This book reviews research on elementary & middle schools students' historical thinking.Grounded in the theoretical context of mediated action,it addresses the breadth of social practices, settings, ...purposes & tools that influence students.
The rise of mass-marketed literature specifically targeting child readers is a significant if often overlooked piece of a larger historical pattern in which contending cultural groups attempt to ...control the words and worlds available to different groups within and between societies. The work of Olive Beaupré Miller, author/editor from 1919-1954 of My Book House for Children, a series of books offering "children's classic literature graded from infancy to secondary school" (Taylor, 1986, p. 85), encapsulates this struggle in the early 20th century in the United States. Shunned by publishing elites for her mass-marketing techniques, Miller nonetheless shared their desire to preserve and pass on a classic Western literary canon. Her mass-marketing techniques, however, breached class boundaries, placing classic literature, along with evolutionary frameworks regarding human development, race, ethnicity and gender, in the homes of working class and immigrant families. Examining these books illuminates some of the challenges of educating for a tolerant, cosmopolitan world for children in a deeply intolerant society, then and now.
Elementary students are often hampered by a tendency to ascribe innovation to increasing human intelligence or individual agency rather than increased information, better access to information, or ...collective and institutional agency. As a result, they struggle to build evidence-based interpretations of the distant past. A fifth-grade "experimental archaeology" approach to studying ancient Eastern Woodlands Indians served as an intellectual tipping point in students' interpreting ancient people's intellect, ingenuity, and agency. As fifth-graders participated in a field-based experience with chaîne opératoire (the sequence of operations) for tools and technologies, classroom-based opportunities to consider material objects as primary sources, and opportunities for reflection, they confirmed the power of "engaged understanding" in supporting the humanistic and civic goals of social studies.
In order to investigate elementary children's understanding of historical time, we conducted open-ended interviews with 58 children from kindergarten through sixth grade. In order to overcome the ...limitations of previous research in this area, we asked children to place pictures from various periods of American history in order and to talk about their reasoning. We found that even the youngest children made some basic distinctions in historical time and that those became increasingly differentiated with age. Dates, however, had little meaning for children before third grade, and, although third and fourth graders understood the numerical basis of dates, only by fifth grade did students extensively connect particular dates with specific background knowledge. At all ages, children's placement of most pictures revealed substantial agreement with one another and with the correct order; this agreement indicates a significant body of understanding of historical chronology. History instruction in the elementary grades, then, might productively focus on helping students refine and extend the knowledge they have gained about history; information which relies on dates, however, is unlikely to activate their temporal understanding.
The study reported here provides an example of the complex interface among historical study, current issues, and adolescents' complex social worlds. The authors investigated the ways in which a group ...of eighth grade students conceptualize the significance of gender in the context of a study of antebellum U.S. history. Fifty students participated in a set of inquiries into women's involvement in nineteenth-century U.S. reform movements, industrialization, and culture contact and conflict on the shifting frontier. Classroom interactions, museum-like displays, presentations, and interviews contrast students' public constructions and private responses to issues of gender and sexuality in the context of historical study. Among other findings, students identified women's experiences as historically significant, recognized, analyzed, and expressed interest in the variety of perspectives represented by women they studied, and worried about "reverse sexism"- studying women at the expense of men. In addition, students' historical inquiries generated discussion about current issues of gender and sexuality, both inside and outside the classroom. In discussing the contrasts between the classroom culture and the encircling "homophobic hallways," the authors suggest the importance of establishing environments where 1) gender is not an "add-on" or "extra" but fundamental point of analysis, and 2) adolescents build a vocabulary for discussing human rights issues and engage in critiquing current practices in regard to gender and sexuality.
Despite a somewhat strengthened research base on teaching and learning history in the early years of schooling, fewer and fewer younger students encounter sustained instruction in history. Our review ...of the literature suggests that, if our aims for history are civic as well as humanistic, then cross‐disciplinary, thematic inquiries into questions that engage citizens in pluralist democracies often offer a more authentic context for historical study than might a single‐subject approach. This, in turn, requires that the careful attention researchers have directed at the intellectual tools of history (i.e., perspective, agency, causality) be similarly focused on the historical questions, content, and concepts that students will investigate.
Maintains that children's ability to understand and use narrative precedes their ability to understand and use other genres. Asserts that the link between history and narrative is overlooked in ...discussions about children's historical understanding. Argues that children should use narrative. (CFR)
