Understanding history

Theorizing Historical Consciousness

Volumn , Issue , 2004, Pages 129-164

  Lee, Peter ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF LONDON   (United Kingdom)

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EID: 84966762401     PISSN: None     EISSN: None     Source Type: Book    
DOI: None     Document Type: Chapter

References (44)

1. M.C. Lemon, The Discipline of History and the History of Thought (London: Routledge, 1995), 9-10.
2. C. Lorenz, ‘Can Histories Be True? Narrativism, Positivism, and the –Metaphorical Turn,—‘ History and Theory 37, no. 3 (1998): 309-29
3. P. Seixas, ‘Schweigen! Die Kinder! Or, Does Post-modern History Have a Place in Schools?’ in P.N. Stearns, P. Seixas, and S. Wineburg, eds, Knowing, Teaching and Learning History (New York: New York University Press, 2000).
4. Of course history of science may cause special problems for the idea that history deals with common sense or everyday concepts, even if we assume that historical concepts are borrowed from the human activities historians seek to explore.
5. A follower of Ankersmit might want to say that such names pick out the metaphorical ‘narrative substances’ that are at the heart of historical narratives, but such a characterization would commit me to an argument I would prefer to leave to more qualified scholars, and to theoretical baggage that I do not want to carry.
6. M. Oakeshott, On History (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1983), 6.
7. There is a problem about terminology here. In the United Kingdom it has been common to use ‘second-order’ ideas to refer to ideas that children, adolescents, lay adults, and professional historians employ in thinking about the nature of our access to the past, the historical claims we make, and the historical accounts we give. In this chapter I have used ‘metahistorical’ for such ideas, perhaps at the risk of hinting at wider philosophical agendas I do not intend to raise. Whereas ‘second-order’ could apply to higher-order substantive concepts, ‘metahistorical’ unambiguously goes beyond the substantive.
8. Patient readers may be willing to forgive a long - if still insufficient - note at this point, on the grounds that more needs to be said about the notion of metahistorical ideas, but that introducing caveats into the main text will interrupt what is, after all, an avowedly introductory argument. First, the distinction between substantive and metahistorical ideas is not marked by a rigid demarcation line. The idea of change, for example, might be thought to be substantive rather than metahistorical: surely it is a matter of understanding what substantive patterns of change there have been in the past. There is truth in this, but the difficulty is that youngsters often see change as equivalent to events. This makes accounts of change the same as narra lives of events, and students cannot distinguish between (borrowing Shemilt’s distinction) ‘what happens’ and ‘what is going on.’ Looked at from this perspective, the concept of change can be thought of as a metahistorical understanding, while people’s knowledge of patterns of change in the past is substantive knowledge. The latter may inform the former, but certain tacit assumptions in the former may prevent students from making any sense of the latter. The distinction between substantive and metahistorical ideas is thus an approximate working distinction, based on the difference between the questions that historians pursue in doing history and the ideas that play a role in characterizing and helping students understand the kind of activity that history (the discipline) is. Second, talk of ‘ideas’ here is clearly loose, and conceals a more complex picture. At the very least we need to recognize that some of the metahistorical ‘ideas’ may (for some purposes) be thought of more as dispositions than concepts. An important issue for students’ understanding of history is likely to be whether they tend to look for links between wider beliefs and values and particular actions. Do they write off strange actions or social practices, or do they work with a presumption - however defeasible - that people in the past did things for reasons? Other ideas about the past may be thought of as more like principles or generalizations than concepts (but, of course, that begs the question as to how we are to understand concepts). Such principles as ‘Peoples’ choices are both enabled and constrained by the choices of others,’ ‘Actions have unintended consequences,’ or ‘People’s reasons do not always give a complete explanation of what happens to them’ may be crutches for beginners, but form an important part of what students need to learn about the past.
9. E. Margolis and S. Laurence, ‘Concepts and Cognitive Science,’ in S. Laurence and E. Margolis, eds, Concepts: Core Readings (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), 3-81.
10. P.J. Lee and R. Ashby, unpublished research at the University of London Institute of Education.
11. One possibility here is to say that both these students are - at least at this point in their discussion - showing evidence of what Riisen would call exemplary historical consciousness. However, it is difficult to see how Jorn Rusen’s categories for the development of historical consciousness, at least in the forms they take in English translation, can be made to take account of the crucial metahistorical differences involved. (See below, in the section ‘Historical Consciousness and Historical Understanding,’ further discussion of and references to Rusen’s publications available in English.)
12. D. Shemilt, The Devils’ Locomotive,’ History and Theory 22, no. 4 (1983): 1-18 (implicitly) and (explicitly)
13. PJ. Lee and R. Ashby, ‘Empathy, Perspective Taking, and Rational Understanding,’ in O.L. Davis Jr, S. Foster, and E. Yeager, eds, Historical Empathy and Perspective Taking in the Social Studies (Boulder, CO: Rowman and Littlefield, 2001), 21-50.
14. D. Shemilt, Evaluation Study (Edinburgh: Holmes McDougall, 1980)
15. PJ. Lee, R. Ashby, and A.K. Dickinson, ‘Progression in Children’s Ideas about History,’ in M. Hughes, ed., Progression in Learning, BERA Dialogue (Clevedon, Bristol, PA, and Adelaide: Multilingual Matters, 1996), esp. 61-4
16. PJ. Lee and R. Ashby, ‘Progression in Historical Understanding among Students Ages 7-14,’ in Seixas, Stearns, and Wineburg, eds, Teaching, Learning and Knowing History, 199-222.
17. LJ. Goldstein, Historical Knowing (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1976).
18. R.F. Atkinson, Knowledge and Explanation in History (London: Macmillan, 1978).
19. This and the other examples in this section are from Project Chata (Concepts of History and Teaching Approaches 7-14), funded by the Economic and Social Research Council.
20. R. Ashby and PJ. Lee, ‘Children’s Concepts of Empathy and Understanding in History,’ in C. Portal, ed., The History Curriculum for Teachers (Lewes: Palmer Press, 1987), 62-88
21. PJ. Lee, R. Ashby, and A.K. Dickinson, ‘Just Another Emperor: Understanding Action in the Past,’ InternationalJournal of’Educational Research 27, no. 3, ed.J. Voss (1997): 233-44
22. D. Shemilt, ‘Beauty and the Philosopher: Empathy in History and Classroom,’ in A.K. Dickinson, PJ. Lee, and PJ. Rogers, eds, Learning History (London: Heinemann Educational Books, 1984), 39-84
23. D. Shemilt, ‘Adolescent Ideas about Evidence and Methodology,’ in Portal, ed., The History Curriculum for Teachers, 39-61.
24. It is possible that ideas about evidence may clash with more tenaciously held tacit understandings than ideas about feudalism, but that is not the same as saying that the former is ‘harder’ than the latter, let alone that it is ‘too difficult’ for school students.
25. J. Rusen, ‘Paradigm Shift and Theoretical Reflection in Western German Historical Studies,’ in P. Duvenage, ed., Studies in Metahistory (Pretoria: Human Sciences Research Council, 1993), 162.
26. J. Rusen, ‘Experience, Interpretation, Orientation: Three Dimensions of Historical Learning,’ in Duvenage, ed., Studies in Metahistory, 87.
27. M. Oakeshott, ‘The Activity of Being an Historian,’ in Rationalism in Politics (London: Methuen, 1962), 137-67.
28. J. Rusen, ‘Experience, Interpretation, Orientation,’ 89-90.
29. A Riisen’s Chapter in this volume and also the collection of his papers in Duvenage, ed., Studies in Metahistory, in particular ‘Historical Narration: Foundation, Types, Reason’ (pp. 3-14), ‘What Is Theory in History?’ (15-47), ‘The Development of Narrative Competence in Historical Learning: An Ontogenetical Hypothesis concerning Moral Consciousness’ (63-84), and ‘Experience, Interpretation, Orientation: Three Dimensions of Historical Learning’ (85-93).
30. P. Seixas, ‘Historical Consciousness: A Scheme of Progress in Knowledge for a Post-progressive Age,’ in jiirgen Straub, ed., Narrative, Identity and Historical Consciousness: On the Psychological Construction of Time and History (Cambridge: Berghahn Books, in press).
31. Lee, Ashby, and Dickinson, ‘Progression in Children’s Ideas about History,’ esp. 61-4.
32. J. Rusen, ‘The Development of Narrative Competence in Historical Learning,’ in P. Duvenage, ed., Studies in Metahistory, 75.
33. Lee and Ashby, ‘Progression in historical understanding.’
34. The chapters in this collection give some indication of the range and scope of what is potentially included in a theory of historical consciousness.
35. Although work on students’ ideas about historical accounts is still relatively sparse, there is a considerable body of work examining the development of other strands of students’ metahistorical ideas. See above, notes 10, 11, and 15. Talk of ‘strands’ here is not meant to imply that students’ ideas are necessarily clustered in the particular strands picked out, but that this is one defensible way of looking at those ideas. Once again, the kinds of question we ask will influence the ways in which we interpret the ideas we seek to understand. It would be perfectly possible to construct typologies based on different questions, working with different interpretative constructs, and hence different ‘strands.’
36. The most influential publication was Denis Shemilt’s Evaluation Study.
37. In subsequent phases a further sample of 92 students were interviewed at the beginning of the spring and the end of the summer term, and then the 23 year 3 children from this sample were followed through years 4 and 5, using the same questions and interview schedule structure, but different content.
38. ‘Accounts’ is used in this chapter to cover both narratives and developmental accounts of change, and is intended to avoid dichotomies between ‘mere narrative’ and ‘explanatory narrative.’ ‘Story’ will be used interchangeably with ‘account,’ because when talking with young children, ‘story’ is the nearest available intelligible equivalent.
39. F.R. Ankersmit, Narrative Logic: A Semantic Analysis of the Historian’s Language (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1983)
40. C. Behan McCullagh, The Truth of History (London: Routledge, 1998), esp. chap. 2. We hope that, despite our use of a concretized simplification, ‘the end of the Roman Empire,’ none of the central issues was closed down for students.
41. PJ. Lee, ‘–None of us was there—: Children’s Ideas about Why Historical Accounts Differ,’ in S. Ahonen et al., eds, Historiedidaktik, Norden 6, Nordisk Konferens om Historiedidaktik, Tampere 1996, (Copenhagen: Danmarks Laererh0jskole, 1997), 23-58.
42. Lee and Ashby, ‘Progression in Historical Understanding.’
43. Elsewhere in the Chata analysis we have been driven to use the neologism ‘aboutness’ to pick out the tendency of children to centre on overt contentwhat something is ‘about.’ (The Piagetian resonances of ‘centre’ are intended here.) Two sources, for example, are the same if they are ‘about the same thing.’ There is much to be pursued here, but no space to do so in this chapter; in any case more investigation is required.
44. Rusen, ‘Historical Narration,’ in Studies in Metahistory, 12.