Historiography in the high school

I liked Bain’s discussion about the seen and unseen aspects of history and how little unseen aspects are taught in public schools. For high schoolers, unseen aspects are difficult to work with because of the epistemic understanding required to move past the “fact-based suppositions of history”. I think we give our students and teachers too little credit, however, when we think that kind of work only belongs in graduate degrees in universities. History, like science, (without getting too caught up in comparisons between the two, they are very different in many other respects after all) is a process, as well as the body knowledge that is produced by that process. If we fail to teach our public school students that first half then we fail to teach them a key skill for fostering informed civic engagement. Bain lays out some pretty clear methods for fostering that kind of thinking when describing how he typically begins a semester. Journaling about the first day of school seems like a particularly powerful exercise because of the psychological power of experience. People have claimed some pretty ridiculous beliefs in the name of an experience they have had (or thought that they had). Having them journal about it and describe their experience so that they next day they can read it out loud to the class would be a fantastic way for them to see how easily different people can have such different accounts of the same event. I think this one exercise alone could go a long way in developing an epistemic understanding of the process of history, but Bain goes on to use a chart and more concrete classifications to make his points even clearer. I think that exercises like this are a clear example that historiography can be effectively understood by high school students. Why it is not implemented in every history classroom I am not sure.

(I know I used this video in my last post, but I think it was a fantastic one and maybe even a little more relevant to this reading. I also think that it took more time and effort to find the video and watch it than it would to grab an image from google so maybe you’ll count it for two images? If not that’s fine)