Gebruik van historische bronnen in Vlaams geschiedenis onderwijs : minder in 3^de graad s.o.

Reasoning with and/or about sources? The use of primary sources in Flemish secondary school history education  Tijdschrift Historical encounters

Karel Van Nieuwenhuyse University of Leuven, Belgium Hanne Roose University of Leuven, Belgium Kaat Wils University of Leuven, Belgium Fien Depaepe University of Leuven, Belgium Lieven Verschaffel University of Leuven, Belgium

Conclusies en enkele andere passages uit deze bijdrage

ABSTRACT: Working with sources in secondary school history education has become a common practice over the last few decades. However, researchers have concluded that teaching practices relating to the educational use of sources cause difficulties. Teachers often only examine sources for/in relation to their content, and tend to ignore author and context information in the analysis of the source.

This paper reports on an empirical study focusing on how primary sources are dealt with in Flemish secondary school history education, in which the standards only make general reference to the use of sources. It focuses on whether primary sources are used to prompt reasoning with and/or about sources, and includes an examination of both the kind of primary sources that are used, and the provided source and context information. 88 classroom history lessons in the three stages of secondary education, involving 51 teachers, were observed and analyzed. Analysis shows that primary sources play an important part in the lessons. Overall, 21% of all primary sources were used for illustration, 55% to reason with sources and thus to foster students’ substantive knowledge, and 24% to reason about and thus foster students’ strategic knowledge. Important differences and similarities regarding the educational use of primary sources between the three stages of secondary education are also found, and further explained and discussed. KEYWORDS: Source Analysis; Primary Sources; Secondary School Education; History Teaching.

Conclusion and discussion

This research investigated, for the three stages of secondary school history education in Flanders, the educational use of primary sources. More specifically, it examined whether they are used to encourage reasoning with or about sources. It included the examination of the kind of primary sources that are used (visual versus textual), the source and context information accompanying sources, and the extent of corroboration. Eighty-eight classroom observations, involving 51 teachers and including 322 primary sources, were analyzed. A first finding is that primary sources played an important part in the 88 classroom observations.

This clearly reflects the importance the Flemish history standards attribute to the use of sources and the prominence of sources in history textbooks, and also reflects developments in history education in other countries. The vast majority of primary sources present in the 88 lessons were visual, which confirms Kleppe’s finding (2010) for Dutch history textbooks.

Looking at the differences between stages, it is notable that in the first stage (graad), significantly fewer primary sources were included in the lessons, on average, than the second and third stage. On the other hand, this stage involved comparatively more visual sources, which can be related to the fact that in the 7th grade prehistory is addressed, a period in which textual sources did not exist. Another explanation might perhaps be found in the perception by teachers of young students’ learning capacities. Teachers might consider visual sources to be easier to deal with for younger students than textual sources. The standards do not give any indication about this, however. 

Regarding the educational use of sources, the analysis shows that, overall, 21% of all primary sources were used for illustration, 55% for reasoning with sources and hence fostering students’ substantive knowledge, and 24% to foster students’ strategic knowledge. This finding roughly parallels previous history educational research in Flanders, in which it was found that 70% of the teachers paid attention in their examination of sources to the interpretative and constructed nature of historical knowledge, and hence to reasoning about sources (Van Nieuwenhuyse et al. 2015a).

 In comparison with other international research, the finding that a quarter of all primary sources were used to stimulate reasoning about sources, is nevertheless remarkable, since it constitutes a comparatively high number. Furthermore, our research did not include the analysis of the use of secondary sources. This means that the number of teachers who also encourage reasoning about sources in general could even be higher. In line with earlier international research (McCrum, 2013; Seixas, 1998; van Hover & Yeager, 2003a; 2003b; 2007), it was found that teachers with a maximum of three years of teaching experience and hence still in the early stages of teaching, did not engage with the constructed nature of history and with reasoning about sources. They used primary sources especially to impart contentrelated substantive knowledge to students. 

How can we explain the comparatively significant amount of attention given by Flemish history teachers to reasoning about sources, and hence to revealing the constructed nature of historical knowledge? The Flemish history standards do encourage the use of sources, albeit not in a very disciplinary way. In the first stage, for instance, they encourage the application of the historical method, without elaborating on that very much, while in the second and third stage, students are supposed to build upon this, while dealing with sources in a more self-reliant way. The rather vague character of the standards’ guidelines is also reflected with respect to the notion of corroboration, for instance. The standards only mention this in terms of ‘students should be able to compare information’, but do not further elaborate on this notion. This coincides with our finding that corroboration of sources was almost completely absent from our data set.

A similar observation can be made about the strategies of sourcing and contextualization, which are not explicitly mentioned in the standards. We found that two-thirds of all primary sources were provided with some source information. Most of this ‘sourcing’ information, however, appeared to be very basic, and lacked sufficient explanation. Information about the genesis of sources was provided in around 20% of all primary sources in each stage.

The standards’ failure to make an explicit connection between source and context information on the one hand and educational use on the other hand is clearly reflected in our research. In the analysis of sources, the source and context information is in many cases not related to the critical analysis of the source. This often results in a use of the source, merely as an illustration, or limited to reason with. On the other hand, the finding remains that a significant amount of attention is given by Flemish history teachers to reasoning about sources.

This shows that several history teachers in Flanders are acquainted with the constructed nature of historical knowledge, and apparently consider it important to at least occasionally touch upon it in their classroom practice. They might be encouraged, in doing so, by history teachers’ continuing professional development initiatives in Flanders.

For during the last decade, many of these initiatives have paid a lot of attention to concrete teaching strategies oriented towards fostering students’ strategic knowledge. The above-mentioned practices relating to sourcing, contextualization and educational use of sources do not just reflect the standards.

 The influence of history textbooks can be discerned here as well. For, as mentioned earlier, Flemish textbooks offer many sources and accompanying questions, yet they often only provide some basic source information (mostly author and date), and do not further contextualize them. Most of the questions are purely content-related and hence oriented towards reasoning with sources. Such questions are certainly legitimate, but, as scholars in the field of history education emphasize, it is also important to pay attention to the source itself, and what it does or does not do – in short to also reason about sources (VanSledright & Limón, 2006).

In order to develop a criterialist stance (Maggioni et al., 2009; Maggioni, 2010), students need to understand that sources are never a mirror of the past, are always biased, are not a collection of facts, and never provide a complete and objective account of a past event. In this respect, it is absolutely necessary to include the source and context information in the analysis and examination of the source, either by providing this information in advance or by including it in reflective questions addressing its influence on the representation of the source.

For the most part, however, Flemish history textbooks tend to cling to realist approaches of historical practice rather than perspectivist ones. Regarding the educational use of primary sources, we found several differences between the three stages of secondary education, especially between the first stage and the two other. Firstly, fewer primary sources occur in the first stage; secondly, the average time spent on them in the lesson is higher; thirdly, students are more actively engaged in analyzing them, meaning that sources are more accompanied by questions, in the first stage; fourthly, compared with each other in terms of percentages, sources are used more to foster students’ strategic knowledge in the first stage. The examination of the reliability and impartiality of primary sources especially occurs in the first stage, in line with the Flemish history standards, requiring that teachers teach the students to apply the historical method, via a set of specific questions.

In this respect, it needs to be noted that  history is not treated as a separate subject until secondary education in Flanders. In primary education, it is part of a larger subject called ‘world orientation’, to which other disciplines such as geography and biology belong too. The use of sources is hence only addressed in general terms here: pupils must be able to consult sources according to their level. They should also be able to distinguish fact from opinion.

As a result, only from the first stage of secondary education on can a profound instructional process of learning how to deal with primary sources in history be developed. In order to do this, teachers select a small number of primary sources, which they subsequently explore and investigate extensively, together with their students.

The focus in the first stage really is on whether a primary source is reliable and impartial. Questions seldom go beyond those notions. One might perhaps have expected that reasoning about sources would have been elaborated on and taught more extensively in the subsequent second and third stages, especially since from the second stage onwards, teachers might have (second stage) and certainly have (third stage) a master’s degree in history. A master’s degree is of course not conclusive evidence of superior competence, but on the other hand it signifies teachers who are more likely to be acquainted with historical research and the use of sources. However, such further elaboration of and attention to reasoning about sources occurs only rarely. The analysis shows an increase in the number of primary sources present in the lessons, but a decrease in reasoning about sources: from 46% of all sources in the first stage, to 19% in the second and 23% in the third stage.

Given the finding that in the second, and certainly in the third stage, more sources are used, but less time is spent on them, and less questions are asked about them, it seems as if, contrary to the standards’ requirements, history education becomes more teacher-centered instead of student-centered (and stimulating self-reliance). This can be connected to the intention of many Flemish history teachers, especially of those holding a master’s degree and hence teaching in the second and third stage, to pursue a 'complete' overview of history in terms of historical content.

Although the standards do not prescribe this, Flemish history teachers indeed nevertheless tend to give priority to providing such a 'complete' historical overview as it is presented in most textbooks. For, even though the time periods to be treated grow shorter from the first to the third stage, the textbooks become significantly more extensive. Teachers aiming to treat the complete textbook and fostering students’ substantive knowledge, hence lack time to reason intensively about sources and foster students’ strategic knowledge.  Another possible explanation, apart from the vagueness of the history standards with regard to reasoning about sources, might be that teachers have the idea that students have already learnt how to deal with sources in the first stage.

Teachers perhaps assume (as the example of the propaganda poster from 1922 might indicate) that students automatically reason about a source they are provided with, and therefore spend much less time on analyzing them, and do not explicitly examine them in a strategic way. Thus they may be convinced that they can focus on content through an almost exclusively substantive use of a larger number of primary sources. Then again, by contrast, some teachers may assume that the acquisition of strategic knowledge, beyond determining whether a source is reliable and impartial, is too difficult for students (Moisan, 2010), and this perception may explain why they avoid addressing this area in the history class. However, existing research does not support these assumptions. On the one hand, research shows that a sustained effort is required to bring students to a criterialist stance in which they go beyond their naïve ideas of sources as mirrors of the past, and start considering them as interpretations that need to be critically analyzed (Nokes, 2010; 2011). On the other hand, research shows that such perseverance  can indeed bring students to a criterialist stance (Britt & Aglinskas, 2002; De La Paz, 2005; Nokes at al., 2007; Nokes, 2013; Reisman, 2012; Van Boxtel & Van Drie, 2012). It is not an easy job, yet it is certainly not an impossible one either. 

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Introduction

Working with sources in secondary school history education has become a common practice over the last few decades. From the 1980s onwards, scholars in the field of history education started to stress the importance of the use of sources, as a means of access to the past, especially in order to foster students’ historical thinking skills (Barton & Levstik, 2004; Van Drie & Van Boxtel, 2008). Students, it was argued, should gain an understanding of how the past is examined and interpreted, and how history is constructed through the critical analysis and interpretation of sources. Thus history education should not only provide an understanding of the past, but also focus on giving training in the skills needed to understand and examine how representations of the past are based on the interpretation of sources (Havekes et al., 2012; Wineburg et al., 2013). History education should not only be about the transfer of substantive knowledge (Lee, 1983), but should also develop students’ strategic knowledge (VanSledright & Limón, 2006). According to Rouet (et al., 1996), students should be able to reason both with and about sources. Reasoning ‘with’ sources refers to the skills involved in selecting information from sources and using this information to support a claim about the past. Reasoning ‘about’ sources concerns students’ skills at critically assessing the value of information, whether or not in corroboration with other sources, and the usefulness and limits of the source, recognizing the author’s perspective, and analyzing what sources do, while taking into account the context in which the source was produced. Reasoning about sources contributes to students’ understanding of history as an interpretative construction, in short to their strategic knowledge. To include reasoning about sources while reasoning with sources is important, since if the use of sources is limited solely to reasoning with sources, students might consider them to be mirrors of the past (Maggioni et al., 2009; Maggioni, 2010). Scholars in the field of history education therefore conclude that direct contact with sources is important in history education, but needs to be thoughtful, and to include reasoning about sources (Seixas, 1993; Yilmaz, 2008).  In this respect, Sam Wineburg (1991; 2001) suggests three strategies to apply when analyzing sources in the history classroom: sourcing, contextualization and corroboration. Students engage in sourcing when they take into account the author of the source, when, where, why and for whom it was produced, and the text’s genre, while assessing and evaluating the source content and its potential value in answering a research question. Contextualization is an activity in which students assess sources within their broader historical and societal context. Corroboration is employed to compare multiple texts on the same event, to look for similarities and contradictions, and so to determine the reliability of texts, and to construct historical interpretations.  Starting from this theoretical framework, this paper reports on an empirical study of how sources are dealt with in secondary school history education in Flanders, the Dutch-speaking part of Belgium. We analyze to what extent students have to reason with and/or about sources. For practical reasons, the research is limited to the analysis of the use of primary sources. Primary sources are, contrary to secondary ones, sources stemming from the time period under study in the history classroom. The paper starts with a short introduction on how history is approached and what use of sources is prescribed in history education in Flanders. The second section consists of a presentation of existing international research on the use of sources in secondary school history education. This section is followed by a brief sketch of the data collection and research methodology, including a presentation of the analysis instrument that was used in this study. In the following sections, the results of the empirical study are presented and discussed.  …The history standards are less focused on a strict demarcation of curriculum contents than on the acquisition of skills and attitudes. Concerning the content, the standards do not prescribe any specific content matter. They prescribe that the period of Prehistory, Ancient History and Classical Antiquity (until ca 500) should be treated in the 1st stage, the Ancien Régime (ca 500ca 1800) in the 2nd stage, while the 3rd stage should be devoted to the period from ca 1750 to the present. In each stage, aspects of political, economic, social and cultural history should be touched upon. The focus is on Western history, with some specific attention to the national past and the requirement to study at least one non-Western society in depth in each grade. In relation to the skills, the main aim is to make students proficient in the use of subject-specific (problem solving) methods. A fundamental part of this is the critical examination of sources (Flemish Ministry of Education and Training, 2000a).  In general, the standards attribute great importance to the use of sources, and address both reasoning with and reasoning about sources, without elaborating on them in detail. The standards distinguish four steps in dealing with sources: (1) collecting historical information material, (2) questioning historical information material, (3) historical reasoning, and (4) historical reporting. They address reasoning with sources, stating that students should be able to select information from various sources in an effective manner, in order to answer a historical research question. Reasoning about sources comes to the fore when they state that students must also be capable of approaching this information in a critical manner that also shows awareness of multiple viewpoints. In the 1st stage, students must “analyze simple historical information in a critical way, via specific questions” (Flemish Ministry of Education and Training, 2000c). In the 2nd stage, students must deduce, compare, structure, synthesize and communicate information, via questions and assignments. In the 3rd stage, students should operate on selfreliant bases. The guidelines regarding the strategic use of sources are rather vague, and do not go beyond the above-mentioned general terms. Reasoning about sources is not made concrete. The need to apply strategies such as sourcing and contextualization is not made explicit, for instance; nor are specific approaches to reasoning about sources provided. It hence seems as if the standards consider the acquisition of skills, which include the use of sources, mainly in terms of instigating student-centered and student-activating teaching methods. They encourage these methods rather than instilling the fostering of epistemological reflection about the nature of historical knowledge. However, the way in which history teachers shape their actual classroom practice is not only determined or influenced by standards. Textbooks also play a role. Teachers tend to rely, to a greater or a lesser extent, on textbooks in preparing and giving their lessons. Boutonnet (2013), discussing research on history textbooks, concludes that these books certainly occupy an important place in teachers’ didactical choices. Based on his own research with Canadian history teachers, he concludes that the most important role they ascribe to history textbooks consists of providing visual and textual sources. This is reflected, he argues, in their practice, since the participating teachers indicate that they use the textbooks, apart from the learning text, mostly for their primary sources. 

Even though no systematic research has been conducted into the way Flemish secondary school history textbooks deal with primary sources, our firm impression is that those textbooks mainly lead teachers towards an educational use in terms of reasoning with sources. Firstly, the textbooks support teachers in activating their students, by providing many sources accompanied by questions. A large majority of these questions are, however, purely content-related. Suggestions involving reasoning about sources, and hence instigating epistemological reflection, seem to be far less common. The context in which primary sources were produced is for instance rarely discussed; the name of the author and the date of the source are mentioned, without any further explanation. Furthermore, this context is almost never included in the questioning. Secondly, the strategy of corroboration is only very rarely applied. Reasoning about sources mostly comes to the fore in questions related to the application of what is called ‘the historical method’. The latter, corresponding to the standards’ requirement of critical analysis of historical information, concerns a fixed set of questions such as who produced the source, where and when, on which information did the author lean in making the sources, why did the author produce the source, and did the author have reasons to construct a subjective account? These questions relate to the strategy of sourcing. Their aim is to determine the reliability and impartiality of a source, or, in the words of a Flemish textbook, to determine to what extent a historical source is "reliable, impartial, complete and thus useful" (Van de Voorde, 2008, 197). In limiting the examination of sources to the above-mentioned questions, textbooks fail to encourage reflection on the concept of reliability, by showing, for instance, that subjectivity and untrustworthiness are not synonyms. Every source is to a certain extent subjective. Moreover, the reliability of a source is not inherent to the source itself, but is related to the questions one asks (Ashby, 2011; Counsell, 2011). The textbooks do not seem to touch upon the fact that the usefulness of a source depends on the research question in respect of which it is analyzed. In short, when paying explicit attention to disciplinary methodology, Flemish textbooks tend to cling to rather straightforward, so-called ‘realist’ approaches of historical practice rather than instilling nuanced reasoning about sources and reflection on the constructed character of history.  The above impressions are not exclusively Flemish. An important conclusion from international research is that the interpretative and constructed nature of historical knowledge is rarely explicitly dealt with in history textbooks. Instead, these often reinforce students’ naïve ideas about historical knowledge and the role of sources in the construction of it (Wineburg, 1991, referring to Crismore, 1984). Especially in educational systems where the interpretative nature of historical knowledge is not an explicit part of the history curriculum, as is for instance the case in French and Catalonian curricula, history textbooks hardly ever discuss the issue, and deal with sources correspondingly (Le Marec, 2011; Pagès & Santisteban, 2011; Van Nieuwenhuyse, 2016). Tutiaux-Guillon (2006) noticed the strength of the belief in French secondary history education that the historical truth can be reached. History textbooks, for example, present history as a finished, completed product. Scientific issues and controversies are not addressed, nor are historians and their (possibly divergent) interpretations of the past mentioned. Sources are mostly used in a lecturing-learning way of teaching, requiring little intellectual effort from students, since the answers and conclusions regarding the sources are fixed. Sources tend not to be contextualized, and are mostly examined for their content, in order to gather factual knowledge, and hence to reason with sources. Seixas (2000) also notes that historiographical openings towards students are rarely made; history is most often presented as a closed and finished product. One notable exception is English history education, wherein reasoning about sources through the study of interpretations of the past – to understand and explain how and why the past has been interpreted in different ways in the period subsequent to the period under study – became a key component of the history curriculum as early as 1991 (Chapman, 2011; Counsell, 2011). According to Haydn (2011), textbooks have undergone significant changes since then. They now pay a lot of attention to strategic knowledge (Van Nieuwenhuyse, 2016).