Von Borries, Bodo. “Representation and Understanding of History.” In International Review of History Education, Vol. 2: Learning and Reasoning in History, edited by J. F. Voss & M. Carretero, 360-77. Portland, OR: Woburn Press, 1998.
This chapter discusses some of the preceding chapters in the book’s fourth section, History Teaching and Understanding. Von Borries states that, while the work completed by the preceding authors is valuable and useful, as with most works they do not offer a total solution for ‘historical learning’ or ‘historical consciousness.’ While Von Borries emphasizes important findings, he also is critical of certain details. He also provides parallel results from a representative study he completed on students in East and West Germany in 1992. He feels that through the presentation of these results, by linking them to findings of other authors in this section and by putting forth the proposal for further interpretation, the international network of information and exchange will improve. This may lead to the moderation of the limitations of the previous specialized studies. He discusses Voss et. al’s work on the perceptions of historical concepts and the research in Germany on social conventions and cultural particularity. He then discussesFernandez-Corte and Garcia-Madruga’s study, which deals with the construction of historical knowledge, and compares it to the research in Germany concerning whether to teach knowledge or adaptation. He then turns to Jacott et. al’s discussion of understanding historical characters and his study in Germany concerning the dependency of historical consciousness on age and culture. The author concludes that there is a need for cross-cultural comparisons, intensive studies on the effects of learning and teaching, comparisons of socially accepted values, and replications of some old studies with high methodological quality.