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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 Question-driven Analytical Applied knowledge Evidence-based interpretation. To quote Bruce Lesh:.

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Historical Thinking and Historical Empathy

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  1. Historical Thinkingand Historical Empathy

  2. Historical Thinking is. . . • Not • Recall • Mere reenactment • Mere process or method with no facts • Instead it is • Question-driven • Analytical • Applied knowledge • Evidence-based interpretation

  3. 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.

  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

  5. 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

  6. 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.

  7. 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.

  8. Asking Questions and Framing Problems • An “unnatural act” • Moving beyond the facts to significance • “Six honest serving men” • Who • What • When • Where • Why • How

  9. 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

  10. 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

  11. 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”)

  12. 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

  13. 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

  14. 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.

  15. Recognizing Limits to Knowledge • Acknowledging the silences in the sources • 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)

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