Teaching with Meaning: Supporting Historical Understanding in the Primary Classroom

Article

By Lynn Newton, published 1st March 2002

In essence, history is a record of human affairs. The problem in making this record is that events are past and gone and have to be reconstructed. Evidence may be uncertain and incomplete. Inevitably, several plausible accounts of an event are often possible. As mental re-constructions, these accounts are our understandings of events. A construction that orders the occurrences in an event and presents them in a temporal sequence could be said to be descriptive understanding. This kind of understanding allows the learner to give a step-by-step account of the event. Historians, however, often attempt to do more and provide explanations of why the event occurred. They construct stories of why events unfolded as they did, generally referring to human behaviours in relation to broader contexts. Explanatory understanding of an historical event involves the construction of an ordered mental representation of matters considered to have a bearing upon the event. This usually includes reasons why things took the direction they did. Often the construction is uncertain so this understanding is one of several that may be plausible (Newton, 2000).

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