This document discusses moving from an emphasis on historical literacy to developing a pedagogy of history. It argues that effective history teaching requires understanding how knowledge is constructed in the discipline and representing concepts in ways that make them comprehensible to students. While research has identified benchmarks of historical thinking, how these are taught in classrooms remains unclear. The document proposes examining how museums teach historical skills and knowledge through their use of artifacts and representations. It announces a symposium bringing together teacher educators and museum educators to improve understanding of history education and develop the signature pedagogy of the discipline.

1. From historical literacy to a
pedagogy of history
Philip Roberts
Assistant Professor, Teacher Education.
http://www.canberra.edu.au/faculties/education/teacher-ed/historical_learning
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2. Do we need to move from historical
literacy to a pedagogy of history?
• Fragments
• Questions
• Observations
• Suggestions
• A little libertarianism
… but not Answers
(that’s what the
symposium is for)
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3. Historical Literacy
Taylor,
T.
and
C.
Young
(2004)
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4. Thinking Historically
Memory-History Disciplinary-History
Substantive Knowledge Procedural Knowledge
Procedural Concepts:
Historical Significance
Continuity & change
Progress & decline
Evidence
Historical empathy
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5. Benchmarks of Historical Thinking
• Six historical thinking concepts of:
– Historical significance
– Evidence
– Continuity & change
– Cause & consequence
– Taking an historical perspective
– The moral/ethical dimension
Seixas, 2006
Centre for the Study of Historical Consciousness
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6. How
do
we
teach
them?
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7. Challenge the ‘generic’ wisdom
Authentic Pedagogy (Newman et al USA)
Productive Pedagogy (Lingard et al Qld)
Quality Teaching
(Gore et al NSW)
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8. A Critical Perspective - The Civics &
Citizenship Contradiction
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9. Pedagogy & History
• What is the pedagogy of Historical literacy &
understanding?
• If Historical literacy & understanding are unique
then surely so is their pedagogy.
• Mandated curriculum mandates the relationship
to the curriculum.
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10. Pedagogical Content Knowledge
• Lee Shulman (1986) argued that teachers subject knowledge and
pedagogy knowledge were often treated as mutually exclusive
domains.
• He proposed PCK (Pedagogical Content Knowledge)
• ‘The most regularly taught topics in one’s subject area, the most useful
forms of representation of those ideas, the most powerful analogies,
illustrations, examples, explanations, and demonstrations – in a word,
the ways of representing and formulating the subject that make it
comprehensible to others’ (Shulman, 1986 p.9)
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11. Pedagogical Content Knowledge
• PCK is a subject-specific knowledge that
includes:
– knowing the structures of the discipline
– knowing about the difficulties students come across as
they work with different subject matters
– knowing about the ways young people learn a
particular subject
– knowing about strategies to assist with and assess
learning.
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12. Pedagogical Content Knowledge
• Wineburg and Wilson isolate two broad categories
of instructional representation commonly used by
history teachers.
– Epistemological representations - These model how
historical knowledge is constructed and inquiry is carried
out. They connect specific subject matter to wider
historical concerns and may include focusing on how to
read documents critically, analyse and interpret visual
sources.
– Contextual representations - These are presentations of
particular events, concepts and ideas grounded in a
specific time and place.
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13. Pedagogical Content Knowledge
• Taylor and Young argue that ‘Effective teachers:
– present history as a constructivist/social activity that
involves students in working with the raw materials
historians use when shaping the past and in drawing
on the knowledge and understanding historians bring
to the history-making process
– understand that constructing the past is an
associative, speculative and imaginative process that
requires learners to connect and relate various pieces
of evidence to build images of the past.
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14. Discussion of effective history
teaching has stalled
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15. Questioning pedagogy & coverage
• Seixas and Peck (2004)
suggest that school
history has a distinct
purpose:
- the development of critical
skills in students
• Distinct from developing
general historical
understanding or even
specific content
knowledge
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16. Questioning pedagogy & coverage
• Confusing the purpose
of education with the
process.
• What about our
sociological learnings?
• Not a technical
redefinition of the
profession.
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17. Popularity ≠ Quality
• A belief that as history has grown more
popular, and been studied to a greater extend
by future teachers at university, that the
quality of teaching in schools would
subsequently increase
– Lévesque
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18. Signature pedagogies
• ‘effective teaching
results from core
values and
principles of our
courses and our
disciplines, rather
than from generic
views of learning’
– Chick, Haynie and
Gurung 2009.
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19. Signature pedagogies
• Understanding of the
disciplinary ways of thinking
• Good teaching extends beyond
the generic
• Humanities complex due to
‘critical thinking’
• Not about narrowing focus
• Broadening understanding
• Not confining pedagogy
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20. Decoding the Disciplines
• Focus on higher order
thinking over the last
decades has meant a
lack of focus on how to
teach the important
foundational ‘lower order’
skills in each discipline
upon which the higher
order skills are developed
– Middendorf and Pace 2004
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21. Decoding the Disciplines
• Reading in history, how is it different?
• Disciplines need to focus more on how people
learn them and that there are different cognitive
processes involved in each.
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22. Time to refocus
• It is time to refocus
the discipline of
history and its
advocates upon
developing
disciplinary skills
and knowledge.
• For School or
University?
• Democratic…
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23. Looking to Museum Education
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24. Museum Ed Journals
• Articles on:
– visual representation, multimodal displays, art history,
structuring exhibits and artefacts, constructivist
learning, memory, public history, authenticity, cultural
artefacts, local museums in communities.
– methodological issues like narrative and thematic
displays.
– large genre of presenting museum displays using the
advances in technology and modern entertainment
(and learning) forms
– educational theory and educational theorists.
– Much in common with education studies with similar
issues, theorists, pedagogical ideas and learning
theories
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25. Positioning the source
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26. Positioning the source
Content-Meaning
Context
Artefact / Source
(knowledge)
Context
Content-Meaning
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27. Enhancing everyone's work
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28. Rethinking history pedagogy – genuinely
build knowledge
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29. Do we need to move from historical
literacy to a pedagogy of history?
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30. A National Symposium
Building Bridges for historical learning: connecting teacher
education and museum education.
28-29 March 2011
Faculty of Education, University of Canberra
http://www.canberra.edu.au/faculties/education/teacher-ed/historical_learning
Theme;
This symposium aims to start a conversation between teacher educators and museum educators. It is
founded upon two premises:
1. There is still work to be done in the understanding of history education and that while we now know a
lot about historical literacy and historical thinking, how we transfer these to the classroom is still not
fully understood.
2. Teacher educators and museum educators have not traditionally actively shared knowledge, even
though they both work to promote historical learning.
The Symposium aims to:
• Facilitate connections between Museum Education and Teacher Education
• Share how each sector goes about teaching historical skills and understandings
• Understand how historical literacy and thinking are taught
• Improve the understanding of history education and its purpose
• Understand how artefacts are used to develop historical understanding
• Assist with decoding the discipline of history
• Assist with the development of the signature pedagogy of history
• Improve the quality of history education provided by schools, museums and other cultural
institutions. CRICOS #00212K