2223 Benjamin Building, EDCI

College of Education

email: bv14@umail.umd.edu

After studying British colonization in North America for almost eight weeks, eighth grader, Randy, was asked to talk about what he understood concerning the development of early Jamestown colony, a key focus in the unit.

To help cue his thinking about the colony, he was asked to talk how he thought it was organized and governed?

Asked to explain, Randy said, "‘Cause it was so much stuff that I learned and [then] I would learn more stuff and . . . I know it's there, but there's just so much stuff."

Clearly, Randy struggles here. The stuff of the past, as he intimates, is all jumbled in his head. His historical thinking is cluttered with residue of ideas he encountered in his study of British colonization. He vies to keep the details straight, to generate some coherent conceptualization of Jamestown, but has great difficulty. In the end he conveys frustration at being unable to assemble a satisfactory image, to compile a convincing narrative, blaming a mind awash in a seemingly endless array of disconnected fragments.

We can sympathize with Randy, having been in this position ourselves when trying to remember and reconstruct the past. Why does historical thinking often give students such difficulty? Is it that historical thinking is an inherently difficult process? Is it simply that the Randys are novice historical thinkers and need more time, concerted study, and help from their teachers to develop greater expertise? What might it have to do with the nature of history itself? What might it have to do with Randy’s present position as a historical inquirer?

In this essay, I want to explore the landscape created by these questions. Specifically, I wish to get at them by attending to four interrelated questions: (a) What is historical thinking in school-age students? (b) How does the student’s present temporal "position" influence his/her historical thinking? (c) How does the student’s position impact the role of the history teacher? and (d) In what ways do savvy history teachers work from their students’ temporal positions to engage them in ambitious acts of historical thinking that promote deep historical understandings?

Embedded in Randy’s account and the questions he was asked is a view of historical thinking. This view suggests that historical thinking involves retelling the past essentially as it happened based on what can be constructed from residue, traces, artifacts, and texts dealing with that past. But is historical thinking confined to the retelling of the past, putting the details into a plausible narrative, or at least a chronicle? Some, perhaps many, think so.

In many school systems in North America, historical thinking appears to be defined as the capacity to recall events that shaped the past (e.g., Brophy, 1990; McKeown & Beck, 1990; Romanowski, 1996; VanSledright, 1996, 1997). Curriculum guidelines for the study of history in these school districts ask students to be able to describe events leading up to particular watershed historical occurrences, to recall key military, political, and economic leaders, to account for the circumstances that caused this or that key episode in nation building. To support this sort of historical thinking, students are asked to read history textbooks that contain the ostensible facts and details arranged in expository prose. Tests students take are designed to assess progress on the development of this type of thinking. This was Randy’s experience (see VanSledright, 1995).

However, judging by the burgeoning literature on historical thinking, this aforementioned view appears rather impoverished. Although there is no complete agreement on the nature of historical thinking, a number of richly detailed descriptions have emerged recently. Here are several examples that go well beyond the view of historical thinking as memorization and recall of the historical events laid out in purportedly objective or realist accounts.¹

For the authors of the National Standards for United States History (National Center for History in the Schools, 1994), arguably one of the most comprehensive efforts to define, among other things, the characteristics of historical understanding, historical thinking represents a range of activities and thought processes and is divided into five categories. Each category has a number of specifications and represents a historical-thinking "standard." The categories include: (a) chronological thinking, (b) historical comprehension, (c) historical analysis and interpretation, (d) historical research capability, and (e) historical issues analysis and decision making.

According to the Standards, thinking chronologically involves, for instance, being able to distinguish between past, present, and future time; identifying the temporal structure of historical narratives, interpreting data presented in timelines; and explaining change and continuity over time. Historical comprehension as a form of thinking requires reconstructing literal meanings in historical passages; identifying central questions in narratives; and drawing on a variety of sources (maps, visuals, graphics, texts) to obtain historical data. The most detailed standard category is historical analysis and interpretation. It includes 11 specifications, which range from formulating questions for historical inquiry, to distinguishing between fact and fiction, considering multiple perspectives, explaining historical causes, and hypothesizing influences from the past. Thinking that requires historical research capabilities relates to operations involved in collecting historical data such as formulating research questions, interrogating historical data, and constructing a data-based story, explanation, or narrative. The final form of thinking—historical issue analysis and decision making—requires items that include developing the capacity to identify issues and problems in the historical record, examining value systems that led to certain decisions, evaluating alternative course of action, and constructing a position on an issue.

The view of historical thinking conveyed by the Standards represents a more complex portrait of the thought processes involved than the rather simplistic view offered by typical school district curriculum guidelines and implied in history textbook constructions. On the Standards view, students would be doing much more than memorizing and recalling information gleaned from a history textbook. At the very least, they would be doing research, analyzing and interpreting historical data, and wrestling with historical issues and problems. Students would learn the "what" of history (as school district guidelines require), and they would also be engaged in the "how" and "why" of history. The Standards appear to suggest that the former cannot be achieved without thinking about and engaging in the latter.

However, although hinting at them in several places, the Standards make no effort to acknowledge a debt to views of historical thinking developed by those who surveyed this terrain before them, or by those who did research with students employed in the actual process. If these earlier and research-based views have any merit, it turns out that historical thinking is more complex than even the multi-layered conceptualization the Standards’ authors provide. For example, consider some of the early work done by scholars in Great Britain.

Foreshadowing elements that would later appear in the Standards’ view, Rogers (1987) argued that historical thinking involves learning the what of history (historical context) and the how (historical inquiry) in an inseparable dyad. Rogers noted:

By Rogers’ lights, historical thinking, if it is to enrich students’ overall historical understanding, must involve the deep interplay of what and how, each approached deliberately but treated as part of a larger process.² The Standards authors’ (wittingly or not) suffused their thinking standards with Rogers’ idea: The first two and the fifth standard imply study of the context of history and the third and fourth standards suggest the inquiry process.

Based on his research work with children and adolescents, Lee (1984) argued that a central piece of historical thinking required what he called the use of historical imagination. In learning to think historically, Lee contended, historians are required to imagine the lives and contexts of historical agents under study in order to make sense of their actions and choices. Only then could the historian piece together a sensible narrative that explained events. By extension, Lee thought that novice historical thinkers—students learning history in schools, for example—would need to develop that same sense of imagination. Lee sought to connect imagination to empathy, the task of understanding the lives of historical figures within the context of their particular experiences. Only when a student had cultivated this historical imagination and developed a sense of empathy would historical understanding come to fruition.

For Lee, teachers were indispensable to this process. By immersing students in those long-past historical contexts—using the source-based inquiry process Rogers recommended—teachers could hone students’ imaginative mental constructions and invite empathy with agents of the past. For novice historical thinkers, this process would move in fits and spurts (Dickinson & Lee, 1984), but nonetheless could be accomplished if care was taken to avoid letting students too readily "presentize" the past.

Both Rogers (1987) and Lee (1984) were quick to note the problematic features of their arguments. For Rogers, school and classroom situations constrained the manner in which context and inquiry could be coupled. Teachers lacked the luxury, afforded historians, of engaging in the inquiry processes (with their students) for days on end. Rogers also noted that historians, by virtue of their expertise, already possessed much of the historical context students lacked, making the teacher’s role that much more problematic. And Rogers observed that teachers needed to make connections between past and present in order to bring meaning to students’ study of history. Avoiding presentism, as expert historical thinkers were more aptly trained to do, was not as likely nor necessarily as desirable with novice thinkers.³

Despite his desire to see imagination and empathy wedded in novice historical thinkers’ vocabularies of understanding, Lee (1984) noted the undesirable consequences of cultivating too rich a historical imagination (see VanSledright & Brophy, 1992, for examples) and the limits on any human’s capacity for empathy. He saw imagination and empathy as necessary pieces of historical thinking but problematic simultaneously.

Another piece of early British work was Shemilt’s (1987; see also Shemilt, 1980) formulation of adolescent thinking about the nature of historical evidence, the linchpin of the inquiry process. Making sense of the past ultimately requires an understanding of the evidentiary traces, those used as the building blocks for historical narratives. However, as Shemilt argued, the most naive historical thinkers simply don’t question evidentiary sources; they accept accounts as objective and authoritative. However, as they become more knowledgeable about sources, novice thinkers begin to question accounts and challenge their reliability. Later, this gave way to an understanding that historians use evidence to interpret the past and construct their accounts. The most complex thinking Shemilt found in the adolescents he studied involved their understanding that historical evidence and traces and accounts were all human creations and therefore all subject to question on reliability and validity grounds. Shemilt noted that movement across this hierarchy was often uneven and difficult for some students, but could be and often was aided by guidance from teachers.

Much recent research on historical thinking in North America has involved examining novice-expert differences. A number of scholars have explored this territory (e.g., Perfetti, et al. 1994; Stahl, et al., 1996; VanSledright & Kelly, in press; Wineburg, 1991, 1994). Perhaps one of the most notable studies was Wineburg’s (1991) effort at understanding differences in the historical thinking of high school students (novices) and historians (experts). Wineburg assembled some primary source texts on the Battle of Lexington coupled with a school textbook account and a historical fiction selection dealing with the same event. He then asked a small group of historians and similar-size group of high school students to read the texts and think out loud about what they thought was "going on in their heads" as the worked their way through the texts.

Wineburg (1991) reported that the historians and students thought about the texts very differently. The hallmarks of expertise displayed by the historians involved the cognitive processes of (a) assessing a document’s authorial subtexts as a means of understanding his/her position as a writer, (b) attempting to corroborate a text’s claims against other texts and prior knowledge, and (c) sourcing the document to understand its origins before actually reading the text itself. The students displayed only rudimentary indications, if any, of these forms of expert historical thinking. The novices were more apt to accept the texts at face value, as though the source of the authority was in the text itself. Wineburg argued that novices had been educated by experiences with "school history" to remain novice historical thinkers, to see authority for knowledge claims as outside themselves, and to remain naive about what history texts do. Further, he noted that schools and teachers would do well to change teaching practices, textbooks, and tests in order to assist novice learners in becoming more expert. Wineburg, however, saw this as no easy transition, given entrenched objectivist and realist views of history common to classrooms and textbooks and tested on high-stakes standardized tests.

In many ways, Wineburg’s results support the general structure of Shemilt’s (1987) continuum of novice-to-expert thinking about historical evidence. Wineburg’s high school students thought about evidence like the most naive thinkers in Shemilt’s study and Wineburg’s historians were similar in some ways to the most advanced adolescent thinkers in Shemilt’s work.

In an attempt to synthesize the efforts of the British scholars and researchers, as well as research undertaken in North America on novice-expert historical thinking, Seixas (1996) conceptualized a range of increasingly complex and problematic areas of historical thinking. He identified six: (a) historical significance, (b) epistemology and evidence, (c) continuity and change, (d) progress and decline, (e) empathy and moral judgment, and (f) questions of human agency. Space limitations prevent treatment of all six areas, but I consider the first two—significance and epistemology/evidence—along with Seixas’ conclusion.

Since historical study requires that we make sense of the vastness of the past from our present position, we focus our attention on those events that we think are most important. Thus, we assign some events historical significance, while relegating others to the dustbin of historical triviality. In other words, in this process of meaning making, all of us as historical thinkers interpret historical data in ways that make it relevant and intelligible from our present positions. Assigning significance to some events while overlooking others is unavoidable. It is nonetheless a process that is deeply imbued with the epistemological and ontological stances of the historical thinker, arguments by historical realists to the contrary. Thinkers—novice, expert, or somewhere in between—are never able to stand entirely outside their cultural assumptions in order to get a God’s-eye view of the past, to distinguish the ultimately important from the banal. Cultural assumptions saturate the interpretations of the historical thinker. So who is to be the final arbiter of significance? Expert historians? Textbooks? Teachers? Students? The answer remains unclear, which is precisely why assigning significance as an inevitable historical-thinking task is such a problematic enterprise.

Embedded deeply in questions of historical significance are equally as problematic concerns about the nature of epistemology and evidence. One could argue that the weight of historical evidence available in the traces of the past ought to arbitrate thinking about significance. But this decision can well depend on one’s epistemology; that is, the view one takes on the nature of knowledge. Do traces and artifacts from the past tell the (hi)story "as it was," making the historical thinker’s task a matter of systematic assemblage? Or are there gaps in the evidence that must be filled in, say, by Lee’s notion of the historian’s imagination, coupled with a well-honed sense of empathy? Of course, the answer depends on one’s epistemology. If you believe that the answer to the former is yes, than the problematic features of epistemology and evidence in historical thinking will seem trumped up. However, to draw this conclusion flies squarely in the face of historical scholarship over the last 30 years. A careful reading of Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s (1990) story of Martha Ballard to which Seixas’ (1996) refers, and attention to Davidson and Lytle’s (1992) assessment of what we know and do not know about "The Strange Death of Silas Deane" (pp. xvii-xxxiv) along with the myriad ways historians have interpreted the Salem Witch Trials (Davidson and Lytle, 1992, pp. 22-46), should be enough to harry that former conviction. It appears that nothing about epistemological and evidentiary thinking in history remains as straightforward as assuming the past reveals itself "as it really was" to the dedicated inquirer, historian or novice historical thinker alike.

Seixas (1996) concludes by describing each of the six areas of historical thinking he has delineated as "epistemological minefields" for both experts and novices.

Seixas then notes that it is the job of educational researchers to explore these minefields, to "expose them, for each other, for teachers, and for students, without getting injured in the process" (p. 778). The audience here is clearly educational researchers. But what role do teachers play? Is the work of making sense of historical thinking the work of researchers alone? Before considering these important questions, let me summarize several salient aspects of historical thinking.

According to those who have pondered and researched the process, historical thinking that leads to historical understanding appears to require a range of cognitions, those that can be used by both experts and novices. These cognitions are broad, complex, interconnected, and not fully understood. However, the more researchers examine how historical thinking contributes to historical understanding, agreement on several key elements appears to increase. At the moment, these elements include the capacity to contextualize the past, while simultaneously employing the necessary tools to engage the process of historical inquiry (Rogers, 1987). Contextualizing the past involves the use of imagination, empathy, and moral judgment in order to avoid unwarranted exercises in "presentism" (Lee, 1984; Seixas, 1996). Two fundamental aspects of contextualizing the past involve thinking about progress and decline and continuity and change (Seixas, 1996). Lurking very near the surface of making sense of history using these cognitions are complex questions that necessitate thinking about how historical significance is assessed and assigned and how the thinker’s view of knowledge (epistemology) influences how evidence is considered (Seixas, 1996; Shemilt, 1980, 1987).

Deeply tied to these forms of thinking is a level of procedural knowledge about how to make sense of the past. This knowledge requires employing the tools of inquiry about which Rogers (1987) alludes and Wineburg (1991) and others describe (e.g., Perfetti, et al., 1994; Stahl, et al, 1996; VanSledright & Kelly, in press). They include the art and capacity to (a) assess the subtexts of historical accounts, (b) corroborate evidentiary traces, and (c) judge the sources accounts contain.

One important aspect of work on historical thinking deals with the thinker’s local and present position. By position I mean what some call the thinker’s frame of reference on which s/he bases an understanding of the past, or in other words, the person’s implicit theory about how things past hang together with things present and make relative sense. However, the nature of the thinker’s position or implicit theory of the past remains only a nascent feature of the work on historical thinking. For example, running through Seixas’ (1996) statement—"Without temporal bearings, we cannot make sense of our lives" (p. 778, emphasis added)—are a set of fundamental, prior orienting questions: Who is the referent—who are "we"? How do "we" understand our world? What are "our temporal bearings"? These questions, it seems to me, are the beginning point of understanding historical thinking, especially as it relates to what novice learners experience in school history courses.⁴ These are pivotal ontological (world view), existential (who am I), and epistemological (how do I know) questions.

The aforementioned history education researchers and scholars in their respective treatments of historical thinking imply the positionality of the learner at almost every point. But the idea itself—the question of who this learner is, what s/he brings by way of temporal bearings to the task of historical thinking, and what implications this might have for history teaching and learning and the development of historical understanding—is left generally unexplored. I want to briefly examine this idea of positionality. Then I want to connect it to the third and fourth questions I asked at the outset, those that deal with relationship of historical thinking to history teaching, and what savvy history teachers do to promote the sort of historical thinking and understanding that takes the positionality of the learner seriously.

Even the most naive, school-age thinkers bring with them a set of temporal bearings that are mediated by a whole range of cultural messages about and experiences with the past. While the student has had no direct personal contact with any of the actual events of, say, the American Revolution, s/he nonetheless may arrive at the classroom door with pictorial images and narrative ideas from books and television, from visits to historical sites, from conversations with family members, from a host of sources. The student may have learned to trust (or doubt) the verisimulitude of these images or ideas. He or she may be able to contextualize them, or may only presentize his/her understanding. The images and ideas could be more or less imaginative and empathic, the thought process more or less cognizant of the significance assigned to various events, the tools for inquiring into the nature of the events more or less sophisticated. The images and ideas might be closely linked or oddly disconnected. Whatever their nature, the child’s memory provides the entry-level building blocks of greater expertise in historical thinking and understanding.

What is this historical memory like in school-age students? How has our present time, the way we treat historical artifacts and traces, our culture’s messages, our collective memory of the past, the student’s family saturated his/her view of the world past? What prior knowledge of history do students bring to the learning context? How does a learner’s race, ethnicity and social class influence memory and prior understanding? This is uneven cognitive topography, if the few recent studies of students prior historical cognitions and understandings are any indication. For example, after studying the situated historical thinking of a group of fifth graders in northern Kentucky for almost an entire school year, Barton (1995) observed,

Moreover, VanSledright (1997) noted a wide range of reasons students cited for why the study of history might be important and how it might be useful for them outside of school, reasons connected to age-related naiveté, ethnicity, and family background. And Epstein (1997) found that African-American and white high school students held very different prior conceptions about the credibility of historical accounts (e.g., textbooks), conceptions heavily influenced by disparate family experiences and the collective memory those experiences instilled.⁵

These studies provide a window into the world of children’s and adolescent’s historical thinking and their prior conceptualizations and culturally-mediated memories of the past. They demonstrate the vastness of the range of understanding and the broadness of possible influences. To be sure, deriving generalizations from the data these studies produce might one day be possible if this research continues. But for the present anyway, the eccentricities of students’ prior knowledge appear to be the rule; that is, the ideas and images students bring to the learning context vary more than they are similar. What does this mean for the researchers that Seixas claims must dig more deeply into this arena? From where I sit, I suspect that, at least in the near term, such studies will only tell us more about how students’ prior understandings—their historical-thinking "positionalities"—depend on local sociocultural context, memory, and experience, and diverge considerably.

Perhaps the more important question to ask and the one I have been working up to is: How does the thinker’s position impact the role of the history teacher? I raise this question because, unlike Seixas (1996), I am less sanguine that researchers, in the near term, will have much to say about the structure of historical positionalities that is independent of the local sites, contexts, and informants in and about which their studies are conducted. If this is so, then it leaves much of the work up to history teachers. Why? It is an issue of proximity. Research can help inform practice. Moreover, research on students’ historical positionalities is important for making sense of the process of historical understanding and therefore should continue. But if context, memory, and experience are the clearest arbiters of those positionalities, then history teachers are the closest to the source, closest to the where understanding students’ varying positionalities will do the most good, closest to where those positionalities come into contact with new ideas, closest to where the positionalities can be influenced by what we know about what it takes to become a more expert historical thinker. Students’ positionalities, as I noted, are the building blocks of changes and advances in historical thinking. This is why the lion’s share of the work must fall to history teachers.

Much of the work falls to history teachers for a second reason, that of necessity. By this I mean that it has become increasingly difficult to envision the learner as a blank slate (tabula rasa) onto which are written the putative lessons of the historical past by directive teachers and standard history textbooks. Developments in how learning is understood and how the mind works (e.g., Brown, Collins, & Duguid, 1989; Resnick & Klopfer, 1987) suggest that we construct new ideas around the images we already hold. Children and adolescents come to school with a host of prior understandings about the past upon which they will build new historical understandings. The more the new images and ideas they encounter in the history classroom cohere with and bridge from what learners already know, the greater the opportunity the teacher has for affecting change, for assisting learners in becoming more proficient thinkers, and for helping them develop new, deeper, and more complex and sophisticated temporal bearings.

To press the point, eighth-grader Randy struggles because the story of Jamestown he was asked to commit to memory and retell held few connections with what he already understood about colonization, the British, and early America. His history teacher, while attempting to do justice to the school district curriculum guide, failed to ask Randy or any of his classmates about their prior understandings, about their historical positionalities, and how they might be analogous to the content studied. Futhermore, Randy was African American, which, if Epstein’s (1997) work is any indication, makes his racial identity a relatively sizable influence on his positionality, one quite different from his white and Hispanic classmates, and one different still from the Eurocentric orientation of his history textbook. It should come as no surprise that Randy struggled.

Necessity puts the heavy lifting in the lap of history teachers because it is they who must most immediately confront the historical positionalities of Randy and his classmates. It is they who have to bridge from these positionalities in order to help the Randys avoid a constantly "jumbled head." Effectively, the history class begins on the first day with questions such as: So how do you, Randy, understand history? What do you think it is? Why do you think we study it? What do you know about how historians work? What sense do you make of this or that event?

These historical-positionality questions are only the first few on the road to developing a response to the fourth question I posed initially: How do savvy history teachers work from their students’ historical positions, using sophisticated forms of thinking that promote understanding? It should be clear by now that an approach to historical thinking that takes a learner’s historical positionality seriously implies a very different view of what goes on in the classroom than what Randy experienced. A march through the decades via the textbook and direct instruction on the facts the textbook unceasingly piles one atop the other ignores the local knowledge and understanding of the learner and cultivates "jumbled head" historical thinking. Adventurous history teachers, who are savvy about and have learned to read their own historical positionalities, understand this. What do they do? Of course, they attend to the learners’ varying positionalities in a variety of ways as they build their capacity for thinking historically. From this variety, consider the following possibilities.

First, savvy history teachers question their students. For example, they ask them about how and why they assign significance to certain events and agents while marginalizing others. They ask students to back up their historical claims with evidence as a means of understanding their learners’ epistemological positions. They raise questions about the assignment of historical agency and in so doing attempt to make a cluster of positionality-based interpretative actions—imagination, empathy, and moral judgment—problematic. In this sense, they act as agents provocateur. Questions drive much of what these teachers do in history classrooms because they wish to understand how their students think, how their differing sociocultural, local, ethnic, familial backgrounds influence how they reason. And these teachers teach students how to ask each other questions. The classroom becomes a community of inquirers who learn to prize interrogations over declarations, to honor the evidence-based contributions of inquirers over textbook claims, and to value continuing curiosity and reflection on their historical positionalities as much as and perhaps more than the possession of deep factual knowledge about the past.

Second, these adventurous teachers spend much of their time listening to students in an effort to understand how the novice historical thinker’s position shifts and changes (and if not, why not) with each new round of historical study. Listening closely to what the students say in response to the questions asked sets the stage for new questions. These new questions are targeted at students’ reformulated positions. Serious questioning and careful listening become inseparable. These ambitious history teachers model the questioning-listening characteristics necessary for building a community of inquirers who emphasize the importance of one’s historical positionality in building historical understanding.

And third, history teachers who focus on developing historical thinking by beginning with the positionalities of their students stress the importance of inquiry into rich historical contexts These contexts allow students to see their positionalities mirrored in such problematic issues as progress and decline, change and continuity, and assessing human agency. In such classrooms where the focus is American history, students dig deeply into, compare, and discuss, for example, the Boston "Massacre," the incident in Rosewood, Florida where a number of black townspeople were attacked by whites, and the student shootings at Kent State University. In the process, they attempt to understand how questions of assessing human agency and applying moral judgment (Who did what to whom, why, and was it justifiable?) and evaluating human progress or decline in handling conflict over time (Have our responses to conflict improved or deteriorated historically?) are inextricably bound up with a historical thinker’s present position (how his/her assumptions and prior understandings guide a response to these questions). Deep inquiry into these types of historical contexts provides a method for bringing forward the substance of the learner’s position, creates the opportunity for reflection on that position via meaningful analogies with the past, and thus enables more complex forms of historical thinking. The historical subject matter is never allowed to wander far from who the learner is in the classrooms of these intrepid history teachers.

To augment deep inquiry, these teachers also provide their students with the tools of inquiry. They begin by enriching the historical context with multiple and differing historical interpretations. They teach students how to think empathically and imaginatively in order to fill in the pieces missing from these interpretations. They push their students along a path from a limited sense of historical evidence to reading for subtext, corroborating accounts, and engaging sourcing techniques. Most importantly, they invite their students to turn these tools on themselves, on their own historical assumptions and the socioculturally-mediated points of view that constitute their historical positionalities. In short, the savvy history teacher begins and ends with the learner’s historical positionality, interrogating it using questions, a sharp ear, and rich, meaningful contexts coupled with the tools of inquiry. She models the process, demonstrates the discourse of inquiry, and encourages students to engage each other in the same fashion with questions of positionality always at the surface.⁶

I have been attempting to reformulate a view of historical thinking that stresses beginning with, working from, and ending with the historical positionality of the learner. My argument hinges on the idea that historical understanding is possible only by taking the learner’s positionality seriously, since that position represents the temporal bearings from which the learner thinks about the past, makes sense of the present, and imagines a future. Furthermore, I am suggesting that one of the most important sites in which the learner’s historical positionality meets an opportunity for change and growth is in the ambitious history teacher’s classroom. Here, what we know about the nature of historical thinking is applied in ways that bring historical understanding to realization. In summary, this position on historical thinking consists of the following features.

The positionality of the historical thinker represents a socioculturally-mediated amalgam of ontological (the thinker’s overall world view), existential (the thinker’s sense of self within his/her world view), and epistemological (the thinker’s understanding of how the world and self are known) assumptions about how things past, present, and future hang together. These assumptions give the historical thinker temporal moorings; they serve as guides for and interpreters of the thinker’s life experience. They are also sites on which historical understandings are constructed. But as the sociologists and ethnomethodologists point out, our assumptions can be so taken for granted that they become invisible to us. In other words, our assumptions or historical positionalities orient us in particular ways to the world, but do so often outside of our awareness.

Therefore, historical positionalities can be stable and resistant to change largely because they are taken for granted, but they also can become slippery when assumptions collide with new experiences that are beyond the capacity of those assumptions to explain. For naive historical thinkers in particular, this is often the case because of the relatively limited nature of their experience with historical contexts and inquiry. In short, the naive thinker’s historical positionality frames his or her historical understanding, while conversely allowing deep experience with manifest acts of historical thinking to profoundly influence it, if those acts challenge taken-for-granted assumptions. This is the cognitive terrain on which ambitious history teachers work. They take full advantage of the sometimes receptive and malleable nature of the assumptions that frame the naive thinker’s historical positionality through questions, community discourse, and inquiry into historical context. Effectively they require learners to embrace a range of deep historical thinking acts.

Historical thinking, as construed by those who have studied it, is the set of manifest acts that create the space in which the thinker’s present temporal bearings can interact with new experiences in such a way that change in those bearings can occur. At a minimum, these acts of thinking include (a) questioning, understanding, and using historical evidence to contextualize the past and develop imaginative and empathic capacity, (b) wrestling with the assignment of historical significance and the judgment of historical agency, and (c) evaluating change and continuity and progress and decline. Thinkers engage in some of these historical thinking acts at least tacitly every day as they encounter new experiences, establish and reestablish their present temporal bearings, construct and reconstruct their historical positionalities. The work of teachers in the history classroom involves making these thinking acts explicit, thus exposing and influencing the plane on which historical understanding is created.

This process requires that historical thinking acts ultimately must be directed back on the historical thinker’s positionality and the specific assumptions that constitute it. Growth in historical understanding occurs when historical thinking is taken to a level—both substantively and procedurally—that allows analysis of, self-reflection on, and change around one’s historical positionality.

This line of reasoning may suggest that the work of teachers in changing naive thinkers’ positionalities is relatively straightforward as long as historical thinking is made explicit and opportunities for self-reflection are provided. This may be the case for young, very naive learners. But, as Wineburg (1997) has observed, learning about and reflecting on one’s positionality is at best an "unnatural act." We prize many of our memories of the past; we defend our present historical positions because they enable understanding in the first place. It is often difficult for us (perhaps impossible argue some) to let go of our presentism in order to face the strangeness of the past. Indeed, as Lowenthal (1985) submits, the "past is a foreign country." But I would contend that this does not stop ambitious history teachers from asking students to engage in "unnatural acts." For as Wineburg later notes, pursuing these acts of historical thinking may well help us as learners attend to how our positionalities shape our understandings by "confront[ing] the fact that the world is infinitely more than what we bring to it. . ." (p. 34). This realization about the nature of one’s historical positionality is not impossible and follows from deliberate, planned experiences with manifest acts of historical thinking, however "unnatural" this thinking might be. Ambitious history teachers are not daunted by this task’s summons.

Research on historical thinking is an important effort in making sense of how learners build historical understandings. It also may be crucial in deepening our collective understanding of the approaches necessary to cultivating more expertise in the historical thinking of novices. However, unless researchers conduct experiments that allow them to more directly influence and then study changes in learners’ historical positionalities and/or become researchers-turned-history-teachers themselves in order to obtain closer proximity to these learners, it will continue to fall to ambitious classroom history teachers the task of helping novices examine their own positionalities in light of the apperception that knowing the past is a difficult act because that past is so much larger and stranger than one’s present temporal bearings will allow. Yes, this apperception is in part why Randy struggles, but it is also related to fact that his historical positionality was ignored. As a result, he never actually was invited to become a historical thinker in any strong sense of the term.

If a key goal of experiences in history classrooms is to help naive learners such as Randy become educated thinkers, and thus more adroit in their historical understandings, then the beginning, middle, and ending points will be the sites on which their historical positionalities—as varied, distinct, resilient, and/or malleable as they might be—intersect with inquiry into the past. That addressing this present-position/past-inquiry intersection is difficult and "unnatural" should not forbid its pursuit. It should simply mean that researchers and history teachers alike work as intentionally and deliberately as possible to bring it to fulfillment.

Acknowledgments

I wish to thank my colleague Patricia Alexander for constructive remarks on an earlier draft of this essay. I also wish to thank those history teachers, who have allowed me to spend time in their classrooms and with them in conversation, for prodding me to think more deeply about the ambitious nature of their practice.