A More Natural Act: Exploring Intersections Between Adolescents’ Historical Thinking and Historical Consciousness

• In Event: Roundtable Session 44
  In Roundtable Session: Supporting Student Contexualization and Historical Understanding: Narrative, Visual Imagery, and Connections to the Present

Abstract

Education researchers are increasingly concerned with how adolescents learn to read, write, and reason in the disciplines, including history. One approach to support disciplinary learning is to consider how teachers can leverage students' existing, everyday practices. However, research on teaching history provides few specific examples of how teachers can do this. We need a better understanding of the resources, experiences, and ways of thinking students bring, and how teachers can use this understanding to develop students’ historical reading, writing, and reasoning. Drawing on theories from literacy research and research on historical consciousness, this study uses interviews with adolescents to identify resources from students’ everyday lives that could support their disciplinary learning in history, and suggests implications for teaching history.

Author

• Sarah Thomson, University of Michigan