Transcript Historical Thinking and Historical Empathy

Historical Thinking
and Historical Empathy
Historical Thinking is. . .
• Not
– Recall
– Mere reenactment
– Mere process or method with no facts
• Instead it is
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Question-driven
Analytical
Applied knowledge
Evidence-based interpretation
To quote Bruce Lesh:
• History is about the debate between
competing interpretations of events,
individuals, and ideas of the past based on
the utilization of historical evidence.
– Bruce Lesh, “Why Won’t You Just Tell Us the Answer? Teaching
Historical Thinking Grades 7-12 (Portland, ME: Stenhouse
Publishers, 2011), 4.
Essential Skills
• Posing historical questions/framing historical
problems
• Establishing significance
• Correlation from disparate sources
• Sourcing
• Contextualization
• Citing—supporting claims with evidence
• Critical engagement with “the other side”
• Recognizing limitations to knowledge
Historical Empathy is NOT
• Putting students in positions where they will have
the same beliefs or experience the same emotions
experienced by people living in the past.
• An exercise in imagination over
– Being (“imagine you are an Apache warrior”)
– Identification (“identify with Adolf Hitler”)
– Sympathy (“sympathize with victims of slavery”)
• Being the person in the past
Historical Empathy IS
• Understanding the past as making sense in light of the way
people saw things.
• Asking “why did an individual or group of people, given a
set of circumstances, act in a certain way?”
• Judging past actors in their own historically situated
context and on its terms.
• Cultivated as an observer of the past, not as an actor in the
past.
• An exercise in a specific type of imagination—Historical
imagination.
Historical Imagination is. . .
• Not
– Fictional or fantasy—making up information
– Detached from evidence or context
– Imagining myself in the past as I think today
• Instead, it is
– Rooted in students’ understanding of context and their
analysis of evidence
– An intellectual leap between information in historical
sources and gaps within the evidence trail.
Asking Questions
and Framing Problems
• An “unnatural act”
• Moving beyond the facts to significance
• “Six honest serving men”
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Who
What
When
Where
Why
How
Establishing Significance
• What is the historian’s purpose in investigating a
given event?
• Was the event a catalyst for great, enduring
change?
• Can the event or figure be linked to larger
processes to
– Illuminate some aspect of past experience poorly
understood
– Illustrate the impact of larger events
Correlation
• Identifying key information in multiple
sources
• Supplementing information from one source
with additional information from another
• Corroborating claims in one source with
additional supporting assertions from
another document
Source Criticism
• Identifying the source
– What kind of source (e.g. letter, diary, military order, official
record)
– Who, when, where, why, how produced?
• Adjusting for bias
– What evidence of bias is present (in purpose of document, internal
vocabulary or tone?
– What information may be gleaned from the bias?
– How can the bias be corrected (e.g. correlation with other sources,
“reading against the grain”)
Contextualization
• Identifying time of production
• Recognizing the social and cultural setting
in which the document was produced
– Evaluating the document’s information, claims,
and biases with reference to its cultural context
• Purpose: to understand
• Not to give a moral pass
• Not to impose present values and prejudices
Citing
• Linking a historian’s claims with the
primary evidence supporting those claims
• Footnotes with information allowing others
to find and check the source
• The historian’s equivalent of scientific
repetition of experimentation
Critical Engagement with “the
Other Side”
• Identifying the range of rival interpretations
of a historical event
• Identifying the strengths and weaknesses of
rival arguments
• Positioning one’s own argument within the
range of rivals and explaining its
advantages over rival arguments.
Recognizing Limits to
Knowledge
• Acknowledging the silences in the sources
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No comprehensive records of the past
Some information lost
Some information inadvertently omitted
Some information deliberately suppressed
• Acknowledging imperfect understanding of
context
• Acknowledging inaccessibility of some
information (e.g. psychological motives)