Page 133 - Powerful Social Studies for Elementary Students 4th Edition

not display advanced forms of historical empathy reflecting deep and contextualized knowledge of the people they studied. They did not, for example, evaluate historical fig- ures’ goals or strategies by taking into account the information available to the individuals at the time in question, or point to the individuals’ prior philosophies or experiences that might have predisposed them toward particular views or courses of action.
The students expressed many inaccurate assumptions or misconceptions. Most of these were expressed prior to the instruction and were not repeated in the post-unit interviews, but some of them persisted, especially misconceptions related to the temporal or spatial relationships among the people and events being studied. The students clearly needed help in seeing how the historical content they were studying fit within the broader sweep of human history (e.g., contextualized with reference to timelines, landmark events and inventions, and social and political developments).
In the process of teaching history to fifth graders, VanSledright (2002) found it neces- sary to address affective as well as cognitive barriers to children’s construction of histori- cal interpretations. Initially, his students showed strong preferences for simple storylines, free of ambiguities or complications. They wanted “the true history.” Later, after expo- sure to multiple interpretations reflecting conflicting biases, they swung to the other extreme, thinking that there is no way to know what really happened so that one account is as good as the next. Still later, after learning about and applying basic principles of historiography, they began to understand that some accounts were more defensible than others because they were supported by more convincing evidence and arguments. Despite this developing understanding, however, their ultimate interpretations of histori- cal events were strongly conditioned by their preexisting knowledge and biases.
Research by Hynd and Guzzetti (1998) also suggests that teacher scaffolding of stu- dents’ exposures to conflicting interpretations is needed to help them tolerate frustration and eventually achieve more sophisticated understandings. These authors found that stu- dents entered the study of Christopher Columbus with oversimplified heroic views of Columbus (e.g., he was adventurous, brave, and smart) that included some misconcep- tions (e.g., he was Spanish, landed on the North American continent, was the first to believe that the earth was round, and was regarded as a great man during his lifetime). They exposed the students to three different texts. The first was a traditional text that reinforced and elaborated the students’ views of Columbus as unambiguously heroic. The second was a revisionist text that depicted Columbus as a greedy gold seeker who “discovered” only islands rather than continents and who cruelly mistreated the Native Americans he encountered. The third text offered a balanced view of Columbus’s good and bad qualities, directly addressed and refuted common misconceptions about him, and concluded that if he had not sailed west and changed the world, someone else would have. The third text had the strongest impact on students, both in reducing their misconceptions and in inducing them to adopt a more nuanced rather than an unambig- uously positive view of Columbus as a person. Most students apparently read the first text without noticing that some of its information contradicted their existing misconcep- tions, and many of them apparently rejected much of the content of the second text because they viewed it as biased.
Most of the research on children’s thinking about history comes from studies of chil- dren in grades four and above. However, our own interviews with K–3 students included questions about historical topics. They revealed that these younger students possessed bits and pieces of historical knowledge that they picked up from the holiday curriculum at school or (more typically) from children’s literature or media. Furthermore, the knowledge they did have was limited and often distorted by misconceptions. When shown an illustration of a tipi, for example, almost all of the students knew what it
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CHAPTER 5 How Can I Teach History Powerfully? 105