accepted as legitimate in history: one positivist view claims the need for an absolute (perspectiveless) neutrality, viewing the search for a consensual explanation as an attainable aspiration on grounds of some kind of consistency; another trend stresses that the subjective element of point of view is inescapable and tries to deconstruct it. A few students asserted the need for attaining a final, complete explanation by seeking consensus among historians. For Rui (17 years old, grade 9) different versions exist when absolute neutrality is not followed. He affirmed his confidence in a better, consistent explanation: ‘Yes, there are opinions of people who always have dealt with this kind of issue thus being more able to formulate more reasonable and concrete explanations.’ Rui claimed that research should be carried out to reach ‘a definitive explanation, a more serious thing!’ Consensus among historians, supported by evidential consistency conceptualized at the level of verification, is the key to that final explanation: ‘All these explanations should be joined together and after being conveniently analysed and proven a final explanation would be formulated.’ Rui valued the summing of factors and plausibility when arguing for the longer version D: ‘[Version D] narrates a whole set of facts better, such as the rounding of the Cape of Good Hope and the systematic discovery of lands providing a launch pad for the expeditions which brought about this domination.’ A few students assuming a perspectiveless neutrality suggested a more relativist trend: secure knowledge is not reachable in history since neutrality and perspective are conflicting notions. Sofia (15 years old, grade 9), for example, recognized the impossible dream of a better explanation while simultaneously arguing for the union of all versions: No, for me the union of all versions is better, but even that is not the most perfect as it can always be completed by something else, which we don’t know. There is always something slipping, something obvious which is far away from our eyes. Mário (13 years old, grade 7) also aspired to absolute neutrality but overlapped ideas of perspective and bias, deconstructing somehow the historian’s point of view: ‘historians only show the side in which they are interested’. He therefore argued against the possibility of one explanation being better, since everyone speaks only about what she or he finds more important. Lina gave an example of considerable oscillation between trends of relativism and objectivism: in the written task she argued against a better explanation as ‘each historian has her/his own point of view and it cannot be said that one is


wrong and the other is right’ or ‘we cannot generalize’. These responses suggest a relativist view, but in the interview she showed progressive signs of objectivism linked to a perspectiveless neutrality: ‘History has been made because new data are found, not because of the way of thinking! An explanation can be considered right till new facts are discovered. If some new facts are known it can turn this explanation false!’ Students’ arguments above may indicate an idea of perspective beyond a common-sense level, integrating notions of bias and/or different cultural presuppositions. However, the idea of point of view appears to contradict principles of neutrality, seen as essential to achieve the explanation. A provisional explanation

Historical explanations are considered under specific methodological criteria pointing to ideas connected with confirmation and refutation as well as plausibility. The idea of perspectiveful neutrality tentatively emerges, still conflicting with the idea of an absolute neutrality. A few students tentatively conceptualized the notion of point of view as legitimate in history in parallel with concerns about explanatory consistency. Lurdes (16 years old, grade 11) assumed that several points of view lead to several answers ‘because nothing is definitive’ and employed a notion of a possible refutation of explanations since ‘nothing guarantees that an explanation might not be put into question’. She affirmed the possibility of a more powerful explanation: ‘Yes, if it is more explicit in a way that beats the other arguments.’ On the same wavelength Filipa gave precedence to explanations that are logically and evidentially consistent: Some data are more important and more logical in order to explain… For example, in version D, which I chose, they give us a goal, the goal of the Portuguese, and several conditions which really explain… Version B only explains the Portuguese conquest in India without transmitting to us any Portuguese goal concerning the Indian seas. [However] that historical explanation [versions A and D] doesn’t manage to explain the why of the other people’s failure. This student discussed the consistency of her favoured version in terms of the relation of the explanations to the evidence, and of their explanatory power and logical completeness. Filipa suggested an elaborate idea of provisionality in history when claiming that ‘a good historical explanation will be put under research’. But the following excerpt suggests an oscillation between the criterion of falsifiability and a tighter idea of proof: a good historical explanation ‘can be put into question by other historical authors!… Proofs really give a right explanation’.


In spite of this apparent contradiction Filipa seemed to recognize the notion of perspective without conflicting with that of methodological neutrality: Each author can have her/his own opinion, but neutrality is not exactly that, because neutrality is not tied to her/his opinion… Version C [she quotes it]: This is an explanation precisely based on the nationalistic mentality of a Portuguese author… The others want to be more objective; maybe this is somewhat subjective. A few of those students who accepted the notion of a genuine point of view opted for not distinguishing a better explanation. Miguel (16 years old, grade 11), for example, claimed that explanations vary according to ‘different sources, different political beliefs, and everything that we do not want or are not permitted to say’. He concluded that there is not a better explanation because each one is ‘well-grounded, thus all of them have something concrete’. As the analysis of the data suggests, some ‘no’-answers (‘versions would be better if added together’) may imply an objectivist view, while some ‘not-sure’and ‘yes’-answers (‘one explanation can only be better within a point-of-view’) may be negative (non-objectivist) answers. In order to get a brief summary of objectivist versus relativist trends among these adolescent students, a final adjustment of these results according to the reasons given will lean more towards objectivism: 58 (60 per cent) positive against 37 (40 per cent) negative answers. Thus, most of the reasons given by students appear to express confidence about the possibility of finding an explanation better than others, on more or less elaborate grounds. Nonetheless, these signs must not be taken for granted as students might give contradicting arguments (as Lina, above, did), appearing to convey some oscillation between realism/objectivism and scepticism/relativism. A Brief Discussion about Objectivity and History Education The results of this study suggest that Portuguese adolescent students argue for and against a better explanation by applying notions of access to truth and criteria of consistency and methodological detachment at various levels of sophistication. Many of those ideas appear to be similar in nature to those elicited in studies with students from other countries, namely from England and Spain: the CHATA (Concepts of History and Teaching Approaches) data analysed by Lee and Ashby have shown some similar views, such as seeing history as ready-made stories or as more or less biased accounts of the past. Nonetheless, more complex ideas of perspective integrating the idea of point of view as an historical feature appear to emerge at earlier ages in Britain than in Portugal.17 Cercadillo also pointed out this distinction between Spanish and English students with respect to ideas of significance.18 Differences in the history curricula may be one major factor: in the UK history is learnt from age 7 (and often age 5) and it is concerned with second-order ideas, while in Portugal


systematic history learning starts at age 10 and its main teaching focus is on substantive content. In spite of those differences, young people across countries develop tacit ideas of either an objectivist or a relativist character: if historians and philosophers of history offer arguments for one or another position such a controversy might be seen as legitimate as far the nature of history is concerned. And it is worthwhile to point out that a few adolescents think of a better explanation as more comprehensive and better justified, or argue against it by deconstructing in some way the historians’ craft. Those arguments, although much simpler than those of philosophers, evoke views adopted by authors such as Martin and White. This convergence in nature-although not in refinement—of ideas between students and the ‘scientific’ community is reminiscent of Wineburg’s discussion of the criteria employed by students and historians when using evidence.19 From this perspective we may conclude that it is both possible and desirable that teachers help students to progress beyond naïve arguments about the validity of explanations of the past. The informal process of education in a pluralist society, where controversial issues are publicly discussed, probably makes the handling of alternative views not very alien from the experience of young people. But leaving the critique of those views at the level of ideas, such as ‘they are all the same after all’ or ‘I don’t know, I wasn’t there’, appears not to contribute to better choices—in history or in present society. Adolescents may be encouraged to think about several explanations of the past by applying specific methodological criteria. However, any approach to the development of more elaborated reasoning must be carried out gradually, taking cognizance of and addressing the different levels of ideas observed. NOTES 1. We take the view that narrative in history is of a descriptive-explanatory kind following Gallie, W.B., Philosophy and the Historical Understanding (London: Chatto & Windus, 1964); and Atkinson, R., Knowledge and Explanation in History: An Introduction to the Philosophy of History (London: Macmillan, 1978). 2. As P.Lee and R.Ashby put it, ‘the acquisition of more powerful procedural or second-order ideas (about, for example, evidence or change) is one way—perhaps the best—of giving sense to the notion of progression in history’. See Lee, P. and Ashby, R., ‘Progression in Historical Understanding among Students Ages 7–14’, in P.Stearns, P.Seixas and S.Wineburg (eds), Knowing, Teaching, and Learning History (New York: New York University Press, 2000), p. 200. See also former related studies such as Dickinson, A. and Lee, P., ‘Understanding and Research’, in A.Dickinson and P.Lee (eds), History Teaching and Historical Understanding (London: Heinemann, 1978), pp. 94–120; Dickinson, A. and Lee, P., ‘Making Sense of History’, in A.Dickinson, P.Lee and P.Rogers (eds), Learning History (London: Heinemann, 1984), pp. 117–153; Ashby, R. and Lee, P., ‘Children’s Concepts of Empathy and Understanding in History’, in C.Portal (ed.), The History


3.

4. 5.

6. 7. 8.

9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

14.

15.

Curriculum for Teachers (London: Falmer Press, 1987), pp. 62–88; Shemilt, D., ‘Adolescent Ideas about Evidence and Methodology in History’, in C.Portal (ed.), The History Curriculum for Teachers (1987), pp. 39–61; Lee, P., Ashby, R. and Dickinson, A., ‘Progression in Children’s Ideas about History: Project CHATA’, in M.Hughes (ed.), Progression in Learning (Clevedon: Multilingual Matters, 1996), pp. 50–81. Dray, W., Laws and Explanation in History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964); Dray, W., Perspectives on History (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980); Dray, W., ‘Comment’, in W.J.Van der Dussen and L.Rubinoff (eds), Objectivity, Method and Point of View:Essays in the Philosophy of History (Leiden: E.J.Brill, 1991), pp. 170–190; Martin, R., The Past Within Us (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989); Martin, R. ‘Progress in Historical Studies’, in B. Fay, P.Pomper and R.Vann (eds), History and Theory, Contemporary Readings (London: Blackwell Publishers, 1998), pp. 377–403. See Martin, R., ibid., p. 390. Certeau, M., ‘A operação histórica’, in J.Le Goff and P.Nora (orgs), Fazer História 1 (Venda Nova: Bertrand, 1977), pp. 17–58; White, H., ‘The Historical Text as Literary Artefact’, in B.Fay, P.Pomper and R.Vann (eds), History and Theory, Contemporary Readings (London: White, H., ibid., p. 16. Blackwell Publishers, 1998), pp. 13–33. Ibid., p. 24. For research in the UK, see the work of Lee, P. and Ashby, R., ‘Progression in Historical Understanding among Students Ages 7–14’; and Lee, P., ‘History in an Information Culture: Project CHATA’, International Journal of Historical Learning, Teaching and Research, 1, 2 (2001), pp. 75–98. In Portugal, the emerging research of M.Gago on students’ conceptions about why historical narratives vary (MA thesis, University of Minho, 2001) presented some patterns of students’ thinking related to the issue of objectivity in history. See also Barca, I., ‘Adolescents’ ideas about provisional historical explanation’, PhD thesis (University of London, 1996), or its published Portuguese version O pensamento histórico dos jovens (Braga: University of Minho, 2000). These ideas appear in the higher levels of responses given by students when dealing with different accounts or explanations in Project CHATA or in M.Gago’s study. Barca, I., ‘Adolescents’ Ideas about Provisional Historical Explanation’. Strauss, A. and Corbin, J., Basics of Qualitative Research: Grounded Theory, Procedures and Techniques (Newbury Park: Sage, 1991). Barca, I., ‘Adolescents’ Ideas about Provisional Historical Explanation’, pp. 277– 278. When diverse ideas were embedded in the justifications given by a student, the idea coded was the one appearing to be most consistently defended across the several students’ tasks. Version D proved to be clearly the most popular of the four versions (79 per cent of students ranked it first) but while some students saw it as a story others converted its information into explanatory features. The last rank was mainly attributed to versions B and C (about 30 per cent each). See Barca, I., ‘Adolescents’ Ideas about Provisional Historical Explanation’, pp. 259–264. Project CHATA data provided evidence of similar ideas among British students: some asserted that versions vary only in the way they were told. See Lee, P. and


16. 17. 18.

19.

Ashby, R., ‘Progression in Historical Understanding among Students Ages 7–14’, p. 209. Similar ideas appear among British students (see Lee, P., ‘History in an Information Culture’, pp. 83–84). Such differences were referred to by Lee in the Preface of O pensamento histórico dos jovens. Cercadillo, L., ‘Students’ Ideas in England and Spain’, in A.K.Dickinson, P.Gordon and P.J.Lee (eds), Raising Standards in History Education, International Review of History Education, 3 (London: Woburn Press, 2001), pp. 116–145. Wineburg, S., ‘Historical Problem Solving: A Study of the Cognitive Processes Used in the Evaluation of Documentary and Pictorial Evidence’, Journal of Educational Psychology, 83, 1 (1991), pp. 73–87.

APPENDIX Version A

Openly defying the Moslem domain and combating the Moslem faith, the Portuguese had to meet as their main enemies in Asia the Egyptians and the Turks. It helped the Portuguese considerably that none of these major Moslem countries based its power upon the sea. O.Marques (Portuguese historian), H.de Portugal, 1980 Version B

The Islamic naval challenge to the Portuguese, when it came, was ineffective… Had the Chinese still been present in the Indian Ocean when the Portuguese arrived, one can only speculate what might have happened. The decision to withdraw the Chinese fleet 60 years before was a momentous one, leaving the ‘door left open’ (to the Europeans) into the Indian Ocean. A.Pacey (English researcher), Technology in World Civilization, 1990 Version C

This large domain quickly conquered with a few human and financial resources can only be explained by the moral correctness of the Portuguese great leaders, by the sacrifices for the country made by all the people. A.Matoso (textbook author), Compêndio de História Universal, 1946 Version D

The sailors of Prince Henry were those who took the first and most difficult steps into the unknown lands for the Europeans… The western African coast was progressively explored. The Portuguese caravels brought back gold, spices, furs, ivory and slaves from those regions.


Meanwhile, between 1405 and 1433, the emperors of China sent seven expeditions to explore the Indian Ocean, commanded by Cheng Ho, bringing back to China spices and unusual animals, including lions and giraffes. Upon Bartolomeu Dias having rounded the Cape of Good Hope, a new expedition, commanded by Vasco da Gama, arrived in India, in 1498. After that, the Portuguese quickly took control of the lucrative spice trade, for almost a century by forbidding other people to trade in the Indian Ocean and seizing the main ports through which the spice route passed. Based on Explorers, 1991 and Exploration & Empire, 1990

6 Children’s Understanding of Historical Narrative in Portugal MARILIA GAGO

History educators face new challenges, and they can respond to these challenges only by basing their practice on a systematic conceptual analysis of the kinds of ideas that their students have—and not by relying on adults’ preconceived notions of ‘deficiencies’ in children’s knowledge or thinking. The teaching of history should be concerned with developing children’s understanding of what history is and how historians carry on research. But as Lee and Barton point out, if we do not know how students think or which ideas they have about the nature of history, we cannot be effective in promoting their conceptual change or development in a way that supports their ability to think about the past, present and future.1 This study specifically focuses on how students think about historical accounts, mainly their ideas about why different historical accounts of the same reality exist. It follows in a tradition of studies that have directly addressed students’ understanding of the variation in historical accounts, including those by Barca, Barca and Gago, Barton, Cercadillo, Lee, Lee and Ashby, Levstik, Shemilt and Wineburg.2 This study attempts to understand how students’ ideas about differing historical accounts vary and what patterns of progression exist in those ideas. Ultimately, one of the intentions of the research is to encourage history teachers to develop greater sophistication in understanding their students’ historical cognition. Historical Knowledge and Historical Narrative Historical knowledge is thought of as both the knowledge of what happened in the past and, at the same time, the reconstruction of past actions in the present. What makes knowledge historical is not just the fact that some actions happened, but the fact that those actions have become known to us in the present. As Collingwood puts it, understanding past reality means rethinking the thoughts that generated the situation that we are considering, researching and reconstructing in the present.3 We should accept as legitimate that different historians working with the same evidence could produce different historical narratives of the past, because their inferences from historical evidence must be consistent with the differing frameworks and questions they bring to their work.


This does not mean that historical narratives are merely the opinions of individual historians. Even a justified opinion—one displaying rationality, plausibility and intelligibility—opens the road to scepticism and subjectivity if it springs simply from the subjectivity of the individual and is not based on a foundation of historical evidence. In considering the concept of historical narrative an attempt was made to analyse the concept of narrative in four senses which are discussed in the literature: explicit/descriptive narrative; narrative with a plot like a story; narrative according to structural history; historical narrative as opposed to fictional narrative. Here, an operational concept of historical narrative within the framework of ‘internal realism’ is proposed. Classical relativism insists that an objective representation of the past is impossible: a position which it justifies by appeal to selection, pre-concepts and perspective inherent to historians as human beings. With modern relativism the focus of justification of the impossibility of objectivity in narration is placed on language and on the artificiality of narrative. In response to such arguments Lorenz suggests that the relation between language and reality is relative and internal to a specific framework, so that we cannot conclude, as post-modernists do, that language is opaque and is unable to represent reality.4 The human past is remembered in different ways in relation to each framework that reconstructs historical reality; a comprehensive relation of the past, present and future. In Rüsen’s language, a temporal orientation for life is constructed with reference to a shared framework and historical identity is formed.5 So the human past is narratively expressed. Thus, as Atkinson argues, historical narrative is the proper structure of historical production, being intrinsically descriptive-explanatory and perspectiveful. It contains the ingredients of a story, logical and plural as any story—even fictional—but it is distinct from fiction because it respects historical evidence, dealing with events and contexts.6 It results from the historians’ point of view, which implies seriousness and a range of conjoined values, moral evaluations and presuppositions. In the light of this epistemological framework of the nature of historical narrative, this empirical study tries to understand students’ ideas about historical narrative, specifically the reasons for the existence of several accounts of a given past reality. Design of the Study Problem

This study investigated the following questions: How do Portuguese students aged 10–13 years, attending the fifth and seventh grades of elementary school, understand historical narrative? Specifically, what kinds of ideas do they have about the existence of a range of historical accounts of the same past reality?

CHILDREN’S UNDERSTANDING OF HISTORICAL NARRATIVE 79

Participants

One class group was chosen from each grade in a public school receiving students from a wide cultural, social and economic environment. The school is situated in a rural context but near several urban centres. Classes were selected from those attending the school during the academic year 2000–2001, and the sampling criterion was to select classes with students who had ‘medium average’ grades. There were 76 participants in the three phases of data gathering (pre-pilot study, pilot study and main study). Of this total, 52 participated in the main study. Instruments

Data were collected in two ways. First, students were given two sets of historical materials to evaluate as part of a paper-and-pencil questionnaire. This task, inspired by Lee’s study, involved providing students with background information on two historical topics (the Roman presence in the Iberian Peninsula and the history of Port wine), followed by two accounts of each topic. These two accounts were placed parallel to each other on an A4 sheet and occupied the same amount of space in terms of text; they were illustrated with images and they shared some phrases, but they differed in the specific theme, tone and time scale.7 (The selection of these topics took into account the curricular content that was studied—or not—by the students: the topic ‘The Romans in the Iberian Peninsula’ is explored in the fifth and the seventh grades; the topic of Port wine is not part of the history curriculum.) The questions in the pencil-and-paper task asked students to explain the existence of different historical accounts about the same thing, for example: Qu. 2. How could you explain the existence of different accounts in history? Qu. 3. If two historians read and found the same evidence and do not lie there will be no difference between the accounts that each write. Do you agree or disagree? Give your reasons. Qu. 5. Past events happen only once so we can have just one account of them. Do you agree or disagree? Give your reasons. Second, students took part in follow-up interviews. These were used to clarify and verify the interpretation of the written ideas of students. Ten of these took place, two for each level of progression that emerged from the paper-and-pencil data. Students’ Understanding of Historical Narrative Data were codified and analysed according to the ‘grounded theory’ methods described by Strauss and Corbin.8 First, data were coded to produce descriptive interpretations of students’ ideas, and the coded data were then collapsed into categories that would facilitate construction of a model of progression. These


categories were based on several dimensions of students’ ideas about why historical accounts differ, including their ideas about the concept of narrative, about the role of historians in constructing accounts and ideas about the past. Another dimension was message understanding.9 Within this latter dimension, three categories emerged: (1) fragmented comprehension, in which students revealed some comprehension of the messages of the text but had difficulty reformulating the information they contained; (2) restricted comprehension, in which students indicated a global comprehension of the messages and attempted to reformulate the information, but in which they concentrated on a sole indicator of the difference between the accounts and relied on expressions found in the accounts themselves and (3) global comprehension, in which students not only understood the global messages but identified central differences that distinguished the accounts and reformulated the information in a personal way. Based on these dimensions of students’ responses, five levels of progression emerged: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

Tell—The story; Knowledge—Correct narrative; Difference—Correct/more complete narrative; Author—Opinion or consensus narrative; and Nature—Perspective.

Tell—The story At this level, students display fragmented comprehension: they think the two accounts are the same but simply use different words. As a result, their ideas about the narratives relate solely to substantive historical knowledge— what happened and how. They explain the existence of alternative historical narratives by noting that authors narrate in a different form, with different words, but with the same meaning. Thus the historian is seen as a storyteller, and the past is understood as something that exists somewhere, waiting to be told by a historian who acquires and tells the story. Schematically, this level can be characterized by the following elements: • • • •

fragmented comprehension of the message; substantive knowledge; history as told; and the past as existing somewhere, untold.

The following are examples of responses at this level: Qu. 2. ‘…because in one story (the author) can tell one way but in the other story can tell in a different manner but meaning the same thing’ (Catarina, fifth grade). Qu. 5. ‘[Historians] may write in a different form and talk of the same story’ (Sofia, seventh grade).


Knowledge—The correct narrative

At this level of progression, the data suggest restricted comprehension, but in some cases global comprehension is also evident. Students indicate that alternative historical accounts are the result of gaps in evidence: historians do not have access to all evidence, or they may be more detailed or less detailed in their accounts. Nevertheless, students consider one account to be more correct and regard the other as containing mistakes; there are correct and incorrect accounts and the coexistence of differing accounts, both of them correct, is impossible. Some students at this level suggest that the past is fixed and stationary: historical reality only happened one way, and so we can have only one correct account. This kind of historical thinking suggests a dogmatic and positivist vision of the past, where the past is permanent and given by the evidence. Thus, the past is known through definite stories, or in other words, it is determined by the existing information—but it can be twisted by an author focusing on a specific dimension of historical reality. Schematically, this level can be characterized by the following elements: • global or restricted comprehension; • narrative concept: – correct/incorrect narrative; – narrative as a copy of the past; • the historian knows either more or less—withholds, distorts or invents; and • the past is known from evidence. The following are examples of responses at this level: Qu. 2. ‘because the narrative is given with more details’ (Cristiana, seventh grade). Qu. 5. ‘I agree. Because there is only one narrative, they couldn’t invent another one because we couldn’t know which one is real’ (Ricardo, seventh grade). Difference—The correct (more complete) narrative

At this level, students understand the message in both restricted and global ways. They suggest that there are different historical accounts because each is concerned with different areas or dimensions of the past, and they explain the existence of different accounts by noting greater or lesser inclusion of details. The past is understood as narrated in a form that is sometimes biased, because written narratives focus on different actions, dimensions, times and spaces. Sometimes, students explain the existence of different historical narratives by pointing to evolution over time; that is, historical reality is huge, and we have different accounts because they are from different spans of time or space. This notion is


not yet a notion of time scale: as the historical past is long in time we can have different accounts about the same period of history but focused on different specific situations. At this level, students suggest that there can be several accounts that are more correct than others, and that some could even be incorrect. Schematically, this level can be characterized by the following elements: • restricted and global comprehension; • narrative concept: – more or fewer facts; – correct/incorrect narrative; • the historian sees different facts more or less from a biased point of view; and • past reality encompasses several situations and different times. The following are examples of responses at this level: Qu. 2. ‘It can be justified because the Iberian Peninsula’s history has several phases’ (Isabel, seventh grade). Qu. 5. ‘I disagree because there can be several narratives of Port wine, each one in its own time’ (Gil, fifth grade). Author—opinion or consensus narrative

At this level, students’ comprehension of messages from the accounts may be restricted or global. They explain the existence of several different historical accounts by focusing on the historian’s point of view—that is, there are alternative historical accounts because they are written by different persons who choose certain sides deliberately. The author’s opinion or point of view, then, is referred to as the main reason for the existence of differing historical accounts. In this way, the historical past is not seen as an acquired fact that is being narrated factually, but as a phenomenon that needs to be, and is, interpreted by the historian, who explains it according to his/her opinion or point of view. The past needs an interpretation that is based on evidence and that validates in some way the historian’s explanation. In sum, the existence of interpretation is recognized, the subjectivity, the opinion, is sometimes justified by a point of view. But, as the author’s point of view is accepted as legitimate in history, some students try to find objectivity through a synthesis or consensus. Schematically, this level can be characterized by the following elements: • restricted and global comprehension; • narrative concept:


– descriptive/explicative narrative; – interpreted narrative; – opinion, justified or not, seeking consensus; • the historian interprets the evidence according to his/her own opinion; and • the past is interpreted and constructed by reference to evidence. The following are examples of responses at this level: Qu. 2. ‘because historians in some form or other, try to profit and that isn’t correct’ Qu. 3. ‘I disagree because there are different narratives that depend on the historian’s point of view, we can’t know what really happened’ (João, seventh grade). Qu. 2. ‘Because historians have different ideas about the same theme but they should all arrive at the same conclusion’ (Diogo, seventh grade). Nature—perspective

At this level, students display global comprehension of the messages. Some students seem to understand that the coexistence of different accounts is something natural and legitimate in history, because different accounts are part of proper historical investigation and reconstruction: historians have different interpretations, different ways of thinking and different theories about the historical past. Therefore, when producing an historical account, historians make use of their own perspective. In this way, the historian, using evidence and trying to be objective, proceeds from a set of presuppositions and constructs a narrative by answering questions—questions that may differ from one historian to the next. Therefore, there are different historical accounts because they were constructed upon different frameworks, interpretations and perspectives. This situation is considered a normal procedure in history and not necessarily biased or harmful. Objectivity is not conceived of in positivist terms but is seen in a critical form: the past is considered a reconstruction, and this reconstruction has been accomplished by trying to answer different questions; these answers must, however, accord with defined historical criteria. Schematically, this level can be characterized by the following elements: • global comprehension; • narrative concept; – explanatory and perspectiveful narrative; • a historian interprets the facts, according to his/her point of view, which is natural and legitimate in historical knowledge; and


• the past is a reconstruction—answers to questions that rely on evidence and are in accord with criteria defined by historians. The following are examples of responses at this level: Qu. 2. ‘It can be explained by the fact that historians questioned the evidence, and from that moment on, built different narratives according to their research’ (Marta, seventh grade). Marta’s interview response extends her argument: Marta: Different questions give different answers, perhaps it depends on the year that they are researching. Interviewer: Why does it depend on the year they are researching? Marta: Throughout the years the evidence disappears, so there is more or less information, which leads to new questions. Interviewer: Is history somewhere to be told, or is it a continuous reconstruction? Marta: It’s being done according to new data and new forms of thinking. Interviewer: The historian’ s way of thinking? Marta: Yes, it changes. Interviewer: Why? Marta: More things, more certainties or uncertainties. Interviewer: The way that the historian thinks today is different from what he believed in the past? Marta: Yes, and I believe that it changes the way history is made. Marta focuses on the necessity of the revision of interpretations of the historical past, and sees the successive reconstruction of the historical past as a legitimate and natural part of historical knowledge. Portuguese and British Students’ Ideas—Cross Comparison The categorization of this study approximates to that of Lee’s British study.10 The data emerging from this study seem to be quite similar to Lee’s data: so a similar categorization and levels of progression emerged. Thus the model of progression designed by Lee was considered to be adequate to the findings of this study for the major aspects, and this had the benefit of making a proliferation of terminology unnecessary. However, in this study the model of progression also integrates some concepts related to the idea of objectivity in history as presented in the progression levels defined by Barca, namely notions of perspectiveless and perspectiveful neutrality, since some ideas of the students seem quite similar.11 In Tables 6.1, 6.2, 6.3, 6.4 and 6.5, some excerpts of data from Lee’s research are presented and compared with the data from this study.12


Conclusions The main aim of this study was to provide data on the historical understanding of Portuguese students, particularly with regard to their explanations TABLE 6.1: ‘TELL’ Tell Portuguese study ‘There are a lot of stories about Port wine because they are told in different ways but the result is the same.’ Alberto, 10 years.

British study Int.: You said there were no differences, are they both exactly the same then? Nicola, year 3: They’re in different words but they both mean the same thing.

TABLE 6.2: ‘KNOWLEDGE’ Knowledge Portuguese study ‘I disagree with this question because the people that write this story could add some details.’ Isabel, 12 years. ‘If historians read the same documents they should say the same because they should be sincerest persons.’ Mirela, 10 years. ‘I agree because just one story could be true.’ Raquel, 12 years.

British study ‘The calendar may be wrong so they may be wrong.’ Tony, year 7. One of the stories must be wrong about when it ended, ‘because you cannot have 2 different history stories about one thing’. The difference matters ‘because they happened and the writers should tell the truth’. ‘You can have 2 stories but only one is right.’ Emma, year 7.

TABLE 6.3: ‘DIFFERENT’ Different Portuguese study ‘I disagree because a lot of stories of Port wine could exist because they exist in different times.’ Gil, 10 years.

British study ‘The first story happened before the second story.’ Olivier, year 6. ‘Because for the West the Roman Empire finished at one time and for the East it finished at another.’ Alison, year 6.

TABLE 6.4: ‘AUTHOR’ Author Portuguese study

British study

‘We could explain the existence of different stories about the same reality because the historians had different opinions.’ Susana, 12 years.

There can be 2 different stories about the same bit of history because they can be written from different views.’ The difference in stories does not matter


Author Portuguese study ‘I disagree because everyone sees the things in a different way even if the same documents/evidence exist, but they see it by different ways.’ Cátia, 12 years.

British study ‘because they are both opinions and noone really knows what happened even if they do have what they think is proof.’ Richard, year 9. The stories can differ ‘quite easily. The storyteller might aim it at one subject, another storyteller would aim it at something else.’ ‘Story one focuses on one thing story 2 focuses on another.’ ‘We don’t really know there was one story there might be millions that are proper history stories.’ Rachel, year 6.

TABLE 6.5: ‘NATURE’ Nature Portuguese study

British study

‘Because historians think in different ways.’ Raquel, 12 years. ‘I disagree because historians could have had the same documents and explain in a different way.’ Susana, 12 years. ‘Because they treat things in a different way, one explains its significance in one way, the other story in another way.’ Daniela, 10 years.

‘I don’t think there could be an exact time’ when the Empire ended. ‘There was no time when someone stood up and said “The Empire’s ended”.’ They are different ‘because the first…is concerned with the physical changes and the second is about cultural reproduction’. ‘Historians answer different questions in a story. If what they are trying to find out is different then the answers may also be different, even if they are about the same thing.’ Peter, year 9.

for the existence of varied historical narratives. In the light of the findings presented here, it seems possible to cautiously affirm that students’ ideas about this topic vary in their degree of sophistication, and that their ideas become more sophisticated with age. The ideas of the majority of fifth graders (mean age 10.3 years) could be categorized as ‘Knowledge’ (correct narrative); this situation changed in the seventh grade (mean age 12.4 years), where the students’ ideas revealed a certain level of elaboration, with the majority of answers classified as ‘Author’ (opinion or consensus narrative). In addition, most seventh graders’ ideas could be categorized in levels that were more elaborate than those revealed by the majority of the fifth graders. A number of cautions are in order, however. Although more sophisticated ideas appear more frequently in students who are at a more advanced school grade, they are also found in younger students. In addition, students at the same age could operate at different levels of sophistication, and there are students of


12–13 years old who are still at the level designated as ‘Tell’ (the story). Perhaps most importantly, the ideas of individual students can oscillate among different levels of progression (as was the case in UK studies).13 Thus, students in the same school grade or of the same age can present conceptions at different levels of progression. This suggests that educators might more effectively capitalize on these cognitive characteristics so that progression in students’ ideas can take place more effectively. Students’ responses did not vary, however, when they were confronted with the two different substantive stories. One of these topics is taught in history classes and is part of the curricular content of both school grades, and the topic had already been taught to these students. The other topic is not part of the school curriculum in any way. Yet the fact that a topic had or had not been taught in class did not affect the level of sophistication of students’ responses, nor did those responses change as the questionnaire task was repeated. As already indicated, the kinds of ideas that surfaced from the answers given by Portuguese students who were part of this study were not very different from the answers given by British students and presented in Lee’s study.14 Finally, it can be hypothesized that 10–13-year-old students, when confronted with historical narratives with differentiated information, may select and reformulate the narrative from a critical point of view. Some go even further and reflect on the existence of different narratives as a natural and genuine characteristic of history. Implications for history education

The results of this study make it clear that fifth- and seventh-grade students (10–13-year-olds) are capable of more sophisticated levels of historical thinking than is usually recognized by Portuguese teachers. It should be possible, then, to develop this historical understanding by adopting a more carefully designed pedagogy based on research and historical enquiry. This would involve much more than engaging students in criticism of different historical accounts or perspectives; it would mean that students must learn how to formulate questions and solve problems, rather than accepting as final the answers that have been provided by authorities. However, students’ exposure to a variety of narratives requires some caution, lest they fall into a sort of relativism that results from a chaos of information derived from multiple perspectives. If attention is not given to deconstructing concepts of ‘opinion’ as intentional distortions by an author, then the official dogmas of the past may simply be replaced with scepticism. Moreover, the existence of a single perspective can be comforting, and students may resist giving up such concepts; this was evident in the response of one student in this study who commented, ‘the people who write these narratives should give their ideas and create only one history. If there are many similar narratives I get confused.’


The implications of this study are in agreement with Barca’s suggestions: Being historically competent today implies understanding: • how to read diversified narratives with different background information, with different messages; • how to confront messages with the evidence, testing their intentions and validity; • how to select evidence for confirmation and refutation of hypothesis (descriptive or explanatory); • how to understand—or try to understand—‘us’ and ‘others’ in their dreams and anguish, in their greatness and misery, in different times, in different spaces; and • how to question which new hypothesis to research—which is at the core of progression of knowledge.15 Promoting the development of students’ frameworks for understanding how and why historical narratives differ seems necessary, because schools are not the only places in which students become familiar with alternative information about the same reality. We must take into consideration the tacit ideas of the students, which in this case could be one of the possible explanations for the fact that ideas concerned with the nature of historical knowledge suggested in the answers of the students do not seem to be different in conceptualization whether the topic was or was not taught in class. In history classes it is necessary to engage history as experience—on the lines of the Oakeshott conception—and to use alternative historical accounts in promoting discussions of different perspectives and new interpretations. These interpretations can assume a role in orientation for daily life since they might allow a more effective cognitive historical approach to reality. When historical experience is thought about and experienced in a vicarious form, it could provide useful and meaningful insights for understanding past, present and future. This line of thought is in accord not only with contemporary perspectives on historical knowledge, but also with the reality lived by children and adolescents in present society. Promoting a more sophisticated understanding of historical narratives may help students to develop a valuable and valid framework that could be an important tool for them in understanding and ‘solving’ present problems in a historically orientated context. NOTES 1. Lee, P., ‘Childrens’ Ideas about the Nature and Status of Historical Accounts’, in Y.Chang and L.Chou (eds), Proceedings of the International Conference on Methodologies: Historical Consciousness and Textbook Research (Hsin Chu, Taiwan: Institute of History, National Tsing Hua University, 1998), pp. 201–226—


2.

3. 4.

5.

6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

English; pp. 227–248—Mandarin; Barton, K., ‘Childrens’ Ideas on Change over Time: Findings from Research in the United States and Northern Ireland’, paper presented at I Jornadas de Educação Histórica (Braga: University of Minho, June 2000). Levstik, L.S., ‘Historical Narrative and the Young Reader’, Theory into Practice, 28 (1989), pp. 114–119; Barton, K., ‘Narrative Simplifications in Elementary Students Historical Thinking’, in J.Brophy (ed.), Advances in Research on Teaching, Vol. 6 (Greenwich: JAI Press, 1996), pp. 51–83; Lee, P.J., “‘None of Us Was There”: Children’s Ideas about Why Historical Accounts Differ’, in S.Ahonen, P.Arola, C.Karlegärd, A.Køhlert, S.Lorentzen and V.O.Nielson (eds), Historiedidaktik, Norden 6, Nordisk Konferens om Historiedidaktik, Tampere 1996 (Copenhagen: Danmarks Laererhøjskole, 1997), pp. 23–58; Barca, I., O Pensamento Histórico dos Jovens (Braga: CEEP-UM, 2000); Barca, I. and Gago, M., De pequenino se aprende a pensar— formar opinião na aula de História e Geografia de Portugal (Lisboa: APH, 2000); Cercadillo, L., ‘Significance in History: Student’s Ideas in England and Spain’, paper presented at the Symposium Creating Knowledge in the 21st Century: Insights from Multiple Perspectives (New Orleans: AERA Conference, 2000); Lee, P. and Ashby, R., ‘Progression in Historical Understanding among Students Ages 7–14’, in P.N.Stearns, P.Seixas and S.Wineburg (eds), Knowing, Teaching, and Learning History, (New York: New York University Press, 2000), pp. 199–222; Shemilt, D., The Caliph’s Coin: The Currency of Narrative Frameworks’, in P.Stearns, P.Seixas and S.Wineburg (eds), Knowing, Teaching, and Learning History, pp. 83–101; Wineburg, S. (2000), ‘Making Historical Sense’, in P.N.Stearns, P.Seixas and S.Wineburg (eds), pp. 306– 325. Collingwood, R.G., A Ideia da História (Lisboa: Editorial Presença, 1978). Lorenz, C., ‘Historical Knowledge and Historical Reality: A Plea for “Internal Realism” ’, in B.Fay, R.Pomper and R.Vann (eds), History and Theory Contemporary Readings (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers Ltd, 1998), pp. 69–89. Rüsen, J., ‘What is Historical Consciousness? A Theoretical Approach to Empirical Evidence’, paper presented at Canadian Historical Consciousness in an International Context: Theoretical Frameworks (Vancouver, BC: University of British Columbia, 2001). Atkinson, R.F., Knowledge and Explanation in History: An Introduction to the Philosophy of History (London: Macmillan, 1978). Lee, P.J., ‘“None of Us Was There”: Children’s Ideas about Why Historical Accounts Differ’. Strauss, A. and Corbin, J., Basics of Qualitative Research: Grounded Theory, Procedures and Techniques (Newbury Park: Sage, 1991). Barca, I. and Gago, M., De pequenino se aprende a pensar—Formar opinião na aula de História e Geografia de Portugal. Lee, P.J.,‘“None of Us Was There”: Children’s Ideas about Why Historical Accounts Differ’. Barca, I., O Pensamento Histórico dos Jovens. Lee, P.J., ‘“None of Us Was There”: Children’s Ideas about Why Historical Accounts Differ’. Ibid. See Lee, P., ‘Why Learn History?’, in A.Dickinson, P.Lee and P.Rogers (eds), Learning History (London: Heinemann, 1984), pp. 117–153.


14. Lee, P.J.,‘“None of Us Was There”: Children’s Ideas about Why Historical Accounts Differ’. 15. Barca, I., Ser-se historicamente competente. www.aph.rcts.pt/inicio.html (24/10/ 2001).

7 Between Reproducing and Organizing the Past: Students’ Beliefs about the Standards of Acceptability of Historical Knowledge VERONICA BOIX MANSILLA

Introduction In the world of American pre-collegiate education, budding efforts to enculturate students into the forms of inquiry that are central to the discipline of history have converged on supporting the development of several key abilities: analysing sources, weighing evidence, understanding complex causality, constructing accounts and debating interpretations. Identifying such modes of thinking has allowed exemplary history teachers to target their instruction on habits of mind that prevail across the various topics or periods that they teach.1 This conception of school history as an exercise in disciplined knowledge puts a premium on educators’ ability to elicit youngsters’ intuitions about historical knowledge, affirm rich beliefs and transform oversimplifications.2 Its success demands that we understand how professional historians view the nature and challenges of building historical knowledge. Equally relevant is our understanding of how intuitive epistemological beliefs that are deeply engrained in the students’ mind shape the meaning that youngsters attribute to tasks like ‘weighing evidence’, ‘producing explanations’ or ‘creating historical accounts’. In this chapter, I address the second challenge empirically. I examine the beliefs about standards of acceptability that exceptional pre-collegiate students reveal as they reason out conflicting accounts of the past. Given two competing accounts of the past, how do young people discern their relative acceptability? I report the results of a study of 16 high school students, who have received multiple awards for their outstanding research ability in science and/or in history. My study sought to (a) portray these students’ beliefs about standards of acceptability of historical accounts; (b) assess the degree to which such beliefs operated as coherent systems or as more or less loose collections of ideas and (c) examine whether these students’ particular research training (in science or in history) was associated with differences in epistemological beliefs. My exploration resulted in two significant findings. First, students’ beliefs about the nature of historical knowledge were arranged in two distinct epistemological orientations. Such orientations tended to operate as cohesive conceptual frameworks. Second, students’ views of the goals, problems and


standards for acceptable solutions that define historical knowledge and inquiry were strongly related to their prior disciplinary training. In this chapter I introduce the study and report my findings, concluding with a discussion of the link between the epistemological views embedded in patterns of students’ responses and expert historiographic traditions. Research Design I interviewed 16 exceptional students whose research in science and/or in history led them to receive recurrent awards in Massachusetts statewide competitions: the Massachusetts Science Fair and the National History Day. To compete in these events students carried out an original research project in the corresponding discipline. All students in my sample were between 14 and 17 years of age. Six could be described as young history researchers with little to no experience in scientific research. Eight science award winners had little to no experience in historical research. Two students were award winners in both domains. My interview protocol confronted students with two conflicting narratives about the Holocaust.3 The first account summarized Lucy Dawidowicz’ 1975 ‘The War against the Jews 1933–1945’. The second one summarized Daniel Goldhagen’s 1996 publication ‘Hitler’s Willing Executioners’.4 Both accounts addressed the same research question: Why did the Germans participate in the mass murder of six million Jews and minorities? Accounts were similar in length and chapter structure. They both included a preface in which the authors explained the methods and process that guided their research efforts. Accounts differed in the period covered, the historical actors on whom they focused and their causal attribution. Dawidowicz’ account began in 1939 and ended at the end of the Second World War; Goldhagen’s began with the emergence of Christianity and ended at the end of the Second World War. Dawidowicz’ account focused on the Nazi elite and attributed the Holocaust primarily to Hitler’s power of persuasion and his subordinates’ blind obedience. Goldhagen examined the role of ordinary Germans and attributed the Holocaust to their willing participation rooted in a longstanding European anti-Semitism, which took an ‘eliminationist’ turn in Germany in the beginning of the twentieth century. Three types of questions followed such controversy: (a) Questions 1–6 assessed students’ understanding of the tensions at hand and elicited their spontaneous beliefs about historical knowledge and inquiry; (b) Questions 7–9 targeted specific dimensions of inquiry (the nature of evidence, understanding historical actors and producing accounts); (c) Questions 10–14 probed for particular beliefs and potential misconceptions by confronting students with disciplinary dilemmas. All interviews were tape-recorded, fully transcribed and entered into a Nud-ist database.

BETWEEN REPRODUCING AND ORGANIZING THE PAST 93

FIGURE 7.1: GROUP MEAN RELATIVE PRESENCE OF STANDARDS FOR ACCEPTABILITY (IN PERCENTAGE POINTS)

Portraying Students’ Beliefs What beliefs did the students in my study hold about the standards by which a historical account can be deemed acceptable? To what degree did their beliefs operate as coherent epistemological frameworks or as loose collections of ideas? Was their research training (in science or in history) associated with differences in epistemological beliefs? In what follows I report the results obtained vis-à-vis the questions above. Four core beliefs about standards of acceptability

An initial content analysis of the interview transcripts allowed me to identify 72 themes associated with standards of acceptability of historical knowledge. Themes included for example, ‘reading many primary sources carefully’, ‘including lots of footnotes’, ‘leaving bias behind’, ‘interviewing people—or travelling in time to see what things were like’, ‘understanding other cultures well’, ‘helping others today understand why people did the things they did’. I grouped the emerging themes into four main categories representing particular standards of acceptability of historical knowledge. First, students converged on expecting an account to have a strong empirical base (e.g. the careful selection, certification and interpretation of sources, and the use of evidence to support historical claims and narratives). Second, they expected accounts to hold explanatory power—i.e. students referred to historians’ explanatory goals, the qualities of ‘good explanations’, the challenges of considering long- and shortterm causes and the placement of explanations in broad narratives about the period. Third, students expected accounts to reveal human understanding, e.g. they addressed the possibilities and challenges of understanding the lives, worldviews and feelings of people who lived in the past and the unique difficulty of understanding evil human actions. Finally, students addressed the narrative


strength of an account, i.e. the presentational, formal and narrative qualities of historical accounts (e.g. clarity, level of detail, use of anecdotes, framing, climaxes and turning points). Figure 7.1 presents the mean relative presence of each standard of acceptability (i.e. the percentage of times that a student referred to a particular standard, over his or her total number of references to standards) for all the subjects in my study. Two emerging epistemologies of history

A closer reading of the ways in which students justified their assessment of historical accounts revealed two underlying views about how historical knowledge is ultimately granted credibility: in one view, students expected historians to ‘reproduce the past as it was’. In the other, they viewed them as attempting to ‘organize the past for people today’. In the following section I portray each epistemological approach and its manifestation in particular standards of acceptability. Reproducing the past as it really was

Students holding this view may be characterized as historical objectivists. They viewed historical inquiry as a practice that operates within a constellation of norms, methods and validation criteria designed to capture the past accurately and completely. Three core beliefs define this epistemological orientation as it emerged in students’ claims: (a) a strong emphasis on accuracy in the sense of an exact representation of the past as it really was; (b) a tendency to believe that, eventually, and at least in principle, a complete account of the past could emerge from historians’ ongoing collective inquiry and (c) a view of historians as striving for objectivity (e.g. distinct separation between past and present, fact and opinion, knowledge and value, subject and object). The following excerpt captures this stance eloquently: The evidence for a historical account relies almost exclusively on primary sources that the author read presumably. And in that case it is just words that somebody else wrote down. And if it can be assumed that the person accurately wrote to the best of his knowledge what actually occurred the evidence is probably good because as a historian you are trying to reproduce a well-rounded and accurate picture of the facts. [Brian] Reproducing the past as it happened on strong empirical grounds To reach the level of accuracy and completeness that defines acceptable historical accounts, these students emphasized relying on multiple sources and perspectives and distinguishing fact from contaminating opinion.


He has a lot of his own opinions in here [Goldhagen’s account], which is good to have in a paper, but when it’s mixed in with the sources, it’s hard to distinguish which is actual facts and which are his own opinions. Also the more sources you read the more you can tell what the real facts were. Here we don’t know which is which, which is true and which is just his opinion, which I think is important to clarify. [Nina] Interviewing actors or polling opinions was another way to ‘find out what exactly happened’. I think if you can get a poll that will give you a good idea. You know, voting, polling, how an idea is distributed among a general population. I mean there can be a very small group of people that have very very strong ideas whereas you can have 70% of the population be totally indecisive and it kind of puts everything in perspective and you can be more sure of your results. [Karen] Students often called on historians to footnote each one of their ideas and provide abundant quotes. Viewed as transparent windows into the past, sources and quotes were seen as ‘the best way to get the reader to see for himself how things happened’ [Ryan]. Events for which we have no direct sources were seen as an important threat to the validity of historical knowledge. In a particularly revealing analysis, a student named Nell resolved this challenge by proposing that historians be explicit about the insufficiency of evidence and clarify the multiple possible ways in which events could have evolved. In this case objectivity and accuracy (with their clear distinction between fact and opinion) were favoured over the demands of a flowing narrative. [A serious problem of evidence emerges] If there are gaps in the story— like you don’t know everything from A to Z if you only have 50% of the documents for the letters in there. You can decide logically what should have happened or the three ways in which that could have gotten from here to there. And I think it would be nice if the stories would present the different options and admit that it’s not clear what happened. Mechanisms such as ‘averaging opinions’, ‘counting sources pro and con’ and ‘picking only dates and names’ were proposed as ways to address the challenge of bias and misrepresentation. Adopting a non-biased third party’s perspective was a solution proposed as well, particularly if historians were able to embody such point of view to ‘see’ what happened and report it as it was. If the historians could have experienced the situation, I think they would have understood it better. If they had lived there and grown up with the mindset of the people they were writing about…probably being an


unbiased third person that was not involved in the conflict would be the best person to be. [Brian] Explaining why things happened in accurate and complete ways Students in this position seemed to believe that the causes of events were to be found in the past itself, rather than attributed to link events in particular explanatory plots. Differences in causal attribution were accounted for by differences in historians’ personal interest leading them to focus on one aspect of the past. The reasons why things happened are right there. So there it is the historian’s job to find them. If two historians look at the same sources and come up with different interpretations, it is because they are interested in different things so their focus is different. [Elizabeth] In a revealing description student Nicole complements this objectivist picture by claiming that the historians’ interest itself is determined by significant features of the past. The historians’ role is limited to that of a recorder of explanations dictated by the past. I think there are so many similarities between different cultures, there are like waves of history that cultures go through. So I guess that as a historian you sort of have to capture a whole wave, and how and why it hits and where it hits…. History is going to write itself and jump out at you, as the historian—enough to want to research it. Chances are it is going to be interesting to someone. Not uncommon was students’ idea that if you could travel in time and be there in Germany in the early 1940s, you would be able to ‘see what happened and why’. For some students this belief was associated with the hope that at least in principle, as historians advance their work, history will eventually produce a complete explanation of the past based on a complete chronicle of all the things that happened. The following excerpt illustrates how the notion of ‘being there’ and that of ‘capturing the complete story’ play mutually supportive roles in Jessica’s argument. INT: Now if you had the choice of moving in time, where would you have to be in order to understand why Germans… J: Everywhere. INT: How would that be? J: You’d have to go to the concentration camps, death marches, and then be in on Hitler’s meetings, be in a regular family home, a German home, a Jewish home, practically everywhere. INT: After being in all these places, what would be an ideal story about the Holocaust? The best story you could produce?


J: Every aspect of it. It would explain every aspect. INT: So it would be a story that would combine… J: It could cover everything, and it’s kind of impossible. INT: So how do historians go about deciding then? J: Pieces at a time, they go about it piece by piece and then hopefully one day they will have the last piece of the puzzle. Historical actors as they really were Because a ‘reproducing the past’ orientation sought accuracy, objectivity and completeness, students’ claims often referred to historians as portraying actors in the way actors would portray themselves at the time, and present as many actors’ perspectives as possible—ideally all perspectives. In their view a historical account was insufficient if it did not provide a rich portrait of the people involved. The account was misguided if such perspective did not depict exactly how things were in the past. For example, Elizabeth claimed: After reading this [Dawidowicz’ account] you don’t have a sense of like the feelings that people had at all throughout it and like it is more just like Hitler stood out as the bad person and six million Jewish people died. I got a lot more out of reading Night—an actual account of someone, what they went through, like what they were forced to eat, the extermination process because then you really see like how terrible it really was.5 What students within this orientation failed to bring into their analysis were the benefits of temporal perspective and hindsight that historians bring to their exploration of actors’ experience. Rather, they tended to propose that historians draw on their own comparable experience as human beings to understand what things were like for actors in the past—as if there were no time barriers between historians and their subjects of study. While admittedly subjective, such experiences would serve historians as proxies for direct phenomenological observation. As Nina put it: For me it would be hard to understand people in war. I have never experienced a wartime. All I could see is photographs, or videos of Vietnam. So I can try to understand these people’s lives but I am never going to completely understand unless I experience something that is similar to that. Telling accurate, clear and complete stories A reproducing the past epistemological orientation tended to view historical narratives as the final product of historical inquiry. Students’ analyses emphasized presentational qualities such as clarity, level of detail, use of short sentences, footnotes and bibliography. In Nicole’s words:


You are the historian you are presenting the facts. Of course you can do that in a really boring and monotonous way and sort of give a really bland picture of the past so in your language and in your writing you are going to want to make it interesting. Narratives of broader scope were favoured because ‘they allow you to see more of what happened’. These students argued that historians should cover periods ‘fully’, ‘without leaving holes’ and ‘in as much detail as possible’. Elizabeth recognized and addressed the tension between coverage and accuracy as follows: The more time covered you will get a better picture, but I m not sure it would be as accurate because covering 2000 years is really hard, whereas if you studied like a month or something it could be more accurate. But I would go for the 2000 years because I like to get a picture of the whole scenario. Organizing the past for contemporary audiences In this epistemology historians were viewed as exploring the past purposefully to make it intelligible to human beings in the present. As in the previously described orientation, these students recognized the importance of establishing past facts, producing rich explanations, understanding actors’ worldviews and contexts and generating powerful narratives. However, two qualities distinguished the reasoning within this orientation from that of the previous one: (a) students seemed to understand the role that narrative and explanatory structures play not only in final reporting, but also in the very process of inquiry (e.g. as historians select and interpret sources, as they decide which actors and events to pursue); (b) they were aware of the temporal distance and perspective that defines historians’ relationships to their object of study. Organizing the past on strong empirical grounds Within this epistemology, source selection and interpretation was viewed under the light of the particular story lines, theses and views about the past that historians seek to propose or question. Referring to a seemingly unrelated source Miranda noted: You may have this awesome speech by Hitler and it seems like it really doesn’t have anything to do with what you are researching. So you have to develop the relevance to your research. So you can make inferences and connections and let your mind put pieces of the puzzle together. Sources work collectively and dynamically. ‘You need a research tree’, one student claimed, ‘where you go from source to source looking for connections, leads, and whole pictures to make your theory about why people did these things convincing’ added Ben. ‘Evidence’ was seen as more than particular sources, including examples and cases. As Miranda explained, ‘Good evidence is not only that [rich sourcing] but


also specific events like the police battalion 101 [in Goldhagen’s account]. It’s important that you use these examples.’ Unlike its previous counterpart, this position tended to see evidential challenges (fragmented and necessarily incomplete sources), inference and plausibility analysis as intrinsic to historical inquiry. For instance Daniel, another student, claimed: I may realize, well Hitler is killing all these people, but Hitler’s one man and he’s got to have people to do it, and so I should now look at the troops. When you look at your evidence and do a little bit of analysis and see who was explicitly involved and then there are the implicit things. Obviously Hitler could not have done it. A really good example of it is the American Revolution. Here you had these people, these mobs who were looting, and doing crazy things around here. And it appears that there is an implicit group a well of merchants who were instigating the revolution and they do not come up but they seem to be there because there were for example bonfires and drinking parties and all sorts of things that were sponsored by somebody. Who was it? So then you have to look for them. You start identifying these groups. Source bias too was embraced naturally. As Jill noted: ‘I work with the assumption that my sources will be biased. So I try to look at specific dates, places, names first but then I go on to see things like how people felt and what that meant because that is what matters.’ Students often viewed the historian’s perspective as positioned in the present and the challenge of ‘translating’ terms, practices and meanings across temporal contexts: ‘Today [in America] we can’t even pronounce the word “nigger” because it feels so discriminatory’, Miranda described, ‘you read it back then and everybody used it and you notice how much things have changed’. Building explanations to make the past intelligible Students holding this epistemological orientation understood the impossible (and uninteresting) nature of a complete chronicle of the past. In their view, historians select portions of the past and organize them to put forth explanations of why and how events happened. You would write an incredibly long and boring book if you were to summarize all the things you found out about the past. What you need is a system to filter things through so that you only include what is relevant to your story, for example you need the case of the police battalion to help people understand that they killed because they wanted [to]. [Jackie] Students within this epistemological orientation viewed historians’ explanations as necessarily positioned within the historians’ Zeitgeist—making the past intelligible to their contemporaries. For example, some viewed current


explanations of the Holocaust as provisional, not because new sources will shed new light on the period but because new contemporary ideas (e.g. studies of religion, gender issues) provide historians with new lenses or analytical categories to examine past times. Well, there wasn’t much less source material available then [when Dawidowicz wrote her account], you have Holocaust survivors although they weren’t coming forth with their stories. This second one [Goldhagen’s] talks a lot more about the roots of anti-Semitism and some of that history is more recent, it’s been coming out more lately. New perspectives on religion are a big thing in the 80s and 90s for people to look at. So he’s got more diverse source material. [Jill] Furthermore, indicating a sophisticated understanding of the provisionality of historical explanations two students proposed that the meaning of particular events may change as we place them in a broader network of events in the future. Their analyses were scaffolded by illustrative metaphors: It’s like a continuously moving circle. So when you look at a cause and effect relationship, you’ve got to keep in mind how these things bounce and change the context in which we live, so that’s the most difficult part [about understanding the past]. Because, if a war were declared today our discussion would take on a totally different tone. I might reference the current events as part of this discussion. [Caitlin] Making actors’ worldviews intelligible In referring to how historians select and interpret the actors and perspectives that they will study, students embracing this orientation focused on how such actors and perspectives supported (or healthily challenged) the core historical arguments that each author was trying to put forth. For instance, according to Miranda, ‘A good analysis will look into Hitler to see how he gained his power how he developed his ability to influence people and what his motivation was because that is exactly the argument you are trying to make.’ Students did not expect a one-to-one correspondence between a historian’s claims about people in the past and sources used. Rather, within this position youngsters tended to view historians as necessarily inferring portraits of the lives and views of historical actors through fragmented and often limited remnants of the past. In describing her own inquiry Alissa said: There just wasn’t a lot on Daniel Shay [a key actor in her study]. He never actually wrote anything. But I am looking at things that others said and there are only three interviews with him and then I use a bit of my own interpretation of what I thought a person in this situation would say.


As portrayed by these students, the selection and interpretation of particular actors’ points of view was necessarily linked to what matters to us in the present. For example, Miranda claimed that Goldhagen was able to look at ordinary Germans in the 1990s because contemporary societies are ‘now more ready to share the blame for the Holocaust’. Students’ arguments revealed their efforts to balance distance and proximity between past and present life experiences. ‘It is surprising to know how much we may have in common with perpetrators in the past’, Miranda claimed, ‘They look like completely different types of human beings and yet it may not be quite so.’ Organizing the past through powerful narratives It may be clear by now that a defining quality of analysis within this orientation was the centrality of narrative structures as guiding forces throughout the historical research process. A language of beginnings and endings, highpoints, turning points, milestones, peaks, climaxes, resolutions and endings permeated students’ assessment of historical knowledge. For example, Laura proposed: [To ensure a good historical account] I would start off like Goldhagen did. I would state my purpose and then I would sort of give how it all started in the beginning. You are kind of setting the seed, giving what’s been going on. And then you build up to the Climax which is the Holocaust, you know. And then I’d go back down. I’d follow the basic plot line of any story. Some students seemed to understand that the time covered by a historical account (as well as what count as its beginning, middle and end) is determined by historians according to the explanatory plot presented. Such choice had natural implications on the sources experts sought for, or the historical agents included. Goldhagen probably began looking at why the Holocaust happened and the influence that religion might have had so he had to go back in time until he found an event that marked the root of the problem: the beginning of Christianity. [Alissa] Historical epistemologies as coherent interpretative frameworks To what degree did the beliefs about standards of acceptability described above operate as coherent epistemological frameworks or as loose collections of ideas in each student’s mind? To address these questions I conducted a consistency analysis of students’ references to standards of acceptability. That is, if students’ beliefs operated as frameworks, they would not only show consistency in the type of argumentative orientation used in their responses (i.e. A or B above), but they would also draw on a variety of mutually supporting standards of acceptability (e.g. empirical strength, explanatory power, human understanding and narrative strength). I considered students who favoured a particular orientation in at least 75 per cent of their references to standards and who


FIGURE 7.2: BIVARIATE PLOT OF RELATIVE RELEVANCE ATTRIBUTED TO ‘REPRODUCING THE PAST’ (X) BY NUMBER OF STANDARDS OF ACCEPTABILITY ADDRESSED WITHIN THIS ORIENTATION (Y)

address at least three of the four different standards previously described, as holding a framework-like epistemological orientation. My analysis revealed three groups of students. Of the sixteen students in my sample, seven showed a consistent framework-like reasoning embracing historians’ ability to ‘reproduce the past’: Nell (S–01), Brian (S–02), Elizabeth (S–03), Ryan (S–04), Jessica (S–05), Nina (S–07) and Nicole (S–08). These youngsters referred to matters of accuracy, completeness and objectivity in between 81.25 and 100 per cent of the claims they made. For example, all of Nicole’s references to standards of acceptability fell within this orientation. In addition, she referred to the four standards of acceptability included in the coding system (i.e. empirical base, explanatory power, human understanding and narrative strength). She illustrated the most definite case of a framework-like reproducing-the-past orientation. Figure 7.2 presents a bivariate plot of relative relevance attributed to reproducing the past by number of standards of acceptability addressed within this orientation. These seven students were trained in science and had little to no training in historical research. Conversely, Figure 7.3 presents a bivariate plot of individual students’ percentage of responses coded as organizing the past against the number of standards of acceptability that they addressed. Analysis of the figure allowed me to identify five students who addressed three or four standards of acceptability drawing systematically on an organizing-the-past epistemology: Caitlin (S–10), Daniel (S–12), Alissa (S–13), Jill (S–14) and Laura (S-16). These students clearly favoured this epistemological orientation and exhibited a rich understanding of the various criteria by which historians assess and warrant their accounts. The clearest example of a framework like approach was Daniel (S–12)


FIGURE 7.3: BIVARIATE PLOT OF RELATIVE RELEVANCE ATTRIBUTED TO ‘ORGANIZING THE PAST’ (X) BY NUMBER OF STANDARDS OF ACCEPTABILITY ADDRESSED WITHIN THIS ORIENTATION (Y)

whose 51 claims within this epistemological view represented 94.44 per cent of his total number of coded claims addressing all standards throughout the coded question clusters. This student had been trained in historical and scientific research. The four remaining students had been trained in historical research with little to no training in scientific inquiry. Finally, four students in my sample exhibited clear epistemic inclinations but their response distribution across orientations and standards was insufficient to ascertain a coherent epistemological stance. Among them, three Jackie (S–06), Ben (S–11) and Miranda (S–15)—examined Dawidowicz’ and Goldhagen’s historical accounts addressing all standards of acceptability and drawing on an organizing-the-past epistemology to a great degree (relative presence 62.07 per cent, 69.23 per cent and 67.44 per cent respectively). Among these students one, Jackie, was an award winner in both disciplines. The remaining two (Ben and Miranda) were trained in history but not in science. The fourth student in this group, Karen (S-9), addressed all standards of acceptability but exhibited 71.43 per cent of responses under a’reproducing the past’—a small 3.57 percentage below my criterion for framework-like reasoning. This student had been trained in scientific but not in historical research. On the role of disciplinary training background

My coherence analysis suggested a strong association between students’ research background and their favoured epistemological orientation. When reasoning about the acceptability of historical accounts, students trained in scientific research tended to favour an objectivist stance. In contrast, those


trained in historical research overwhelmingly favoured a view of historical accounts as organizing the past for contemporary audiences. A two-tailed t-test confirmed the statistical significance of the difference in beliefs between the two groups (t-value=20.30; p

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