Hi, I'm Dr. Fran Mako, and I'm a Professional Development Coordinator with Cicero Systems. I'm going to talk a little bit today about multiple perspectives in history. So many of our students think history is all about facts.
And yes, history is about facts. Much of history is factual information. The dates, the place names, the individuals.
Those are facts of history. But how particular? event or individual is perceived, how an event is interpreted, we know can be varied and can change over time. How do we help students understand there's more than one way to look at an event, especially since textbooks very often present just one perspective? And they really need to for a number of reasons.
One, obviously, is length of a textbook. If a textbook were to cover all of U.S. history, let's say from exploration through reconstruction, and every possible or a number of perspectives were offered for every event, the textbook would be huge and very unwieldy and really not a very particularly effective teaching tool. But we do know, however, that often... The perspectives that a textbook presents or the perspective is limited and often it's a consensus perspective. It's the accepted or the traditional perspective.
What we want our students to be able to do is not only think about different ways of viewing an event or an individual but hopefully to become good historical thinkers and make sound and reasoned judgments about which perspective they feel perhaps is... a more accurate reflection of what happened at that particular time. For those of you who are Common Core State Standard adoptees, we know that there is a whole component of the Common Core State Standards for Content Literacy and Social Studies that are around integration of knowledge and ideas, and those are all about understanding, analyzing multiple sources, understanding them, and looking at perspective across time.
And we know that history is not necessarily stagnant. We know that the facts remain the same, but interpretations or perspectives often change. And that's what historiography is about, how different individuals, historians view a particular event. And we also know that there's a difference, and we see this every day in our classrooms, between Students who are expert readers of history and students who are, as Sam Weinberg calls them, novice readers.
And the differences that he focuses on all have to do with understanding perspective and bias and point of view. And he talks about things like expert readers wanting to understand the context as well as the content. So it's not just what you read, what's the historical context and why is that important?
Also, expert readers see any text as the construction of a vision of the world. We all have a worldview. We all see the world differently. And that's influenced by a number of factors, our beliefs, our experiences, our political affiliations. So everyone has a point of view.
And helping students understand that and being able to analyze it. Weinberg also says, that expert readers of history compare texts to see what are the different accounts. And that, again, is very critical for that historical thinking, having kids being able to assess the reliability and the accuracy of a particular perspective.
Expert readers also assume bias as opposed to objectivity or neutrality. As much as we like to think that we can be objective and unbiased, it's very difficult to do. and it's certainly difficult in history. History is not...
clean and straightforward as many students, as most students feel. So if students can accept this, and expert readers do, then they start to get interested in all those contradictions and ambiguities of history. What Sam Weinberg calls seeing history as a series of problems to be explored, not necessarily solved or resolved.
I think this is critical for kids. There may not be a right answer. There may not be a right perspective. And it's looking at those different perspectives and how understanding those different perspectives deepens and enriches our understanding of a particular individual or event. Weinberg also says that expert readers of history check the sources, and that goes back to accuracy and reliability.
How valid is this source? What do we know about the author? What do we know about what the author's... purpose was?
This is where things like propaganda come in. How reliable is this source? And then finally, expert readers acknowledge uncertainty and complexity. And that goes back to what I just said about history being a series of problems to be explored, but not necessarily solved, and that there is this uncertainty about history. And I think also, if we think about understanding multiple perspectives, helps kids with this historical thinking piece.
As I said, history is not stagnant or closed-end. Facts remain the same. What they mean or how they're interpreted often changes.
And again, having students understand that any particular interpretation is affected by purpose, intention, and goal, and also the individual's assumptions, beliefs, and worldviews. So we know also that we want students to begin to think about how historians think, and that historians don't necessarily settle immediately for one perspective. They look at and sort of piece together many and sometimes competing versions of an account. They think about reliability.
They think about accuracy. They think about, is this person responding at the time the event happened? And is it... responding 100 years later.
How is that different? And they test and they judge multiple perspectives and they have to look at the evidence. What do we know? What are those facts?
And how does a person's interpretation correlate to the facts? If there's a disconnect, then we have to consider how accurate or reliable is a particular perspective. And then there's the whole piece, again, where we love our students to be at some point, where they can begin to critically analyze and evaluate different perspectives, and then begin to think about their own thinking.
Well, if I've looked at four or five different perspectives, and I've weighed them against what I know about the authors, what I know about the facts, can I, as an individual, offer what I think my perspective is. And not only offer, not only say, I think this is the more, this is a more valid perspective, because all perspectives can be considered valid, but it's a perspective that I can support with factual information, as opposed to just saying, this is what I think. So multiple perspectives and having students understand multiple perspectives, look at different documents, think about the common core, where when they compare literature and informational text around the same event or theme, think about perspective in the literary piece and perspective in the document, the historical document, and begin to think about how that impacts understanding.
What we'll have ultimately are students who are not only better readers of history, but good historical thinkers who understand the process of historical thinking and can apply it to content. that they are learning. Cicero Systems does a lot of work with multiple sources and helping kids and multiple perspectives and helping students understand historical thinking skills and the process of looking at different perspectives in history. If you'd like to know more about our professional development offerings and how we could help your school or your district, please check out our website at www.cicerosystems.com.