Teaching History in Basic Education

• The presentation discusses issues on the teaching of history in basic education.
• Norjie Y. Cabanero, MEd is the presenter.

Intended Learning Outcomes

• Students will determine issues on historical literacy.
• Students will discuss issues revolving around historians and historical texts.
• Students will examine issues on the sources of teaching history.
• Students will propose ways of addressing challenges to teaching history.
• Students will explore accounts of history classes and determine issues that need to be addressed.

Issues on Historical Literacy

• Historical literacy involves being able to read and write.
• Historical literacy enables students to read history texts critically, write thoughtfully, and engage in meaningful discussions about the past.

Issues in Historical Literacy

• Cognitive or pedagogical influence of texts can cause issues.
• Complex vocabulary is an example of a cognitive or pedagogical influence.
• History textbooks should have a sound instructional design that matches the needs and inclinations of the students.
• History textbooks are considered voiceless and dispassionate.
• A combination of primary and secondary sources is recommended as the foundation for instruction.
• Teachers in basic education need textbooks.
• Teachers lack resources like eyewitness accounts in history, which can be costly and not practical.
• Teachers end up using traditional textbooks, highlighting the urgent need to improve these textbooks for effective history education.

History and Narrative Voice in Writing History Textbooks

• The author or writer acts as a storyteller, also known as author visibility, personal narrative, and personal agency.
• Narrative writing helps learners relate to the lesson because they know where the lesson originates.
• History textbooks require a narrative voice so that learners can develop deep historical knowledge.
• History textbooks need interpretive judgment.
• Historians arrange and select events based on their relevance.
• History textbooks need temporal and inherently causal content.
• Writers of history textbooks need to incorporate creativity and imagination in presenting historical events chronologically so that learners will better understand how events evolved.
• History textbook features need improvement.
• Current textbooks include little information about the sources of data, authors, and how the textbook was written.
• Features like short biographical descriptions of the authors and introductory chapters describing the arc of their research can help learners with essential information about the writing.
• Footnotes, endnotes, parenthetical comments, and other techniques can lay bare the fact-finding process.
• These features need to be incorporated into textbooks as a foundational aspect of true historical writing.
• Textbook writers need to employ sourcing heuristics to help learners understand the meaning of their lessons.
• Heuristics are strategies derived from previous experiences with similar problems.
• Sourcing heuristics involves determining a text's origin and legitimacy before reading, enabling readers to determine if the text will support their learning.
• Textbooks history need rhetorical facts to enable students to read between the lines and develop critical analysis.
• History textbooks are dull, lifeless, erroneous, overly broad, and difficult to understand.
• A first-person approach to history, using "I" in narrating events, can make history textbooks better.
• The use of "good, lively writing, and a critical approach to history" can make history textbooks better.
• History should be taught as a discipline and deviate from using textbooks.
• Often, history textbooks use "textbookese" or have an anonymous authoritative author who uses a third-person voice, discouraging questioning by the reader.
• Readers only receive information, and cannot think critically which leads to memorization of facts.
• History textbooks lack metadiscourse.
• Metadiscourse refers to the author intruding into the informational discourse of a text to give opinions or direct the reader.
• The author can express views and guide readers on how to analyze ideas.
• Readers can determine the author's perspective, which will guide them in understanding the text.
• There is a debate on whether history textbooks should use "considerate texts" or "less considerate texts".
• "Considerate texts" facilitate understanding, learning, and remembering by avoiding complex constructions that cause comprehension and learning difficulties.
• "Considerate texts" are easy to understand and make students confident in their answers, especially those with low comprehension.
• "Less considerate texts" are hard to understand and less coherent.
• High-knowledge readers or students with high levels of comprehension benefit from less considerate texts as they are challenged to fill in gaps and make their own inferences.
• An appropriate balance of considerate and less considerate texts will benefit all learners.
• The number of authors who made the textbook is another concern in writing history textbooks.
• Textbooks should have a visible author so that students will know who the source of the information is.
• Students will also understand conflicting historical accounts.
• Narratives should know how to write narratives based on conflicting accounts of historical events.
• Students can create their own accounts of the past with historical evidence.
• Dialogue is essential for students to understand conflicting historical accounts, think historically, and achieve the goals of history education.

Issues on the Sources of Teaching History

• Teaching history using textbooks trends to be a "dry presentation of facts" which can greatly affect student appreciation of the lesson.
• Primary sources are a solution to "dry" lessons.
• History textbooks can be transformed into teachable texts that provide a teacher with a resource base for classwork concerned with historical thinking.
• Considerate textbooks are recommended to use a "considerate textbook" to reveal the author's voice or make evident the historian's methods of inquiry.
• History teachers should provide metadiscourse by rewriting some sections of the textbooks.
• Since the most common sources of teaching history in schools, textbooks have an authoritative edge, particularly when compared with primary sources.
• Because of the unavailability of primary sources, teachers usually use textbooks.
• Students tend to be exposed to textbooks and just accept their contents as historical truths.
• History teachers face the predicament of helping students read classroom authority.
• Students tend to view history as a subject that features indisputable stories told about the past, packaged with clear lessons and unfettered by considerations of evidence.
• This authoritative tone and stance from history textbooks and teachers shapes how history is presented in the classroom.
• Textbooks and teachers tend to be authoritative due to several practices in the school.
• Students are often required to take good care of their textbooks by covering them and by not writing on their pages.
• Authors of textbooks tend to fill them with information so they look like encyclopedias in terms of thickness and weight.
• Textbook authors present the facts in a confident, omniscient, and objective tone.
• Students tend to treat textbooks as the authority in learning history.
• History textbook writers need to establish the connection between the students and the textbooks' content, tone, and rhetoric.
• Student-historians critique "historiographic shortcomings" in history textbooks.
• Textbooks rely on insufficient, misleading, or inaccurate facts.
• History textbooks should be detailed so that readers will understand the flow of events.
• Textbooks must use terms and events that must be explicated and elaborated.
• Background information should be provided on concepts.
• Misleading or inaccurate content that is not geographically and demographically sound should be avoided.
• History textbooks treat events in isolation.
• Textbook authors must care to incorporate essential understandings about the lesson.
• History textbooks lack supporting documentation.
• Textbooks in history still lack reliability in content, as writers fail to disclose their references.
• There is an absence of the human story in history textbooks.
• Textbooks should have author visibility where the students will feel that the author or writer is like a storyteller who is talking or discussing with them.
• In this way, the students will easily understand and relate to the lesson.
• History textbooks become eurocentric.
• This demonstrates the teacher's role for teaching history in the classroom.
• Teachers hold academic authority over students in terms of their learning of history.
• History teachers can shape the learning experiences of students by selecting the documents like primary sources and textbooks that they will be analyzing.
• This is similar to the work of a historian who "shapes an account in deciding what to include and how much attention to give an event.
• This enabled both teacher and students to talk about problems usually encountered in history like finding sources, and the limited time and knowledge on the lesson.
• Students understood that teachers can create classroom accounts in history by manipulating sources provided, creating favorable or biased historical accounts.