Making the Past Present in the Lives of Students

Over the last couple of years my friend Dave Scott and I have been engaged in a dialogue about alternative and innovative pedagogies in social studies, particularly in history education, and how to make encounters with the past through history content relevant and engaging for students. Dave is a a social studies teacher at the Calgary Science School and a PhD student at the University of Calgary. Both Dave and I, like many social studies teachers, came into the subject area as people already fascinated and motivated to learn about the past, but we realize that students do not necessarily have the same enthusiasm for the content that we do.

• How might we get the history content to inhabit students lives and provoke their interest in inquiry?
• How can we help students to appreciate the relevance of curriculum content to the lives they are living now?
• What pedagogic approaches, connected to knowledge, skill, and attitude outcomes, might encourage students to recognize their respective and collective capacities to be agents of change in their communities?

One of the pedagogic approaches that both of us have been learning to integrate into our teaching practice is Kent den Heyer’s throughline questions concept. These questions are structured to provide students and teachers with the intellectual conditions  and parameters through which they connect prescribed content with themselves as individual and collective agents to understand, participate in and shape our communities and the world we live in. Good throughline questions implicate students and teachers in learning by encouraging and supporting increasingly sophisticated understandings and responses to relevant and unresolved issues, problems, and challenges. Here are a few examples:

• How might our substantial attention to wars in history education impact students’ understanding of conflict resolution?
• How does our conception of who ‘we’ are in the present shape how we tell stories of the past, especially when the stories shed light on uncomfortable and unpleasant aspects of ‘our’ past.
• How might historical examples of isolation and integration, such as Meiji Period Japan, help us to better understand and live with economic, political and social globalization in the present and future?

Dave and I have been working with the notion of history content as analogy for current conditions to help students ask questions about the present and the future by drawing on enriched and focused understandings of the past. The focus of one of our conversations was the Renaissance topic, one of three topics in grade 8 social studies in Alberta. Dave and I tossed around ideas for how to take this topic up with his students.

We wondered whether students might develop deeper understanding of the concepts, characters and events of the Renaissance and better appreciate the urban environment they live in if they were asked a kind of question that students are seldom asked. In this case: Does Calgary possess the necessary conditions to be a Renaissance city? Essentially, how is the Calgary of today like or not like Florence and Sienna of the 15th century? We recognize that the question asked of students is not really a throughline question; I will come back to this in a moment.

In helping Dave to plan for this topic, both he and I agreed that we wanted to interrupt the ‘general knowledge survey approach’ that often occurs in students’ encounters with the past in classrooms. So, rather than students taking up all aspects of this question on an individual basis and skim across the surface of the topic, students, working in small groups, researched a domain or discipline of the Renaissance, for several weeks, such as medicine, architecture, art, or science in both the 15th and 21st century contexts. They developed some specialist knowledge, drawing on a range of sources, building a knowledge base of the history content because they needed this to research and respond to the question about their city in the present. Dave guided them through historical inquiry process and other elements of historical and social research.

Dave coordinated opportunities for students to interview experts in history, business, medicine, the arts, and education. The students did extensive research using online resources. They talked among themselves and figured out what they needed to know, how they were going to find it, and how it helped them to respond to the topic question. And finally, using videos they produced, they shared their insights with their peers.

Students found the opportunity to do original research challenging and interesting. Taking up a resolved question for which students are expected to reach a conclusion that experts have already reached is helpful in aiding students to understand how knowledge comes to be, but when we supplement this with the opportunity to practice these competencies in relation to new questions, we allow students the opportunity to generate new knowledge and offer well-considered insights. Young people are capable of doing this research, and, somewhat unencumbered by the assupmtions and dispositions of grown-up researchers, they sometimes offer insights that surprise us. The best example of this is the Blackawton Bees study.

When we talked with students after they finished this topics most told us they really enjoyed the approach and stressed how different it had been from what they had been used to in social studies. Several students also pointed out the deficiencies in the question they had been asked, especially that no one was insisting that they do anything with that knowledge to help them improve and/or transform their community. We found this to be both surprising and pleasing. These students seemed to really want their history lesson to do more than help them understand the past, they were really engaged when the past seemed to give them a fresh perspective on the present.