“What Happened Needs to Be Told”: Fostering Critical Historical Reasoning in the Classroom

Abstract

Scholars often define historical reasoning as constructing defensible interpretations of past events. Drawing on critical theory, this article suggests that it also entails consciously framing one's topic of inquiry. The article examines an instructional unit that aimed to foster this expanded view of historiography. Forty students, ages 14–15, wrote histories of the Vietnam War from 12 primary accounts and compared their depictions to that of their textbook. After participating in the unit, students found the textbook factually accurate yet biased in its pattern of emphasis and omission, a conclusion that aligned with the unit's goal of helping them distinguish empirical integrity from interpretive frame. However, whereas critical theorists view all scholarship as partially subjective, the students sought to achieve objectivity by including “both sides” in their histories. The study suggests that educators should highlight the numerous dilemmas historians face, from framing their topic to selecting and analyzing evidence.

Notes

Other intervention studies include: Foster and Yeager (1999); Ferretti, MacArthur, and Okolo (2001); Britt and Aglinskas (2002); Hynd, Holschuh, and Hubbard (2004); Kohlmeier (2006); Saye and Brush (2007); and van Boxtel and van Drie (2012). Some of this work touches on elements of critical historical reasoning, such as identifying historians’ interpretive frames and biases. See also Trofanenko (2008), who examined how three students understood the social functions served by competing narratives of the Lewis and Clark expedition of 1804–1806.

Studies that follow this selection-justification methodology include: Seixas (1994b, 1997); Barton and Levstik (1998); Levstik (1998, 2000); Epstein (1998, 2000); Yeager, Foster, and Greer (2002); Barton (2005a); and Terzian and Yeager (2007). For related studies that take a different approach, see: Cercadillo (2001); Cornbleth (2002); and Wineburg and Monte-Sano (2008).

The picture cards that students selected from in Barton and Levstik's (1998) study used wording that may have swayed students to endorse a narrative of progress. Epstein's work (1998, 2000) avoids this problem, thus lending credence to their findings (at least for White students). In a national survey, however, Rosenzweig (2000) found that more than four fifths of White adult respondents “described change for the worse” (p. 270) when depicting American history, and Wineburg and Monte-Sano (2008) found in a different survey that when disallowed from choosing presidents, respondents of all races listed African Americans as the most “famous” Americans.

Other scholars have examined how students interpret documents pertaining to the Vietnam War (Hynd et al., 2004; Stahl et al., 1996), but none explored how students respond to the dilemma of how to frame the conflict.

Here and throughout, pseudonyms are used to protect participants’ anonymity.

We also distributed two optional sources: a description of Vietnam's physical and cultural landscape for U.S. army recruits (Young et al., 2002), and John Kerry's antiwar testimony to the U.S. Senate on April 22, 1971 (Cantu & Cantu, 2003). Only a few students chose to analyze these documents or include them in their histories.

Table 2 Primary Documents Used in the Vietnam Unit

For instructional resources that advocate strategies similar to ours, see: Menkart, Murray, and View (2004); Kohl (2005); Wineburg (2007); Bigelow (2008); and Martin (2008). See also Kobrin (1992) for a description of a comparable curriculum in action.

During the interviews, I sometimes prompted students to compare multiple documents. Their use of corroboration in these instances is not reported, as the impetus came from me and not the student.

Contextualization has been measured differently by different authors. Nokes et al. (2007), for instance, apply a narrower definition than Monte-Sano (2010) does. It also tends to overlap with certain types of sourcing, which helps explain our low level of interrater agreement for contextualization.

The fact that students corroborated more frequently with the textbook than with the primary sources (see Table 5) could stem from the differing prompts in each case. I asked them to assess the primary sources’ credibility (Appendix 1, Questions 1–3), whereas I asked them to compare the textbook chapter to the student histories (Figure 3). In addition, they analyzed the primary sources orally but the textbook in writing. For reasons such as these, I deemed it inappropriate to conduct a statistical comparison of heuristic use in the two situations.

Stahl et al. (1996) consulted students’ written notes, where they might be less likely to use heuristics than in oral interviews. Wineburg's (1991a) think-aloud protocol is more congruent with the approach I used.

Students’ positivism might also have stemmed from the way one of the interview questions was worded (see Appendix 1, Question 5). Their reluctance to allow their “personal stance on the war” to affect what they wrote is shared by many historians. A better example of how a narrative's frame could inform its points of emphasis might have yielded a different student response.