Peter Seixas

The Community of Inquiry as a Basis for Knowledge and Learning: The Case of History

Science, social science, literary studies, philosophy, and history have all encountered challenges to the notion of “objectivity” in the wake of the Kuhnian revolution. These challenges, which problematize knowledge itself, have revived interest in the pragmatist notion of knowledge based in a community of inquiry. The related social constructivist recasting of curriculum thought in the past 15 years has been based not so much on the revision in the epistemology of the subject disciplines as in developments in learning theory and psychology. Using the discipline of history as a case study, this paper compares the scholarly community of inquiry with the community of inquiry in the classroom and examines the role of the teacher in negotiating the knowledge generated in each.

A Model of Historical Thinking

Abstract ‘Historical thinking’ has a central role in the theory and practice of history education. At a minimum, history educators must work with a model of historical thinking if they are to formulate potential progression in students’ advance through a school history curriculum, test that progression empirically, and shape instructional experiences in order to maximize that progression. Where do they look, and where should they look, in order to construct such models? Over the past several decades, three major strands have developed, one based in the empirically minded and instruction-oriented British Schools Council History Project, a second through the more philosophically oriented German field of history didactics and historical consciousness, and a third in the US. All three had roots in the historiography and philosophy of their own national traditions. Canadian history educators have been working with a pragmatic hybrid defined around six ‘historical thinking concepts.’ While this model has both been highly influential in the reform of Canadian history curricula and prompted adaptations elsewhere, there has been only minimal theoretical discussion exploring the relationship of these concepts to each other or to the three traditions which helped to shape them. This article is a contribution towards filling that gap.

Translation and its discontents: key concepts in English and German history education

Abstract Key terms and concepts are crucial tools in teaching and learning in the disciplines. Different linguistic traditions approach such tools in diverse ways. This paper offers an initial contribution by a monolingual Anglophone history educator in dialogue with German history educators. It presents three different scenarios for the potential of translation between German and Anglophone research communities. In the case of Geschichtsbewußtsein or ‘historical consciousness’, the Anglophone field has already been enriched by the introduction of a new concept over the past decade. In the case of the fundamental group of concepts – ‘source’, ‘evidence’, ‘trace’ and ‘account’ – the Anglophone field is shown to be in surprising disarray, but clarification is within reach. German history education researchers may have a similar need; if so, perhaps they can benefit from the English language discussion. In the third case, that of Triftigkeit or ‘plausibility’, the German field is poised, again to make a significant contribution to a gaping hole in the theory, research and practice of Anglophone history education.

National history and beyond

Taylor and Francis CUS_A_404698.sgm 10.1080/00220270903045253 Journal of Curri ulum Studies 0 22-0272 (p i t)/1366-5839 (online) Original Article 2 09 & Francis 0002 9 Peter eixas p .s @ubc.ca Within the next couple of decades World War II will slide beyond the horizon of living memory as its surviving participants meet the ends of their lives and even those who experienced the war as very young children reach old age. Meanwhile, the world has been reconfigured dramatically, and so too has the war’s memory. In the USA, a Republican administration erects the triumphant new World War II memorial in the middle of the Mall in Washington, DC, to celebrate ‘the good war’ and to overshadow the ambivalent and divisive Vietnam War Memorial. In Russia, the sacrifice and triumph of the Great Patriotic War are memorialized with rejuvenated fanfare in the 9 May Victory Day parades. The Baltic states, no longer part of its empire, view the same day as marking the beginning of a half-decade of oppression from which they have only recently emerged into independent nationhood. The politics of memory over the Nanjing Massacre, Hiroshima, Pearl Harbor, and Vichy, to name a few, are similarly fraught with conflicting agendas of national survival and collective guilt.1 The memory of war is the gold standard as an instrument to shore up the coherence of the national story, the valourizing of national heroes, and the significance of the nation on the international stage. Representations of wars fought are the quintessential nation-building invocations of the past. They convey powerful notions of national origins, the confrontation with monumental challenges, and the surmounting of lethal threats. They define heroic values and divide with stunning clarity the collective us from the enemy them (Lorenz 2004). Finally, they provide a crucible for an overwhelming and never-ending collective debt to those who sacrificed for the collective good (Bodnar 1992). Wars are, however, only the limit case: other historical events can function similarly to build the nation through memorial practice. However, a funny thing happened on the way to the parade. Countervailing forces mobilized in the arena of public memory in the form of counter-memories of indigenous peoples, ethnic and national minorities, other national groups beyond the nation’s borders, and, in important ways, the evolving discipline of history, with its Enlightenment notions of open, critical inquiry, liberalism, humanism, and truth (Berger and Lorenz 2008).

Who Needs a Canon

What do we mean by a ‘canon’? The notion of the canon has origins in Catholic religious doctrine. It comes to history education by way of debates over literature, as a critique of the notion of a universally valid — but overwhelmingly white and male — list of the greatest authors and their major works. Over the last several decades literary critics have high-lighted the gendered and racialized nature of the traditional list, and have sought either to broaden the representation, or to question the notion of a universally valid list of ‘the greats’ at all. The critical use of the term ‘canon’ has an additional rhetorical bite, since it comes with connotations of papal authority, tradition and faith: the canon is the received wisdom from fundamental texts, as opposed to critical readings and rational discourse.

Subjects and Disciplines : asymmetries in a collaborative curriculum development project

Abstract Teachers and university professors hold strong, and often different, views on school subjects and academic disciplines. This paper explores the meanings of subjects and disciplines for teachers and university professors who have different subject or disciplinary affiliations as these emerge within discussions about curriculum in a professional development context. It describes a group of university professors and secondary school teachers who met to discuss new developments in research in the humanities and social sciences and their impact on school curriculum. The professors brought their expertise in their academic disciplines and their teaching experience to the conversations. Teachers brought their varied disciplinary knowledge, pedagogical content knowledge and a deep understanding of schools. They perceived their primary goal as making ‘translations’ and ‘transformations’ between university and school. There were many bridges to cross within these complex and multi‐layered conversations. Th...

Progress, Presence and Historical Consciousness: Confronting Past, Present And Future In Postmodern Time

It is possible to long for the past: we long for something that once was present but is no longer – nostalgia. We hope for something that has never been present but might be in the future – dreams: this is the core of progress in the modernist project. What can “longing for the present” mean? We desire a situation that we already have? We long to be what we already are? The phrase is both intellectually provocative and emotionally evocative. It is an invitation for speculative and theoretical rumination. My attempt to shine a light on this misty and shrouded terrain begins with a survey of the idea of progress. The idea of progress sets up a particular relationship between past, present and future, and provided a key intellectual underpinning for the project of modernity. This sets the context for a second exploration: the relationship between past and present in our own historical moment, early in the twenty-first century. Challenges to the idea of progress currently exist on at least two levels. Ontologically, the links among science, technological progress and human welfare – the essential progressive nexus – are under threat from the escalating destruction of the global environment: the doomsayers “the end is near” is rationally plausible. At the same time, epistemologically, the capacity of any historian to make judgements about progress (or decline) embedded in a grand narrative of human development is viewed, at best, with critical scepticism. In the third part of the article, using empirical data from research with young people, I sketch some implications for history education in these times.

'But we didn't live in those times’: Canadian students negotiate past and present in a time of war

Abstract This article examines the ways in which students reason about past and present in relation to questions of ethnic identities and loyalty to the state in a time of war. In digitally recorded discussion groups of three, they studied documents from the largely German–Canadian town of Berlin, Ontario, which, responding to images of the German enemy, changed its name to ‘Kitchener’ in 1916. It examines how students make sense of the documents; how they use traces of the past to explore issues in the contemporary world; and what patterns of difference emerge in respect of their own ethnic identities and immigration histories. It concludes that, even with well-selected historical materials, most students need attentive guidance in the difficult tasks of drawing meaningful interpretations from them.

Research, Instruction, and Public Policy in the History Curriculum: A Symposium

Abstract Editors Note: As educators and policy—makers have attempted to reform or revitalize the school curriculum in the past decade, the history curriculum has been the subject of numerous research efforts and policy initiatives. But, as several of these authors note, policy recommendations are rarely informed by careful attention to either research on historical thinking and learning or to the concerns of classroom teachers. The following essays, which are based on a symposium held at the 1995 annual meeting of the College and University Faculty Assembly of NCSS, analyze the relationships among research, instruction and public policy regarding the history curriculum, and suggest ways of conceptualizing the future of history education. THEORY AND RESEARCH IN SOCIAL EDUCATION encourages reader responses that sustain and extend the dialogue initiated by this set of essays. See the Information for Authors in this issue for reply guidelines.

Historical Consciousness and Historical Thinking

In the field of history education, the terms “historical thinking” and “historical consciousness” draw from two different pedagogical traditions, Anglo-American and German, respectively. In this chapter, Seixas compares the two, asks where they overlap and explores the theoretical and practical benefits attained by clarifying their differences at a moment when history educators are increasingly involved in international dialogue and exchange. Examples are drawn from Quebecois research, the Swedish national curriculum, the German “FUER” model, Dutch heritage education and the Canadian Historical Thinking Project. The chapter concludes with questions and challenges currently facing both traditions.