Historical Reasoning: Exploring Complexity and Identity Wrestling With the Sense-Making in the Disciplines Tool

• In Event: Literature and History as Pathways for Wrestling With Complexities

Abstract

We face complex issues in the public domain around highly contested questions that are both contemporary and rooted in historical conundrums. Drawing on the National Academy of Education report, Educating for Civic Reasoning and Discourse, our project draws on a multi-faceted conception of civic reasoning and discourse (e.g. involving knowledge, epistemology, ethics, dispositions to question, weigh competing evidence and multiple points of view). These are applicable to historical reasoning and relevant because even when topics in the public domain entail content knowledge (e.g. science around climate change and the covid pandemic), deciding what we (as individuals, communities, a nation, members of a world community) should do also requires understanding processes of decision making informed by the study of history/social studies.

We articulate an expansive conception of the knowledge and disposition required in historical reasoning: examination of sourcing, contextualization and reliability in primary and secondary sources, and corroboration with the broader historical record. Drawing on the Science of Human Learning and Development, when learning environments support feeling efficacious and seeing the relevance of problems, motivation and engagement are heightened.

The SenseMaking in the Disciplines tool is an authoring tool with embedded structures to support close reading and argumentation. An authoring tool, teachers can input their own texts around their essential questions, but with structured tasks and supports in the system to build self-efficacy and collaboration.

I report on field testing of the tool in two high school contexts in history classes: one an African-centered high school to illustrate instructional units that invite wrestling with complex questions around race and equity; one a suburban high school with a largely Hispanic population to illustrate the processes of creation of instructional units to use with the tool.

Findings:

• An explication of the scope of historical reasoning and the literacy and epistemological demands of such learning, captured in the design of the tool and the instructional tools developed by the project
• Results from pre-post assessments of historical reasoning and psycho-social factors that contribute to engagement, motivation and persistence. Findings reveal nuanced relationships among students’ perceptions of effort and self-efficacy.
• Qualitative analyses of the processes of unit construction
o Challenges of re-conceptualizing instructional goals beyond content alone
o Evolution of shifts in design decisions based on collaborative discussions among the department at the suburban school

Significance:

Findings capture a more expansive conception of the demands of historical reasoning and relationships among learning to engage historical reasoning and students’ multiple perceptions of themselves. Findings illustrate the complexity of supporting shifts in teachers’ thinking about their instructional design. The SMD tool represents a unique tool to support historical reasoning, both because as an authoring tool teachers can input their own texts and essential questions, but also are guided in the tool design to address literacy demands and socializing self-efficacy and growth mindset. The work contributes to the conference theme by demonstrating pedagogical supports for interrogating complex questions of what should be weighed in considering truth in the historical record, past and present.

Author

• Adria Carrington, Chicago Public Schools
  Presenting Author