This article draws on an empirical study that suggests useful practical strategies for representing progression in history, especially regarding historical empathy. It also demonstrates how teachers can both guide and involve students in working with these representations, thereby encouraging students to make sense of, and gauge, their own progress. In doing so it sets out the case for educators having better knowledge of progression in the learning of historical concepts and better ways of showing that progression.
Developing historical empathy
Showing progress
Key points
•Clear and rich descriptions of progression provide teachers and students alike with valuable information about where learning is heading and what needs to be done to improve students’ grasp of historical empathy.
•Historical empathy typologies and pathways are useful to teachers in planning the sequencing of teaching and learning.
•Displaying progressions graphically helps students and teachers to describe and explain shifts in students’ understanding of historical empathy
This article draws on an empirical study that suggests useful practical strategies for representing progression in history, especially regarding historical empathy. It also demonstrates how teachers can both guide and involve students in working with these representations, thereby encouraging students to make sense of, and gauge, their own progress. In doing so it sets out the case for educators having better knowledge of progression in the learning of historical concepts and better ways of showing that progression.
Introduction
What is it that indicates a student’s growing understanding of history? The New Zealand Curriculum (NZC) (Ministry of Education, 2007) states that it is when students develop a better grasp of the complexity and contestable nature of the past. The national qualification for senior secondary school students, the National Certificate of Educational Achievement (NCEA) (New Zealand Qualifications Authority, 2014), sees it as the shift from describing past events to analysing those events. These answers provide a useful guide to history teachers, by giving a sense of where students might start (by describing the past) and where they might end up (being able to analyse the past in all its complexity). What they do not do, however, is show what that journey looks like. More broadly, very little history education research attempts to describe the ongoing changes in students’ understanding of history (Barton, 2008). This article addresses this need by drawing on an empirical study (Davison, 2013) to suggest progressions in the learning of historical empathy of use to both teachers and students. It also provides some practical strategies that might be used to assist teachers and students to “see” progress.
The New Zealand Curriculum and progression
Currently, NZC outlines the broad objectives of history teaching. Within the curriculum’s Social Sciences learning area are a series of history achievement objectives at curriculum levels 6, 7, and 81 (see Table 1), that provide “broad descriptions of learning expectations” (Ministry of Education, 2010, p. 18).
TABLE 1. THE NEW ZEALAND CURRICULUM ACHIEVEMENT OBJECTIVES FOR HISTORY
| Curriculum level | History achievement objective 1 | History achievement objective 2 |
| 6 | Understand how the causes and consequences of past events that are of significance to New Zealanders shape the lives of people and society. | Understand how people’s perspectives on past events that are of significance to New Zealanders differ. |
| 7 | Understand how historical forces and movements have influenced the causes and consequences of events of significance to New Zealanders. | Understand how people’s interpretations of events that are of significance to New Zealanders differ. |
| 8 | Understand that the causes, consequences, and explanations of historical events that are of significance to New Zealanders are complex and how and why they are contested. | Understand how trends over time reflect social, economic, and political forces. |
Regarding progression, these objectives signpost a shift from understanding differing perspectives and the way history affects lives, to an ability to see historical events as complex, contested, and being concerned with forces across time. As Absolum, Flockton, Hattie, Hipkins, and Reid (2009) have posited, they do not, however, provide teachers and students with a rich description of what progression looks like because they focus on “surface coverage at the expense of in-depth learning” (p. 35). For instance, they refer to the concept of significance without describing what it means for the teaching of history. Can such descriptions be found in the history achievement standards for NCEA?
NCEA and progression
In the last 3 years of schooling students opting to study history are assessed using a menu of achievement standards at Levels 1, 2, and 3. There are six achievement standards at each Level. Following the publication of the NZC document in 2007, pre-existing achievement standards for NCEA were rewritten2 so that they better reflected the intention of the curriculum’s achievement objectives (Ministry of Education, 2014).
Three achievement standards can be internally assessed by teachers. These include a piece of historical research, the analysis of this research, and an exploration of perspectives. The remainder are externally assessed and involve analysing source material and writing essays about causes and consequences, and an historical trend or force. This menu is wide-ranging and evidence suggests that the internally assessed tasks are motivating to students and engage them in the craft of “doing history” (Sheehan, 2013). The externally assessed tasks are also focused on those concepts that form the basis of most models of historical thinking, such as evidence and cause and consequence. What neither do, however, is set out a sequence of progression from NCEA Level 1 to Levels 2 and 3, and within each level, that fully reflects what happens as students shift from naïve to more sophisticated historical thinking.
Student attainment in relation to each achievement standard is gauged as “achievement”, “achievement with merit”, or “achievement with excellence” (see Table 2). In Table 2, progression at Level 1 is described in terms of students moving towards “in-depth” and then “comprehensive” understanding. Progression at Level 2 and Level 3 is couched in similar terms but the emphasis is on interpretation and analysis, respectively. This language is used throughout each of the 18 history achievement standards. The explanatory notes for the achievement standards outlined in Table 2 state the importance of using supporting evidence and define comprehensive as the ability to show perceptiveness.
The achievement standards are inadequate descriptions of progression because they rely so heavily on “semantic incrementalism” (Absolum et al., 2009, p. 40). For instance, understand, interpret, and analyse are used incrementally to signal the differences between achievement at Levels 1, 2, and 3. And, within an achievement standard, progression is described in terms of student assignments being increasingly detailed (see Table 2). Achievement Standard 91004, based on understanding different perspectives, is typical, with its criteria for “achievement with merit” being “in-depth understanding” and for “achievement with excellence” being “comprehensive understanding”.
TABLE 2. WHAT STUDENTS SHOULD BE ABLE TO SHOW, REGARDING HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVES, ACROSS 3 YEARS OF SECONDARY SCHOOLING
Absolum et al.’s point is that to teachers and students, understand, interpret, and analyse are likely to mean the same thing and therefore do not clarify points of progression. Meanwhile, in depth and comprehensive define progression rather narrowly in terms of students providing greater detail or moving towards perceptiveness.
Progression in the history classroom
An approach to progression could be, rather like the NCEA achievement standards, to focus on the concepts that underpin history, but in a way that more closely sets out how history students shift from a novice to a more sophisticated grasp of each concept. In recent years the field of history education research has both defined what these concepts are and, in many cases, set out typologies that describe these shifts in thinking (Seixas, 2006; Taylor, 2005). While it is sometimes called historical literacy there is a broad consensus that thinking about history involves at least six key concepts. Seixas (2006) refers to these concepts as “benchmarks of historical thinking” and lists them as:
•historical significance
•evidence
•continuity and change
•cause and consequence
•historical perspective (sometimes called historical empathy)
•the moral dimension of the past.
Typologies are generally characterised by a sequence of levels (Ashby & Lee, 1987; Lee & Shemilt, 2004) that identify shifts from novice to more sophisticated thinking. These levels have been described by Lee and Shemilt as predictable “break points” (2004, p. 29) that signal when a student’s grasp of history shifts. Table 3 is adapted from the typologies of the Southern Regional Examinations Board (1986, pp. 15, 42–43) and Ashby and Lee (1987, pp. 68–81), and attempts to predict a range of student responses to historical empathy. It is a tool for gauging students’ responses to tasks and showing teachers what to look out for as students develop historical empathy. We do acknowledge, however, that it is linear and, as Counsell (2000) has highlighted, students do not necessarily sequentially progress through different levels. It cannot therefore be said that for every student a typology will reflect how they might grow in their development of historical empathy. In other words, typologies are fallible.
While it is sometimes called historical literacy there is a broad consensus that thinking about history involves at least six key concepts. Seixas (2006) refers to these concepts as “benchmarks of historical thinking” and lists them as:
•historical significance
•evidence
•continuity and change
•cause and consequence
•historical perspective (sometimes called historical empathy)
•the moral dimension of the past.
TABLE 3. FIVE-LEVEL TYPOLOGY OF HISTORICAL EMPATHY
| Level | Affective | Cognitive |
| 1 | People in the past are imagined as simple cardboard cut-outs, without feeling or a willingness to entertain different points of view. | People in the past are not comprehended or at times are thought of as being stupid. |
| 2 | People in the past are imagined with some feeling so that they are more than cardboard cut-outs. However, they are still quite vague and stereotypical. | People in the past are comprehended using some evidence, but they tend to be thought of in terms of “stereotypes”. |
| 3 | People in the past are imagined with more feeling and care so that their lives are more fully interpreted but from the position of the present day. | People in the past are comprehended using evidence so that an historical context is beginning to be built up. This historical context is comprehended from the position of the present day. |
| 4 | People in the past are imagined with attuned feeling and care so that their lives are more fully interpreted from their own position in the past. | People in the past are comprehended using evidence so that an historical context is built up. This context is comprehended from peoples’ position in the past. |
| 5 | People in the past are imagined with attuned feeling and care so that their lives are more fully interpreted from their own position in the past. An attempt is also made to differentiate between individuals who lived in the past so that factors such as personality and shared experiences are considered. | People in the past are comprehended using diverse evidence so that a wider historical context is built up, giving the “bigger picture” of their life and times. This context is comprehended from peoples’ position in the past. |
Making progress in historical empathising
In 2010 the first author conducted an empirical study that explored the historical empathy understanding of 45 Year 10 students3 across two social studies classes in a co-educational suburban secondary school (Davison, 2013). The typology reproduced in Table 3 was used early on in the study as a means of gauging students’ progress in historical empathising. The students participated in a teaching intervention of 19 one-hour lessons, culminating in writing an essay about the 1915 Gallipoli campaign. Both classes were taught the same teaching and learning material but the sequence in which it was taught was different. In one class, material that engaged with the affective dimension of historical empathy was taught first, followed by material that engaged with its cognitive dimension. In the second class, this sequence was reversed and the cognitive was taught first followed by the affective. The cognitive dimension focused on students exploring evidence and the historical context of Gallipoli while the affective dimension was directed towards students’ emotions and feelings of care for those involved in the Gallipoli campaign. Using data from this research (interviews, student workbooks, and entry, mid, exit, and post learning tasks) and the ideas of Gaddis (2002) on how students “enter into the past”, a pathway was devised that described three stages of historical empathy, each with a series of elements (see Figure 1).
The pathway provides teachers with a clear picture of teaching historical empathy in a sequence that begins with the affective dimension before moving into the cognitive. In contrast, other researchers, such as Dulberg (2002), place less emphasis on sequence, and argue that teachers often move back and forth between the affective and cognitive. While acknowledging that providing teaching time for both dimensions is crucial, the sequence is important because the affective dimension has the potential to best promote student engagement when entering into the past.
As teachers begin to teach activities that align with the purposes set out in Figure 1, so they and their students can plot their progress. To do this Vermeulen’s (2000) metaphor of progression as the “growth of a spider’s web” (2000, p. 36) is useful as it can be used to display graphically how students might progress at four moments during the teaching of historical empathy. The points on each spiderweb diagram come from the students and/or teachers interpreting how well they have responded to class-based tasks and plotting these against the elements used in the pathway. A five-point ordinal scale is used to order “the extent” that students are displaying each element: 1—not at all; 2—small extent; 3—some extent; 4—large extent; and 5—very large extent (see Figure 2).
FIGURE 1. HISTORICAL EMPATHY PATHWAY
FIGURE 2. LUCY’S SPIDERWEB DIAGRAM AT FOUR DIFFERENT POINTS
Using spiderweb diagrams makes the complexity and variability in patterns of student progress visible. They graphically signal that developing historical empathy is not a simple linear process. Nuthall’s (2007) research demonstrates that student learning is individual and varied. In looking at Figure 2 an inference can be drawn that at the midpoint in the teaching, Lucy needed to focus on the idea that past and present were different. The spiderweb diagrams provided a means for Lucy and the teacher to plan her next steps in learning. As such they are a tool for learning and help students to navigate their learning trajectory. By involving students in tracking their progress it is more likely that they will be aware of where they are in terms of their learning journey and where they need to go next (Davies & Hill, 2009).
It would also be worthwhile to draw upon student essays to make judgements about progression. Essays are a means of exemplifying what progression looks like. In the study the essay topic was: Why did young New Zealanders go to fight in the First World War and what was that experience like? By selecting these essays at various degrees of sophistication it was possible to show what novice and sophisticated historical empathy looked like.
Table 4 sets out an excerpt from an essay from Lucy,4 one of the study’s participants. Her essay exemplifies the elements of historical empathy outlined in the pathway (“open-mindedness” is omitted as it is not easily identifiable in the essay). Students and teachers could read exemplars such as this to clarify what the various elements of historical empathy might look like in student writing. With practice, therefore, it might be possible for them to become adept at recognising sophisticated historical empathy. This is important because, as Sadler (2007) has argued, it is this ability to judge quality that identifies those who are able to recognise a subject’s guild knowledge—in this case, the knowledge of what is meant by sophisticated historical empathy. Sadler would also promote the value of reading essay exemplars in terms of being able to view the whole. It is possible, as outlined in Table 4, to identify “elements” within exemplary essays, but it is also worthwhile reading them as a “whole”. Sadler argues that “if you break something into pieces [in this context, elements], whatever originally held it together has to be either supplied or satisfactorily substituted if the sense of the whole is to be restored” (2007, p. 390). Essays are one way of providing that “sense of the whole” to students and teachers who might otherwise be struggling to picture more than one element of historical empathy at a time. Other means could include recording student discussion and participation in role play.
TABLE 4. LUCY’S ESSAY: EXEMPLIFYING ELEMENTS OF HISTORICAL EMPATHY
| Elements of historical empathy | Examples from Lucy’s essay? | Teacher comments |
| Feeling care | “1915 is the year we will always remember as the year so many soldiers lost their lives, bravely fighting for what they believed in … Lest we forget.” | Lucy sensitively refers to the importance of remembering what happened at Gallipoli. However, she does not discuss why using the words of a fictional character such as “Archy”5 are problematic. |
| Imagination | “Leadley describes the constant sound of war, the lack of hygiene and the bad food and the dirty water.” | Lucy uses Leadley’s diary to help her visualise what Gallipoli was like. |
| Evidence | “Joining the war was ‘the thing to do at the time’ (Vic Nicolson). Soldiers joined up because it was popular.” | Lucy frequently uses veterans’ reflections at face value, but does conclude that there were many reasons why men joined up. |
| Contextual knowledge | “Most of the men settled in New Zealand during the time of the First World War had grown up on the isolated islands, and so the thought of adventure appealed.” | Lucy’s grasp of context could be developed further so that she could provide a broader picture of why soldiers held thoughts of adventure. |
| Multiple perspectives | “The final, but not the only other reason, as it varies with different people, is because they were patriotic and loved their country.” | Lucy understands that soldiers’ reasons for fighting can be viewed from multiple perspectives. |
| Judgements | “1915 is the year we will always remember as the year so many soldiers lost their lives, bravely fighting for what they believed in.” | Lucy makes a judgement about the significance of Gallipoli from a present-day perspective. |
Responding to the challenges of using progression strategies
While this article has promoted the use of typologies and other progression strategies, it should be noted that they are contestable for two related reasons. First, they do not take into account the different ways that students might come to grasp historical concepts. As VanSledright (2001) has pointed out, students can appear to be at different levels at the same time, or to be haphazardly moving between them. This point might be missed if teachers pay too much attention to the typology and not enough attention to what is happening in the classroom. Counsell has therefore argued that teachers must devise models of progression for themselves, based on their practical experience, and that simply relying on research-based typologies can “deprofessionalise teachers” (Counsell & the Historical Association Secondary Education Committee, 1997, p. 12).
Second, progression strategies, if too rigidly applied by the teacher, might inhibit student responses. This is because student responses to activities in the history classroom may not match the descriptions laid out in a sequence of levels or stages. Therefore, Lee and Shemilt (2003), who have promoted typologies, admit that they should be employed with caution, and principally as a means of “scaffolding” teaching and learning. This approach has been adopted by VanSledright (2011), who also framed student progression in terms of building student capacity. He has described an imaginary, but nonetheless exemplary, history teacher, Thomas Becker, slowly building up the capability of students by aligning classroom tasks with various goals, including the development of concepts such as historical empathy. To do this, VanSledright does not use the term typology but he does refer to students using “criteria-laden tools (e.g., use of evidence …) … to decide poorer from better accounts [of the past]” (2011, p. 66). Throughout, VanSledright has stressed the need to repeatedly share, model, and discuss the criteria historians use to make judgements about the past, largely because these criteria are unfamiliar to secondary-school-age students. This is similar to Sadler’s (2007) insight that it is the ability to judge quality which identifies those who understand a subject’s guild knowledge.
Sadler also cautioned that in breaking down a subject’s guild knowledge into different criteria, a sense of the whole might be lost. This is a risk in using typologies because they pull apart concepts and create separate criteria. One of the great advantages, however, of using the spiderweb diagrams and the historical empathy pathway is that it contains the various “elements” of historical empathy within the “whole”.
Conclusion
In a landscape where history teachers have a large degree of autonomy and are given only a broad direction for the teaching, learning, and assessment of history, there is a need for more accurate descriptions of how thinking historically grows in sophistication, what student progress looks like, and how it can be gauged. This article has sought to provide such a description for one of history’s key concepts—historical empathy—and provided some ways to represent progression in history. Such descriptions in relation to the subject’s other conceptual strands would be useful for the wider history teacher community to explore.
Suggested resource
A detailed description of the activities regarding the Gallipoli campaign can be accessed at: http://www.nzcer.org.nz/system/files/press/abstracts/History%20Matters_ch%201_0.pdf
Notes
References
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Counsell, C., & The Historical Association Secondary Education Committee. (1997). The twentieth century world: Planning study unit 4 of the national curriculum for history. London: Historical Association.
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Davison, M. (2013). ‘It is really hard being in their shoes’: Developing historical empathy in secondary school students. Unpublished doctoral thesis, The University of Auckland.
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Martyn Davison is a secondary school teacher. He is interested in practitioner inquiry and how teachers contribute to educational research.
Email: DAV@pakuranga.school.nz
Claire Sinnema is a senior lecturer in the Faculty of Education at The University of Auckland. Her research focuses on the improvement of teaching and learning across four main strands—curriculum, practitioner inquiry, pedagogy, and school leadership.
Mary Hill is an associate professor in the Faculty of Education at The University of Auckland. Her research and teaching spans educational assessment, practitioner inquiry, and assessment learning through teacher education.
1Curriculum levels 6, 7, and 8 broadly relate to NCEA Levels 1, 2, and 3, and student age groups of 16, 17, and 18 years, respectively.
2The realignment of NCEA history achievement standards was completed at the end of 2012.
3Year 10 students were selected because the Gallipoli campaign was a pre-existing part of their social studies course at secondary school.
4To help protect the anonymity of the study participants, pseudonyms were used.
5Archy was a central character in Peter Weir’s 1981 film Gallipoli. Students watched the film in class as part of the first author’s 2010 study.