Before starting this posting, a word regarding Uvalde is offered. Profound sorrow is felt over this senseless event.
An advocate of parochial federalism continues his/her presentation[1] …
Student Pedagogical Interests [2]
This posting will complete this blog’s
review of the parochial/federalist view regarding the first curricular
commonplace, the student, by focusing on students’ pedagogical interests. Curricular decisions must be made with a
realistic approach concerning the learning conditions and contexts which
characterize American classrooms and therefore affect students. This dialectic argument advocates changes in
curriculum toward federalist ideals and such moves make certain assumptions
about the nature of learners relevant to those changes.
That would include changes in the educational substance and
processes that are associated with any resulting prescriptions. In large measure, those conditions take on
the form of assumptions and are related to the abilities and aptitudes of
American adolescents in their study of historical material, since the parochial
federalist construct calls for a high degree of analysis of historical information.
That is, information contained in accounts that transpired in
earlier days and over the documents associated with those events would be the
material students would be called upon to study. This posting addresses those assumptions and questions about whether
the proposed change is viable in today’s classrooms.
Specifically, this posting will look at two issues – posed as
questions:
·
Are students in the middle and
high school years sufficiently sophisticated to analyze the historical material?
·
Are these students cognitively
matured enough to deal with the issues and perform the skills necessary to
meaningfully benefit from a study of the issues associated with
parochial/traditional federalism?
Given the
current condition in society, i.e., the prevalence of the natural rights
perspective, many of the descriptions which will emanate from the parochial
federalist approach might seem to students to be bizarre or counter-intuitive
to what they have come to expect. In
many ways, federalist inspired content would take on a different language and
point to unexpected concerns.
Some time ago, John B. Poster shared
some insightful descriptors about how young people view history. He delineates several notions of time when
studying a cultural contextual subject: that
would be social time, literary time, personal time, physical (clock) time, and
historical time. Historical time “[requires
a] sense of existing in the past as well as the present, a feeling of being in
history rather than standing apart from it.”[3]
This interaction might and does get thwarted by cultural biases,
as those in Western societies with their market orientation of current
consumptive-centered views. Under such a
prevailing, general view, commentators are prone to become practical in the
study of history (or any other subject).
When one comes to history and being practical, one often cites the
following reasons for such study:
understanding the world, becoming a more rounded person, understanding
one’s identity, becoming inspired, learning from mistakes, and developing
transferable skills (such as analyzing social information).[4] In each of these, the interests of the
learner, exclusively, seems to be the motivation for such concerns.
Yet history, while assisting with these sorts of aims, can more
fundamentally tempt or challenge its readers and students to question their
basic views of life, their existence, and their modes of living in their most
basic sense. And these other concerns expand
from the individual to more socially motivated interests. When tied with the transformational time of
life – adolescence – a realistic, substantive, and even introspective approach
to this study can be of great benefit to those young people and the general
society.
This makes the challenges of teaching history or historical
material more difficult, but not impossible.
Several studies (Bradley Commission on History in School,[5] William
J. Friedman,[6]
and E. C. Oakden and Mary Sturt[7]) establish
the recognition of the ability of eight- and nine-year-old youngsters to
cognitively figure estimates of the amount of time that has transpired since
events have taken place, to separate events in chronological order, and to
connect dates with specific individuals and events.
More recently, these topics are beginning to be seen as having a placating
role over contentious issues even for younger students. Here is a more recent view expressing a
concern over the state of social attention that American schools are affording to
younger students.
There’s long been concern
about American students’ lack of history and civics knowledge. On national tests, 85% of eighth graders
score below proficient in U.S. history, as do about 75% in geography and
civics. Now there’s also handwringing
about whether it’s possible to teach these subjects in an even-handed way. But a more basic problem is that many
students reach middle and high school without enough background knowledge to
grasp much history at all, let alone understand it in all its complexity –
especially if they haven’t been able to pick up historical knowledge at
home. In the current polarized climate,
that leaves them vulnerable to oversimplified versions of the country’s past.[8]
This cited
article further calls for more meaningful questioning, even at lower grades, so
that teachers can direct study more meaningfully to reveal consequential issues
(an example in the article cites the Boston Tea Party and suggests questions about
how colonists should have reacted to this illegal incident).
Not only does Natalie
Wexler, the author of the above quote, believe elementary students should tackle
such questions, but that a more probing history is recommended for a kindergarten
curriculum. Of course, reasonableness
should guide what is doable for such young students. But the point here is that if higher geared,
more revealing questioning can be utilized with these younger students, then those
types of questions are quite suitable for adolescents in secondary schools.
Jean Piaget, back in the 1960s, argued that children can
make a wide range of logical relationships including causal and temporal
relations at an early age. And the
literature supporting this claim is quite extensive.[9] With these skills, students of the middle and
high school years can facilitate the acquisition of historical knowledge with
the use of narratives or scripts (story lines).[10] Narratives allow people to interrelate with
historical events and events from one’s own life and they also allow a holistic
sense of the time studied.
But isn’t the concern here not history but civics? The parochial/traditional federalist construct
favors – not to the exclusion of other forms of research – historical inquiry in
the study of federalist issues. In turn,
in building those narratives or checking their veracity, documentary evidence
becomes important. There is evidence –
cited here – that a course of study that primarily depends on that type of
evidence is viable.
With
nine- and ten-year-old students, despite being less knowledgeable of dates and comprehensive
information, they acquired, with appropriate historical lessons, clearer views
of studied periods – of their people – and a more meaningful understanding of
the problems faced by those people.
Historical
contributions to civics education can be as simple as providing narratives and
sources that demonstrate people in the past had an impact on the world in which
they lived. The past is filled with people who are not given the agency in
traditional textbooks that they possessed in life. [11]
And for a more substantive instructional strategy, the reader is encouraged
to see this blogger’s book, Toward a Federated Nation, where his “historical
dialogue-to-action” (HD-to-A) instructional model is described and explained.[12]
Overall, there is ample evidence to suggest
that students at the middle and high school levels are cognitively capable
(actually, better suited) to pursue a study of American government or civics
using history and utilizing the parochial federalist construct to guide such
study. With the above cited evidence, the
conclusion can be drawn that students at the secondary level are sophisticated enough
to analyze the historical material used in conjunction with that construct.
That is, they are cognitively mature enough to
analyze and reflect on the issues which federalism holds as important. And with that, the reader is set to review
the next commonplace, the teacher.
[1] This presentation begins with the posting, “A Parochial Subject Matter” (March 11, 2022). The reader is reminded that the claims made
in this posting do not necessarily reflect the beliefs or knowledge of this
blogger. Instead, the posting is a
representation of what an advocate of parochial federalism might
present. This is done to present a
dialectic position of that construct.
[2]
William H. Schubert, Curriculum: Perspective, Paradigm, and Possibility
(New York, NY: MacMillan Publishing
Company, 1986). The meaning of this term
has been shared in previous postings and refers to the political interests of
students that curriculum developers should consider in their plans.
[3] John B. Poster, “The Birth of the Past: Children’s Perception of Historical Time,” The
Historical Teacher, 6, 4 (August 1973), 587-598, 589.
[4] For example, Nord Anglia, “Why Is It Important to
Study History?,” Nord Anglia (April, 29, 2020), accessed May 25, 2022, https://www.nordangliaeducation.com/news/2020/04/29/why-is-it-important-to-study-history .
[5] “Resolution of the Commission Steps toward Excellence
in the School History Curriculum,” Bradley Commission on History in Schools (Westlake,
OH: Author, 1988).
[6] William J. Friedman, “Development of Time Concepts in
Children,” in Advances in Child Development and Behavior, editors Hayne
Reese and Lewis Lipsitt, 12 (New York, NY:
Academic Press, 1978), 267-298.
[7] E. C. Oakden and Mary Sturt, “The Development of
Knowledge of Time in Children,” British Journal of Psychology, 12 (1922),
309-336.
[8] Natalie Wexler, “Why We Need to Start Teaching
History in Kindergarten,” Forbes (July 5, 2021), accessed May 25, 2022, https://www.forbes.com/sites/nataliewexler/2021/07/05/why-we-need-to-start-teaching-history-in-kindergarten/?sh=63078e1b1e8f .
[9] Along with Wexler, examples include Robin Fivush and
Elizabeth Slackman, “The Acquistion and Development of Scripts,” in Event
Knowledge: Structure and Function in
Development, edited by K. Nelson (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1986), 71-96 AND Friedman,
“Development of Time Concepts in Children,” in Advances in Child Development
and Behavior AND L. Harner, “Talking about the Past and Future,” in The Development
of Time, edited by William J. Friedman (New York, NY: Academic Press, 1982), 141-169 AND Roy N.
Smith and Peter Tomilson, “The Development of Children’s Construction of
Historical Duration: A New Approach and
Some Findings,” Educational Research, 19 (1977), 163-170.
[10] Here one finds another extensive literature. See, for example, Charles L. Newhall,
“Witnessing Historical Thinking:
Teaching Students to Construct Historical Narratives, Common Place,
12, 3 (April 2012), accessed May 25, 2022, http://commonplace.online/article/witnessing-historical-thinking/ .
[11] “Civics Education,” The Inclusive Historian’s
Handbook (January 15, 2021), accessed May 25, 2022, https://inclusivehistorian.com/civics-education/#:~:text=Historical%20contributions%20to%20civics%20education,that%20they%20possessed%20in%20life. AND to feature how long this insight has been
recognized, see David W. Blake, “Observing Children Learning History,” The
History Teacher, 14 (1981), 533-549.
[12]
Robert
Gutierrez, Toward a Federated Nation:
Implementing National Civics Standards (Tallahassee, FL: Gravitas/Civics Books, 2020). Available through Amazon.
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