how does history encourage critical thinking

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Using History to Teach Critical Thinking Skills

Feb 26, 2019

Exploring Historical Perspectives for Critical Thinking Development

One of the most important tools we can give our students is the ability to think critically. In this age of unlimited social media sharing, fake news, and hidden agendas, it has never been more important to be able to look at information and its source and determine if the information is accurate and true. Dictionary.com defines critical thinking as clear, rational, open-minded, and informed by evidence. In a good history class, one that moves beyond the textbook, thinking critically is part of the package.

Students of history look at an event from many different perspectives. The use of both primary (first-hand accounts) and secondary (recounting with interpretation and analysis) sources helps students see an event from many different angles. Imagine an event like the Boston Massacre. The account of the British soldier involved would be very different from the patriot on the street. Likewise, Paul Revere, Thomas Jefferson, and King George III would all see the Boston Massacre from a different place. A twenty-first century historian would add another view of the event. A British historian and an American historian would likely see the event in two different lights. A student of history learns to read all the accounts and make judgments about the event. Were the patriots justified in their actions? Were the soldiers? Why did Paul Revere refer to the event as a massacre? How did the event contribute to the tensions between the colonies and the crown leading up to the American Revolution?

Looking at different sources, the perspective of the author, and the bias brought to the event help students learn to discern and think critically. This important skill can be extrapolated to their non-academic life to determine if a news article, tweet, or report is valid or bait.

how does history encourage critical thinking

Becky Frank has been steeped in American History from her early days growing up on the family farm in Northeastern North Carolina. Although Barrow Creek Farm has been in her family since the 1680s, her parents were the first to live on it in three generations. On the farm she learned to milk cows, sheer sheep, and drive a tractor.

After an internship at Historic Edenton, she received a B.S. in Public History from Appalachian State University in 1992. Answering God’s call to teach in a classroom setting, she added teacher certification from East Carolina University to her degree in 1998. Becky then taught social studies in Gates County, North Carolina where her classes included U.S. History, World History, Economics, Government, and Humanities. In 2003 she married her husband John and left the classroom to start a family.

Becky has been teaching online for more than 10 years. She also homeschools her three children and is an active leader in the Children’s and Youth’s ministry at her church. She also enjoys gardening, cooking, scrapbooking and long walks with her kids and the family dog. Sharing the heritage of our great country is one of her passions as well. Her lifelong dream is to return to the family farm and make a portion of the acreage a living history site.

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A Brief History of the Idea of Critical Thinking

The intellectual roots of critical thinking are as ancient as its etymology, traceable, ultimately, to the teaching practice and vision of Socrates 2,500 years ago who discovered by a method of probing questioning that people could not rationally justify their confident claims to knowledge. Confused meanings, inadequate evidence, or self-contradictory beliefs often lurked beneath smooth but largely empty rhetoric. Socrates established the fact that one cannot depend upon those in "authority" to have sound knowledge and insight. He demonstrated that persons may have power and high position and yet be deeply confused and irrational. He established the importance of asking deep questions that probe profoundly into thinking before we accept ideas as worthy of belief.

He established the importance of seeking evidence, closely examining reasoning and assumptions, analyzing basic concepts, and tracing out implications not only of what is said but of what is done as well. His method of questioning is now known as "Socratic Questioning" and is the best known critical thinking teaching strategy. In his mode of questioning, Socrates highlighted the need in thinking for clarity and logical consistency.

Socrates set the agenda for the tradition of critical thinking, namely, to reflectively question common beliefs and explanations, carefully distinguishing those beliefs that are reasonable and logical from those which — however appealing they may be to our native egocentrism, however much they serve our vested interests, however comfortable or comforting they may be — lack adequate evidence or rational foundation to warrant our belief.

Socrates’ practice was followed by the critical thinking of Plato (who recorded Socrates’ thought), Aristotle, and the Greek skeptics, all of whom emphasized that things are often very different from what they appear to be and that only the trained mind is prepared to see through the way things look to us on the surface (delusive appearances) to the way they really are beneath the surface (the deeper realities of life). From this ancient Greek tradition emerged the need, for anyone who aspired to understand the deeper realities, to think systematically, to trace implications broadly and deeply, for only thinking that is comprehensive, well-reasoned, and responsive to objections can take us beyond the surface.

In the Middle Ages, the tradition of systematic critical thinking was embodied in the writings and teachings of such thinkers as Thomas Aquinas ( ) who to ensure his thinking met the test of critical thought, always systematically stated, considered, and answered all criticisms of his ideas as a necessary stage in developing them. Aquinas heightened our awareness not only of the potential power of reasoning but also of the need for reasoning to be systematically cultivated and "cross-examined." Of course, Aquinas’ thinking also illustrates that those who think critically do not always reject established beliefs, only those beliefs that lack reasonable foundations.

In the Renaissance (15th and 16th Centuries), a flood of scholars in Europe began to think critically about religion, art, society, human nature, law, and freedom. They proceeded with the assumption that most of the domains of human life were in need of searching analysis and critique. Among these scholars were Colet, Erasmus, and Moore in England. They followed up on the insight of the ancients.

Francis Bacon, in England, was explicitly concerned with the way we misuse our minds in seeking knowledge. He recognized explicitly that the mind cannot safely be left to its natural tendencies. In his book , he argued for the importance of studying the world empirically. He laid the foundation for modern science with his emphasis on the information-gathering processes. He also called attention to the fact that most people, if left to their own devices, develop bad habits of thought (which he called "idols") that lead them to believe what is false or misleading. He called attention to "Idols of the tribe" (the ways our mind naturally tends to trick itself), "Idols of the market-place" (the ways we misuse words), "Idols of the theater" (our tendency to become trapped in conventional systems of thought), and "Idols of the schools" (the problems in thinking when based on blind rules and poor instruction). His book could be considered one of the earliest texts in critical thinking, for his agenda was very much the traditional agenda of critical thinking.

Some fifty years later in France, Descartes wrote what might be called the second text in critical thinking, . In it, Descartes argued for the need for a special systematic disciplining of the mind to guide it in thinking. He articulated and defended the need in thinking for clarity and precision. He developed a method of critical thought based on the . He emphasized the need to base thinking on well-thought through foundational assumptions. Every part of thinking, he argued, should be questioned, doubted, and tested.

In the same time period, Sir Thomas Moore developed a model of a new social order, , in which every domain of the present world was subject to critique. His implicit thesis was that established social systems are in need of radical analysis and critique. The critical thinking of these Renaissance and post-Renaissance scholars opened the way for the emergence of science and for the development of democracy, human rights, and freedom for thought.

In the Italian Renaissance, Machiavelli’s critically assessed the politics of the day, and laid the foundation for modern critical political thought. He refused to assume that government functioned as those in power said it did. Rather, he critically analyzed how it did function and laid the foundation for political thinking that exposes both, on the one hand, the real agendas of politicians and, on the other hand, the many contradictions and inconsistencies of the hard, cruel, world of the politics of his day

Hobbes and Locke (in 16th and 17th Century England) displayed the same confidence in the critical mind of the thinker that we find in Machiavelli. Neither accepted the traditional picture of things dominant in the thinking of their day. Neither accepted as necessarily rational that which was considered "normal" in their culture. Both looked to the critical mind to open up new vistas of learning. Hobbes adopted a naturalistic view of the world in which everything was to be explained by evidence and reasoning. Locke defended a common sense analysis of everyday life and thought. He laid the theoretical foundation for critical thinking about basic human rights and the responsibilities of all governments to submit to the reasoned criticism of thoughtful citizens.

It was in this spirit of intellectual freedom and critical thought that people such as Robert Boyle (in the 17th Century) and Sir Isaac Newton (in the 17th and 18th Century) did their work. In his , Boyle severely criticized the chemical theory that had preceded him. Newton, in turn, developed a far-reaching framework of thought which roundly criticized the traditionally accepted world view. He extended the critical thought of such minds as Copernicus, Galileo, and Kepler. After Boyle and Newton, it was recognized by those who reflected seriously on the natural world that egocentric views of world must be abandoned in favor of views based entirely on carefully gathered evidence and sound reasoning.

Another significant contribution to critical thinking was made by the thinkers of the French Enlightenment: Bayle, Montesquieu, Voltaire, and Diderot. They all began with the premise that the human mind, when disciplined by reason, is better able to figure out the nature of the social and political world. What is more, for these thinkers, reason must turn inward upon itself, in order to determine weaknesses and strengths of thought. They valued disciplined intellectual exchange, in which all views had to be submitted to serious analysis and critique. They believed that all authority must submit in one way or another to the scrutiny of reasonable critical questioning.

Eighteenth Century thinkers extended our conception of critical thought even further, developing our sense of the power of critical thought and of its tools. Applied to the problem of economics, it produced Adam Smith’s In the same year, applied to the traditional concept of loyalty to the king, it produced the . Applied to reason itself, it produced Kant’s

In the 19th Century, critical thought was extended even further into the domain of human social life by Comte and Spencer. Applied to the problems of capitalism, it produced the searching social and economic critique of Karl Marx. Applied to the history of human culture and the basis of biological life, it led to Darwin’s . Applied to the unconscious mind, it is reflected in the works of Sigmund Freud. Applied to cultures, it led to the establishment of the field of Anthropological studies. Applied to language, it led to the field of Linguistics and to many deep probings of the functions of symbols and language in human life.

In the 20th Century, our understanding of the power and nature of critical thinking has emerged in increasingly more explicit formulations. In 1906, William Graham Sumner published a land-breaking study of the foundations of sociology and anthropology, , in which he documented the tendency of the human mind to think sociocentrically and the parallel tendency for schools to serve the (uncritical) function of social indoctrination :

"Schools make persons all on one pattern, orthodoxy. School education, unless it is regulated by the best knowledge and good sense, will produce men and women who are all of one pattern, as if turned in a lathe. An orthodoxy is produced in regard to all the great doctrines of life. It consists of the most worn and commonplace opinions which are common in the masses. The popular opinions always contain broad fallacies, half-truths, and glib generalizations (p. 630).

At the same time, Sumner recognized the deep need for critical thinking in life and in education:

"Criticism is the examination and test of propositions of any kind which are offered for acceptance, in order to find out whether they correspond to reality or not. The critical faculty is a product of education and training. It is a mental habit and power. It is a prime condition of human welfare that men and women should be trained in it. It is our only guarantee against delusion, deception, superstition, and misapprehension of ourselves and our earthly circumstances. Education is good just so far as it produces well-developed critical faculty. A teacher of any subject who insists on accuracy and a rational control of all processes and methods, and who holds everything open to unlimited verification and revision, is cultivating that method as a habit in the pupils. Men educated in it cannot be stampeded. They are slow to believe. They can hold things as possible or probable in all degrees, without certainty and without pain. They can wait for evidence and weigh evidence. They can resist appeals to their dearest prejudices. Education in the critical faculty is the only education of which it can be truly said that it makes good citizens” (pp. 632, 633).

John Dewey agreed. From his work, we have increased our sense of the pragmatic basis of human thought (its instrumental nature), and especially its grounding in actual human purposes, goals, and objectives. From the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein we have increased our awareness not only of the importance of concepts in human thought, but also of the need to analyze concepts and assess their power and limitations. From the work of Piaget, we have increased our awareness of the egocentric and sociocentric tendencies of human thought and of the special need to develop critical thought which is able to reason within multiple standpoints, and to be raised to the level of "conscious realization." From the massive contribution of all the "hard" sciences, we have learned the power of information and the importance of gathering information with great care and precision, and with sensitivity to its potential inaccuracy, distortion, or misuse. From the contribution of depth-psychology, we have learned how easily the human mind is self-deceived, how easily it unconsciously constructs illusions and delusions, how easily it rationalizes and stereotypes, projects and scapegoats.

To sum up, the tools and resources of the critical thinker have been vastly increased in virtue of the history of critical thought. Hundreds of thinkers have contributed to its development. Each major discipline has made some contribution to critical thought. Yet for most educational purposes, it is the summing up of base-line common denominators for critical thinking that is most important. Let us consider now that summation.

We now recognize that critical thinking, by its very nature, requires, for example, the systematic monitoring of thought; that thinking, to be critical, must not be accepted at face value but must be analyzed and assessed for its clarity, accuracy, relevance, depth, breadth, and logicalness. We now recognize that critical thinking, by its very nature, requires, for example, the recognition that all reasoning occurs within points of view and frames of reference; that all reasoning proceeds from some goals and objectives, has an informational base; that all data when used in reasoning must be interpreted, that interpretation involves concepts; that concepts entail assumptions, and that all basic inferences in thought have implications. We now recognize that each of these dimensions of thinking need to be monitored and that problems of thinking can occur in any of them.

The result of the collective contribution of the history of critical thought is that the basic questions of Socrates can now be much more powerfully and focally framed and used. In every domain of human thought, and within every use of reasoning within any domain, it is now possible to question:

In other words, questioning that focuses on these fundamentals of thought and reasoning are now baseline in critical thinking. It is beyond question that intellectual errors or mistakes can occur in any of these dimensions, and that students need to be fluent in talking about these structures and standards.

Independent of the subject studied, students need to be able to articulate thinking about thinking that reflects basic command of the intellectual dimensions of thought: "Let’s see, what is the most fundamental issue here? From what point of view should I approach this problem? Does it make sense for me to assume this? From these data may I infer this? What is implied in this graph? What is the fundamental concept here? Is this consistent with that? What makes this question complex? How could I check the accuracy of these data? If this is so, what else is implied? Is this a credible source of information? Etc." (For more information on the basic elements of thought and basic intellectual criteria and standards, see Appendices C and D).

With intellectual language such as this in the foreground, students can now be taught at least minimal critical thinking moves within any subject field. What is more, there is no reason in principle that students cannot take the basic tools of critical thought which they learn in one domain of study and extend it (with appropriate adjustments) to all the other domains and subjects which they study. For example, having questioned the wording of a problem in math, I am more likely to question the wording of a problem in the other subjects I study.

As a result of the fact that students can learn these generalizable critical thinking moves, they need not be taught history simply as a body of facts to memorize; they can now be taught history as historical reasoning. Classes can be designed so that students learn to think historically and develop skills and abilities essential to historical thought. Math can be taught so that the emphasis is on mathematical reasoning. Students can learn to think geographically, economically, biologically, chemically, in courses within these disciplines. In principle, then, all students can be taught so that they learn how to bring the basic tools of disciplined reasoning into every subject they study. Unfortunately, it is apparent, given the results of this study, that we are very far from this ideal state of affairs. We now turn to the fundamental concepts and principles tested in standardized critical thinking tests.

{ Taken from the , Sacramento, CA, March 1997. Principal authors: Richard Paul, Linda Elder, and Ted Bartell }

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critical thinking , in educational theory, mode of cognition using deliberative reasoning and impartial scrutiny of information to arrive at a possible solution to a problem. From the perspective of educators, critical thinking encompasses both a set of logical skills that can be taught and a disposition toward reflective open inquiry that can be cultivated . The term critical thinking was coined by American philosopher and educator John Dewey in the book How We Think (1910) and was adopted by the progressive education movement as a core instructional goal that offered a dynamic modern alternative to traditional educational methods such as rote memorization.

Critical thinking is characterized by a broad set of related skills usually including the abilities to

break down a problem into its constituent parts to reveal its underlying logic and assumptions
recognize and account for one’s own biases in judgment and experience
collect and assess relevant evidence from either personal observations and experimentation or by gathering external information
adjust and reevaluate one’s own thinking in response to what one has learned
form a reasoned assessment in order to propose a solution to a problem or a more accurate understanding of the topic at hand

Theorists have noted that such skills are only valuable insofar as a person is inclined to use them. Consequently, they emphasize that certain habits of mind are necessary components of critical thinking. This disposition may include curiosity, open-mindedness, self-awareness, empathy , and persistence.

Although there is a generally accepted set of qualities that are associated with critical thinking, scholarly writing about the term has highlighted disagreements over its exact definition and whether and how it differs from related concepts such as problem solving . In addition, some theorists have insisted that critical thinking be regarded and valued as a process and not as a goal-oriented skill set to be used to solve problems. Critical-thinking theory has also been accused of reflecting patriarchal assumptions about knowledge and ways of knowing that are inherently biased against women.

Dewey, who also used the term reflective thinking , connected critical thinking to a tradition of rational inquiry associated with modern science . From the turn of the 20th century, he and others working in the overlapping fields of psychology , philosophy , and educational theory sought to rigorously apply the scientific method to understand and define the process of thinking. They conceived critical thinking to be related to the scientific method but more open, flexible, and self-correcting; instead of a recipe or a series of steps, critical thinking would be a wider set of skills, patterns, and strategies that allow someone to reason through an intellectual topic, constantly reassessing assumptions and potential explanations in order to arrive at a sound judgment and understanding.

In the progressive education movement in the United States , critical thinking was seen as a crucial component of raising citizens in a democratic society. Instead of imparting a particular series of lessons or teaching only canonical subject matter, theorists thought that teachers should train students in how to think. As critical thinkers, such students would be equipped to be productive and engaged citizens who could cooperate and rationally overcome differences inherent in a pluralistic society.

Beginning in the 1970s and ’80s, critical thinking as a key outcome of school and university curriculum leapt to the forefront of U.S. education policy. In an atmosphere of renewed Cold War competition and amid reports of declining U.S. test scores, there were growing fears that the quality of education in the United States was falling and that students were unprepared. In response, a concerted effort was made to systematically define curriculum goals and implement standardized testing regimens , and critical-thinking skills were frequently included as a crucially important outcome of a successful education. A notable event in this movement was the release of the 1980 report of the Rockefeller Commission on the Humanities that called for the U.S. Department of Education to include critical thinking on its list of “basic skills.” Three years later the California State University system implemented a policy that required every undergraduate student to complete a course in critical thinking.

Critical thinking continued to be put forward as a central goal of education in the early 21st century. Its ubiquity in the language of education policy and in such guidelines as the Common Core State Standards in the United States generated some criticism that the concept itself was both overused and ill-defined. In addition, an argument was made by teachers, theorists, and others that educators were not being adequately trained to teach critical thinking.

Historical Thinking, Epistemic Cognition, and History Teacher Education

First Online: 04 April 2020

Cite this chapter

Christian Mathis 4 &
Robert Parkes 5

1427 Accesses

7 Citations

This chapter explores the specific form of historical thinking taken up in the recently formed Australian Curriculum (as an example from the Anglosphere), and the related idea of historical competencies influencing curriculum in Switzerland (as an example from the German-speaking world). It then turns to the research on teachers’ epistemic beliefs and their impact upon teaching practice, arguing that attending to pre-service History teachers’ epistemic cognition is important in the development of history teachers. The chapter then re-examines the original conception of “historical consciousness” as understood in the Germanic hermeneutic tradition, demonstrating a link with epistemic cognition. The chapter concludes by arguing that pre-service teachers ought to be engaged in explorations of their individual epistemological cognitions, and that this is a necessary aspect of developing their historical thinking as “historically conscious” History teachers for the twenty-first century.

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Historical Consciousness and Historical Thinking

Historical Thinking and Narrative in a Global Culture

Remembering Australia’s past project: pre-service history teachers, national narratives and historical consciousness

Anna Clark, “Scholarly Historical Practice and Disciplinary Method.” In Historical Thinking for History Teachers: A New Approach to Engaging Students and Developing Historical Consciousness , ed. Tim Allender, Anna Clark and Robert Parkes (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2019), 47.

See for example: Stéphane Lévesque. Thinking Historically: Educating Students for the Twenty-First Century. (Toronto, CA: University of Toronto Press, 2008); and Karl-Ernst Jeismann. “Geschichtsbewusstsein als zentrale Kategorie der Didaktik des Geschichtsunterrichts.” In Jeismann, Karl-Ernst, Geschichte und Bildung. Beiträge zur Geschichtsdidaktik und zur Historischen Bildungsforschung, edited and introduced by Wolfgang Jakobmeyer and Bernd Schönemann (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2000), 48.

Christine Counsell, “Historical Knowledge and Historical Skills: A Distracting Dichotomy.” In Issues in History Teaching , edited by James Arthur and Robert Phillips. (London: Routledge, 2000), 52–71.

Meg Gorzycki, Linda Elder, and Richard Paul. Historical Thinking: Bringing Critical Thinking Explicitly into the Heart of Historical Study. (Tomales, California: Foundation for Critical Thinking Press, 2013); Günther-Arndt, Hilke and Meik Zülsdorf-Kersting. Geschichtsdidaktik: Praxishandbuch für die Sekundarstufe I und II , 6th fully revised edition. (Berlin: Cornelsen Scriptor, 2014).

On the “historiographic gaze,” see Robert J. Parkes, Interrupting History: Rethinking History Curriculum after ‘the End of History.’ (New York: Peter Lang, 2011). On “historical consciousness,” see Hans-Georg Gadamer. Truth and Method. Translated by J. Weinsheimer and D. G. Marshall. (New York: Crossroad, 1992); Rüsen, Jörn. Historik: Theorie der Geschichtswissenschaft . (Köln: Böhlau, 2013); and Jeismann, Karl-Ernst “Geschichtsbewusstsein als Zentrale Kategorie der Didaktik des Geschichtsunterrichts.” In Jeismann, Karl-Ernst, Geschichte und Bildung. Beiträge zur Geschichtsdidaktik und zur Historischen Bildungsforschung, edited and introduced by Wolfgang Jakobmeyer and Bernd Schönemann (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2000), 46–72.

Two influential discussions documenting the loss of confidence in institutional knowledge come from Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Translated by G. Bennington and B. Massumi. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1979); and Jason Harsin, “Post-Truth and Critical Communication Studies.” Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Communication . December (2018). https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190228613.013.757 . There is also a body of work that addresses this same issue in relation to historical knowledge specifically, including: Keith Windschuttle, The Killing of History: How Literary Critics and Social Theorists Are Murdering Our Past. (New York: The Free Press, 1996); Richard J. Evans, In Defence of History. (London: Granta Books, 1997); Lipstadt, Deborah E. Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Memory and Truth. (New York: Plume, 1994); C. Behan McCullagh, The Logic of History: Putting Postmodernism in Perspective. (London: Routledge, 2004).

Tony Taylor and Robert Guyver, eds. History Wars in the Classroom: Global Perspectives . (London: Information Age Publishing, 2011), xii.

Peter Seixas, “Schweigen! Die Kinder! Or Does Postmodern History Have a Place in the Schools?” In Knowing, Teaching, and Learning History: National and International Perspectives , edited by Peter N. Stearns, Peter Seixas and Sam Wineburg, (New York: New York University Press, 2000), 19–37.

In the English literature, see Rob Siebörger, “Fake News, Alternative Facts, History Education.” Public History Weekly 5 (2017): 8. https://doi.org/10.1515/phw-2017-8548 ; and Sam Wineburg, Why Learn History (When It’s Already on Your Phone). (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2018); and Bruce A. VanSledright, The Challenge of Rethinking History Education: On Practices, Theories, and Policy. (New York: Routledge, 2011). In the German language literature see Moller, Sabine. Zeitgeschichte sehen: Die Aneignung von Vergangenheit durch Filme und ihre Zuschauer . (Berlin: Bertz+Fischer, 2018); and Jan Hodel, Verkürzen und Verknüpfen: Geschichte als Netz narrativer Fragmente: wie Jugendliche digitale Netzmedien für die Erstellung von Referaten im Geschichts unterricht verwenden (Bern: hep, 2013).

Jörn Rüsen, Historische Orientierung: Über die Arbeit des Geschichtsbewusstseins, sich in der Zeit zurechtzufinden , 2., überarb. Aufl., Forum Historisches Lernen (Schwalbach/Ts: Wochenschau, 2008).

Franz E. Weinert, ed. Leistungsmessungen in Schulen (Weinheim& Basel: Beltz, 2001).

John Hattie, Visible Learning: A Synthesis of over 800 Meta-Analyses Relating to Achievement . (London: Routledge, 2008).

Elisabeth Erdmann, and Wolfgang Hassberg, eds. Facing – Mapping – Bridging Diversity, Foundation of a European Discourse on History Education, 1 (Schwalbach/Ts.: Wochenschau, 2011).

See for example: Carol Bertram, “Exploring an Historical Gaze: A Language of Description for the Practice of School History,” Journal of Curriculum Studies 44, no. 3 (2012): 429–42; Anna Clark, “Teaching the Nation’s Story: Comparing Public Debates and Classroom Perspectives on History Education in Australia and Canada,” Journal of Curriculum Studies 41, no. 6 (2009): 745–62; Carla van Boxtel, and Jannet van Drie, “Historical Reasoning: A Comparison of How Experts and Novices Contextualise Historical Sources,” International Journal of Historical Learning, Teaching and Research 4, no. 2 (2004); and VanSledright, The Challenge of Rethinking History Education.

See Dennis Shemilt, Evaluation Study: Schools Council History 13–16 Project. (Edinburgh: Holmes McDougall, 1980); and Dennis Shemilt, “Adolescent Ideas About Evidence and Methodology in History.” In The History Curriculum for Teachers , Christopher Portal, Ed. (London: Falmer, 1987) 29–61; and Peter Lee and Dennis Shemilt, “A Scaffold, Not a Cage: Progression and Progression Models in History.” Teaching History , no. 113 (2003): 13–23.

As a sample of their work, see VanSledright, The Challenge of Rethinking History Education: On Practices, Theories and Policy (New York: Routledge, 2011); Sam Wineburg, Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts: Charting the Future of Teaching the Past (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001); Linda S. Levstik and Keith C. Barton, Doing History: Investigating with Children in Elementary and Middle Schools (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2001); Peter Seixas and Tom Morton, The Big Six Historical Thinking Concepts (USA: Nelson, 2012); Carla van Boxtel and Jan van Drie. “Historical Reasoning: A Comparison of How Experts and Novices Contextualise Historical Sources,” International Journal of Historical Learning, Teaching and Research 4, no. 2 (2004).

Robert J. Parkes and Debra Donnelly. “Changing Conceptions of Historical Thinking in History Education: An Australian Case Study.” Revista Tempo e Argumento 6, no. 11 (2014): 113–36.

On the politics of history curriculum change in Australia, see Robert J. Parkes, “Teaching History as Historiography: Engaging Narrative Diversity in the Curriculum,” International Journal of Historical Learning, Teaching and Research 8, no. 2 (2009): 118–32; and on the “history wars” Stuart Macintyre and Anna Clark, The History Wars (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2003).

To read the Prime Minister’s Australia Day speech, see John Howard, “Unity Vital in Battle against Terrorism.” The Sydney Morning Herald (Sydney), 26th January 2006, 1st, 11; and to understand its political and practical consequences in an attempt to shape curriculum, see Tony Taylor, “Howard’s End: A Narrative Memoir of Political Contrivance, Neoconservative Ideology and the Australian History Curriculum,” Curriculum Journal 20, no. 4 (2009): 317–29. https://doi.org/10.1080/09585170903424765

Robert J. Parkes, “What Paradigms Inform the Review of the Australian Curriculum: History? What Does This Mean for the Possibilities of Critical and Effective Histories in Australian Education?” Curriculum Perspectives 35, no. 1 (2015): 52–54.

See Peter Seixas, “The Historical Thinking Project.” Accessed: 25 July 2019. http://historicalthinking.ca/about-historical-thinking-project

See the following: Waltraud Schreiber, Andreas Körber, Bodo von Borries, Reinhard Krammer, Sybilla Leutner-Ramme, Sylvia Mebus, Alexander Schöner, and Béatrice Ziegler, “Historisches Denken. Ein Kompetenz-Strukturmodell (Basisbeitrag).” In Kompetenzen: 2. Kompetenzen Historischen Denkens: Ein Strukturmodell als Beitrag zur Kompetenzorientierung in der Geschichtsdidaktik , edited by Andreas Körber, Waltraud Schreiber and Alexander Schöner (Neuried: Ars Una, 2007), 17–53; Andreas Körber, Kompetenzen Historischen Denkens. Ein Strukturmodell als Beitrag zur Kompetenzorientierung in der Geschichtsdidaktik (Neuried: Ars Una, 2007); Peter Gautschi, Guter Geschichtsunterricht (Schwalbach/Ts.: Wochenschau, 2009); and Ulrich Trautwein, Christiane Bertram, Bodo von Borries, Nicola Brauch, Matthias Hirsch, Kathrin Klausmeier, Andreas Körber, Christoph Küberger, Johannes, Meyer-Hamme, Martin Merkt, Herbert Neureiter, Stephan Schwan, Waltraud Schreiber, Wolfgang Wagner, Monika Waldis, Michael Werner, Béatrice Ziegler, and Andreas Zuckowsky. Kompetenzen historischen Denkens erfassen. Konzeption, Operationalisierung und Befunde des Projekts “ Historical Thinking – Competencies in History” (HiTCH) (Münster: Waxmann, 2017).

Marko Demantowsky, “Jenseits des Kompetenzkonsenses.” In: Handro, Saskia, & Bernd Schönemann (Eds.): Aus der Geschichte lernen? Weisse Flecken der Kompetenzdebatte (Berlin: Lit, 2016) 21–35; Thünemann Holger, “Probleme und Perspektiven der geschichtsdidaktischen Kompetenzdebatte.” In Aus der Geschichte lernen. Weisse Flecken der Kompetenzdebatte , edited by Saskia Handro and Bernd Schönemann (Berlin: Lit, 2016) 37–51; Andreas Körber, Historical Consciousness, Historical Competencies – and Beyond? Some Conceptual Development within German History Didactics (Deutsches Institut für Internationale Pädagogische Forschung, 2015). Retrieved from http://www.pedocs.de/volltexte/2015/10811/pdf/Koerber_2015_Development_German_History_Didactics.pdf

For the original concept, see Jörn Rüsen, Lebendige Geschichte. Grundzüge einer Historik III: Formen und Funktionen des historischen Wissens (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1989) 94; and its take up, see Körber, Historical consciousness, historical competencies – and beyond? .

The German acronym “FUER” stands for “Research and Development of Reflexive and Self-Reflexive Historical Consciousness” and gathers history education scholars from Germany, Switzerland, and Austria. Ulrich Trautwein, et al. ( 2017 ); Gesellschaft Didaktik des Sachunterichts (GDSU); M. Kübler, “Historisches Lernen von vier- bis zwölfjährigen Kindern im Deutschschweizerischen Lehrplan 21.” In: Monika Fenn, Ed. Frühes Historisches Lernen. Projekte und Perspektiven empirischer Forschung (Frankfurt: Wochenschau, 2017) 296–314; and P. Gautschi, Guter Geschichtsunterricht (Schwalbach/Ts.: Wochenschau, 2009).

Nadine Fink and Peter Gautschi, “Geschichtsunterricht in der Schweiz.” Geschichte in Wissenschaft und Unterricht, no. 3/4 (2017): 154–71.

Barbara K. Hofer, “Epistemological Understanding as a Metacognitive Process. Thinking Aloud During Online Searching.” Educational Psychologist 39, no. 1 (2004): 43; and Barbara K. Hofer and Paul R. Pintrich, “The Development of Epistemological Theories: Beliefs about Knowledge and Knowing and their Relation to Learning.” Review of Educational Research 67 (1997): 88–140.

See Mariene Schommer and Kiersten Walker, “Are epistemological beliefs similar across domains?” Journal of Educational Psychology 87, no. 3 (1995): 424–432; and work from over the past decade including: Jeffrey A. Greene, William A. Sandoval, and Ivar Bråten, Eds., Handbook of epistemic cognition (New York, NY: Routledge, 2016); Joanne Brownlee, Gregg Schraw, and Donna Berthelsen. (Eds.) Personal Epistemology and Teacher Education (New York: Routledge, 2011); Joanne M. Brownlee, Sue Walker and Julia Mascadri, “Personal Epistemologies and Teaching” In Helenrose Fives and Michael Gregoire-Gill, Eds., International Handbook of Research on Teachers’ Beliefs (New York: Routledge, 2011).

Michael Weinstock, Dorothe Kienhues, Florian C. Feucht, and Mary Ryan, “Informed Reflexivity: Enacting Epistemic Virtue” Educational Psychologist 52, no. 4 (2017): 284–298.

From the Netherlands, see: Michiel Voet and Bram De Wever, “History Teachers’ Conceptions of Inquiry-Based Learning, Beliefs about the Nature of History, and their Relation to the Classroom Context,” Teaching and Teacher Education 55 (2016): 57–67; Bjorn G. J. Wansink, Sanne F. Akkerman, Jan D. Vermunt, Jacques P. P. Haenen and Theo Wubbels “Epistemological Tensions in Prospective Dutch History Teachers’ Beliefs about the Objectives of Secondary Education,” Journal of Social Studies Research 41, no. 1 (2017): 11–24; Bjorn G. J. Wansink, Sanne Akkerman, and Theo Wubbels “The Certainty Paradox of Student History Teachers: Balancing Between Historical Facts and Interpretation” Teaching and Teacher Education 56 (2016): 94–105; and Gerhard Stoel, Albert Logtenberg, Bjorn Wansink, Tim Huijgen, Carla van Boxtel, and Jannet van Drie, “Measuring Epistemological Beliefs in History Education: An Exploration of Naïve and Nuanced Beliefs,” International Journal of Educational Research 83 (2017): 120–134. From Switzerland see: Martin Nitsche, “Geschichtstheoretische und –didaktische Überzeugungen von Lehrpersonen. Begriffliche und empirische Annäherungen an ein Fallbeispiel” In Historisches Erzählen und Lernen. Historische, theoretische, empirische und pragmatische Erkundungen, eds. Martin Buchsteiner and Martin Nitsche (Wiesbaden: Springer VS, 2016) 159–196; Martin Nitsche, “Geschichtstheoretische und -didaktische Beliefs angehender und erfahrener Lehrpersonen. Einblicke in den Forschungsstand, die Entwicklung der Erhebungsinstrumente und erste Ergebnisse.” In Geschichtsunterricht – Geschichtsschulbücher – Geschichtskultur. Aktuelle geschichtsdidaktische Forschung des wissenschaftlichen Nachwuchses (Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für Geschichtsdidaktik 15), edited by Uwe Danker (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2017), 85–106; Martin Nitsche, Beliefs von Geschichtslehrpersonen. Eine Triangulationsstudie (Bern: Hepverlag, 2019); and Martin Nitsche and Monika Waldis, “Geschichtstheoretische und -didaktische Beliefs von angehenden Geschichts Lehrpersonen in Deutschland und in der Deutschschweiz. Erste Ergebnisse Quantitativer Erhebungen” In Forschungswerkstatt Geschichtsdidaktik 15. Beiträge zur Tagung “Geschichtsdidaktik Empirisch 15” (Geschichtsdidaktik heute 08), edited by Monika Waldis and Béatrice Ziegler (Bern: hep, 2017), 136–150.

See Liliana Maggioni, Bruce VanSledright, and Patricia Alexander, “Walking on the Borders: A Measure of Epistemic Cognition in History,” The Journal of Experimental Education 77, no. 3 (2009): 187–213; and Jeremy D. Stoddard, “The Roles of Epistemology and Ideology in Teachers’ Pedagogy with Historical ‘Media’,” Teachers and Teaching: Theory and Practice 16, no. 1 (2010): 153–171.

Barbara K. Hofer, “Personal Epistemology Research: Implications for Learning and Teaching,” Journal of Educational Psychology Review 13, no. 4 (2001): 353–383.

On the issues for student teachers, see Christopher C. Martell, “Learning to Teach History as Interpretation: A Longitudinal Study of Beginning Teachers,” The Journal of Social Studies Research 37, no. 1 (2013): 17–31; Jennifer H. James, “Teachers as Protectors: Making Sense of Preservice Teachers’ Resistance to Interpretation in Elementary History Teaching” Theory and Research in Social Education 36, no. 3 (2008): 172–205; Susan M. Johnson and S. Birkeland, “Seeking Success with Students.” In Susan M. Johnson (ed.). Finders and Keepers: Helping New Teachers Survive and Thrive in Our Schools (San Francisco: Jossey Bass, 2004) 69–90; and Chauncey Monte-Sano and Melissa Cochran. “Attention to Learners, Subject, or Teaching: What Takes Precedence as Preservice Teachers Learn to Teach Historical Thinking and Reading?” Theory and Research in Social Education 37 no. 1 (2009): 101–135. On the Problem of the Null Curriculum, see the classic text by Elliot W. Eisner, The Educational Imagination: On the Design and Evaluation of School Programs (New York: Macmillan Publishing, 1979).

James V. Wertsch, “Texts of Memory and Texts of History,” L2 Journal 4, no. 1 (2012): 10–11.

Eli Gottlieb and Sam Wineburg, “Between Veritas and Communitas: Epistemic Switching in the Reading of Academic and Sacred History,” Journal of the Learning Sciences 21, no. 1 (2012): 84. https://doi.org/10.1080/10508406.2011.582376

Karl-Ernst Jeismann, “Geschichte und Bildung. Beiträge zur Geschichtsdidaktik und zur Historischen Bildungsforschung,” 2000. Rüsen Jörn, History: Narration – Interpretation – Orientation (New York: Berghahn Books, 2005).

Hans J. Goertz, Unsichere Geschichte. Zur Theorie Historischer Referentialität. (Stuttgart: Reclam, 2001); and Rüsen, “Historik: Theorie der Geschichtswissenschaft ,” 2013.

Keith Jenkins, On “ What Is History? ” : From Carr and Elton to Rorty and White (London: Routledge, 1995) 173. See also Reinhart Koselleck, “Vom Sinn und Unsinn der Geschichte.” In Reinhart Koselleck. Vom Sinn und Unsinn der Geschichte: Aufsätze und Vorträge aus vier Jahrzehnten , ed. Carsten Dutt (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2014), 9–31.

Hans Kellner, Language and Historical Representation (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), x.

Louis O. Mink, “Narrative Form as a Cognitive Instrument.” In The History and Narrative Reader , edited by Geoffrey Roberts (London: Routledge, 1978/2001), 211–20.

To understand the narrative impositionalist view, see Alun Munslow, Deconstructing History (London: Routledge, 1997), 96; and Andrew P. Norman, “Telling It Like It Was: Historical Narratives on Their Own Terms,” History and Theory 30, no. 2 (1991), 119–135. For the alternative view, see David Carr, “Narrative and the Real World: An Argument for Continuity.” In The History and Narrative Reader , edited by Geoffrey Roberts (London: Routledge, 2001), 143–56.

See: Jörn Rüsen, History: Narration – Interpretation – Orientation (New York: Berghahn Books, 2005); or Jörn Rüsen, “Historical Consciousness: Narrative Structure, Moral Function, and Ontogenetic Development.” In Theorizing Historical Consciousness , ed. Peter Seixas (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004), 63–85.

See Foucault’s claim that we are “totally imprinted by history” in Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History.” Translated by Donald F. Brouchard and Sherry Simon, In Essential Works of Foucault 1954–1984 , ed. James D. Faubion (London: Penguin Books, 1971/1994) 376; or Althusser’s notion of interpellation in Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes Towards an Investigation).” Translated by B Brewster. In Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays , edited by Louis Althusser (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971), 127–86. On mnemonic communities, see James V. Wertsch, “Texts of Memory, Texts of History,” 2012: 10.

Avner Segall, “What’s the Purpose of Teaching a Discipline, Anyway?” In Social Studies – the Next Generation: Re-Searching in the Postmodern , edited by Avner Segall, Elizabeth E. Heilman and Cleo H. Cherryholmes (New York: Peter Lang, 2006), 125–39; Reinhart Koselleck, “Standortbindung und Zeitlichkeit. Ein Beitrag zur historiographischen Erschliessung der geschichtlichen Welt.” In Reinhart Koselleck. VergangeneZukunft: zur Semantik geschichtlicher Zeiten (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1989), 176–207.

Reinhart Koselleck, ““Erfahrungsraum” und “Erwartungshorizont” – Zwei Historische Kategorien.” In Reinhart Koselleck. Vergangene Zukunft: zur Semantik Geschichtlicher Zeiten (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1989), 349–75; Christophe Bouton, “The Critical Theory of History: Rethinking the Philosophy of History in the Light of Koselleck’s Work.” History and Theory 55, no. 2 (2016): 163–84.

Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Truth and Method,” 1992: 278. Although much work has been done in the German tradition since Gadamer, we return to Gadamer here as the touchstone for a particular line of thought in the hermeneutic tradition that is readily accessible in English translation, and the starting point for work that has come since.

Chris Lawn and Niall Keane, The Gadamer dictionary (London: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2011): 115.

Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Truth and Method,” 1992, 284.

Ibid., 295.

Ibid., 228.

Ibid., 291.

Ibid., 300.

Jocelyn Létourneau, “Remembering Our Past: An Examination of the Historical Memory of Young Québécois.” In To the Past: History Education, Public Memory, & Citizenship in Canada , edited by Ruth Sandwell (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006), 70–87.

Jörn Rüsen, “History: Narration – Interpretation – Orientation.” 2005.

Robert J. Parkes ( 2011 : 99–126).

See Peter Seixas, Benchmarks of Historical Thinking: A Framework for Assessment in Canada (Centre for the Study of Historical Consciousness, University of British Columbia: Vancouver, CA, 2006); and for the uses of history, Robert Thorp, “Towards an Epistemological Theory of Historical Consciousness,” Historical Encounters: A Journal of Historical Consciousness, Historical Cultures, and History Education 1, no. 1 (2014): 20–31.

Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Truth and Method,” 1992, 306 and 336.

Peter Lee, “History Teaching and the Philosophy of History.” History and Theory XXII, no. 4 (1983): 48.

See for example, Thomas D. Fallace, “Once More unto the Breach: Trying to Get Preservice Teachers to Link Historiographical Knowledge to Pedagogy.” Theory & Research in Social Education 35, no. 3 (2012): 427–46; Hilke Günther-Arndt and Meik Zülsdorf-Kersting, 2014; Andreas Körber, Waltraud Schreiber, and Alexander Schöner. (Eds.). Kompetenzen Historischen Denkens. Ein Strukturmodell als Beitrag zur Kompetenzorientierung in der Geschichtsdidaktik (Neuried: Ars Una, 2007); Michael G. Lovorn, “Historiography in the Methods Course: Training Preservice History Teachers to Evaluate Local Historical Commemorations.” The History Teacher 45, no. 4 (2012): 569–79; Robert J. Parkes ( 2009 ); John Whitehouse, “Teaching the Historians: How Might Historiography Shape the Practice of Teachers?” Agora (Sungraphô) 43 (2008): 4–8; and Kaya Yilmaz, “Social Studies Teachers’ Conceptions of History: Calling on Historiography,” The Journal of Educational Research 101, no. 3 (2008): 158–76.

Klaus Bergmann, Multiperspektivität. Geschichte selber denken (Schwalbach/Ts.: Wochenschau, 2000); Martin Lücke, “Multiperspektivität, Kontroversität, Pluralität.” In Michele Barricelli and Martin Lücke. Handbuch Praxis des Geschichtsunterrichts , 2nd edition (Schwalbach/Ts.: Wochenschau, 2017), 281–88.

Christian Mathis, ‘Irgendwie ist doch da mal jemand geköpft worden’: Didaktische Rekonstruktion der Französischen Revolution und der historischen Kategorie Wandel , 44, Beiträge zur Didaktischen Rekonstruktion (Baltmannsweiler: Schneider Hohengehren, 2015) 233–237; and Christian Mathis, “The Revolution Is Not Over Yet.” German Speaking Ninth Graders’ Conceptions of The French Revolution,” History Education Research Journal 14, no. 1 (2016): 81–92.

Robert J. Parkes ( 2009 ); and Robert J. Parkes, “Developing Your Approach to Teaching History.” In Tim Allender, Anna Clark and Robert Parkes, Eds., Historical Thinking for History Teachers: A New Approach to Engaging Students and Developing Historical Consciousness (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2019), 72–88.

Barbara K. Hofer, “Shaping the Epistemology of Teacher Practice Through Reflection and Reflexivity.” Educational Psychologist 52, no. 4 (2017): 299–306.

Michael Weinstock, Dorothe Kienhues, Florian C. Feucht, and Mary Ryan, “Informed Reflexivity: Enacting Epistemic Virtue,” 2017: 284.

Betty Achinstein and Bradley Fogo, “Mentoring Novices’ Teaching of Historical Reasoning: Opportunities for Pedagogical Content Knowledge Development through Mentor-Facilitated Practice,” Teaching and Teacher Education 45 (2015): 45–58.

Barbara K. Hofer and Paul R. Pintrich, “The Development of Epistemological Theories: Beliefs about Knowledge and Knowing and their Relation to Learning,” 1997: 88–140; Barbara K. Hofer, “Shaping the Epistemology of Teacher Practice Through Reflection and Reflexivity,” 2017: 299–306; Martin Nitsche, “Geschichtstheoretische und -didaktische Beliefs angehender und erfahrener Lehrpersonen. Einblicke in den Forschungsstand, die Entwicklung der Erhebungsinstrumente und erste Ergebnisse,” 2017: 85–106; Martin Nitsche, “Geschichtstheoretische und – didaktische Überzeugungen von Lehrpersonen. Begriffliche und empirische Annäherungen an ein Fallbeispiel,” 2016: 159–196; Martin Nitsche, “Beliefs von Geschichtslehrpersonen. Eine Triangulationsstudie,” 2019.

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Mathis, C., Parkes, R. (2020). Historical Thinking, Epistemic Cognition, and History Teacher Education. In: Berg, C.W., Christou, T.M. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of History and Social Studies Education. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37210-1_9

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A Primer on Critical Thinking and Business Ethics

ISBN : 978-1-83753-309-1 , eISBN : 978-1-83753-308-4

Publication date: 27 July 2023

Executive Summary

In this chapter, we introduce the history of critical thinking briefly, starting from Socrates to contemporary contributions. Based on this history, we derive several modules for training in critical thinking via practical exercises in critical thinking. Three classic critical thinking models are introduced: Socratic questioning method, Cartesian doubting method, and Baconian empirical method. We discuss their potential for critical thinking as foundational methods. The material in this chapter is distributed in three parts. In Part I, we provide a brief history of critical thinking. In Part II, we design models of critical thinking based on its classic history. In Part III, we list some models of critical thinking based on its history, from the Renaissance period to the current times. In the last section, we also discuss critical thinking in the context of business ethics, by delineating its normative domain, assessing its characteristics, and reviewing its processes.

Mascarenhas, O.A.J. , Thakur, M. and Kumar, P. (2023), "History of Critical Thinking and Some Models of Critical Thinking", A Primer on Critical Thinking and Business Ethics , Emerald Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 41-80. https://doi.org/10.1108/978-1-83753-308-420231003

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Historical content matters: a response to the critical thinking skills agenda

Katie barclay | 06 november 2019.

Executive Summary

Historical knowledge is a significant form of ‘common sense’ knowledge that shapes decision-making
Academic histories play a key role in shaping this ‘common sense’ knowledge
As a result, academic historical scholarship plays a significant and undervalued role in producing social, economic and political outcomes in all areas
Universities, policymakers and society should take greater heed of historical research as vital to the healthy functioning of societies, economies and polities
The value of history degrees is not just an important skillset in critical thinking, but the historical content that it provides students

Introduction

History is regularly deployed by people from all walks of life for all sorts of purposes. Pro-Brexit campaigners have variously called upon Britain’s imperial heritage or nostalgic imaginings of whiter British past to justify their retreat from the European Union. Remainers have responded with their own histories of Empire and migration. Both sides have wielded experts in universities to support their points, or posed with historical writings in piles behind them as they make political arguments. The Christchurch shooter carved the dates of Crusade battles into his weapon, locating his action – he claimed – in a long history of Christian-Muslim conflict. Recent debates around sex education in schools have deployed arguments about ‘traditional’ family structures , that LGBT families are meant to sit outside. More benignly, journalists and the public display surprise when they encounter academic scholarship that sheds light on contemporary issues, claiming these ‘hidden’ histories have been withheld from them. It is a degree of surprise, sometimes outrage, that is suggestive that the public recognise that history does important work in shaping how we feel about the world, and that gaps in knowledge are somehow unjust or designed to deceive the public.

For all these people, history matters. And it matters to historians that the public has access to the best and most cutting-edge histories to help inform these discussions. One of the key purposes of History & Policy is to direct the knowledge and findings produced by historians towards those addressing similar problems in the present. Historians, deeply appreciative of the importance of context, are loathe to suggest that ‘lessons from the past’ can be directly applied to a new set of circumstances. But equally we argue that understanding the past can help people make better decisions when encountering similar circumstances today. It can be particularly useful for highlighting how a specific problem has arisen, and for offering an appreciation of the scope of an impact of a choice and the variety of dimensions that need to be considered. Thus, for example, research on children and institutions illuminates why institutions have repeatedly failed many of the children that have been brought into them and why these same problems continue into the present. Historical knowledge, however, is also significant because it shapes our understanding of who we are, our identities, and our potential as people. It is important not just where it can be directly applied but as a source of general information that informs how we engage with the world. That it plays this role ensures that we should not only consider historical research and teaching critical when it has an instrumental and applied value but also because of its role in producing people, inclusive democracies, and nations.

Histories and the everyday

Historical knowledge is all around us. It is transmitted through families, fact and fiction books, television, museums and heritage sites, in language, and as ‘common sense’ information that we use to make decisions. Our first encounters with the past are often in the stories told about own ancestors – parents and grandparents – designed to help us understand what is valued in our family or how our childhood experience might have differed in a previous era. These stories offer a set of common sense information that help us locate our own experiences in relation to time and place, to significant events, and to other people. They can be incredibly varied, ranging across histories of childhood, school, workplaces and occupations, political parties and geopolitics, climate and environment, arts and culture, love and friendship, science, medicine and technology to name a few. As we age and encounter other histories, perhaps at school or in books, our knowledge of the world expands and we learn both about diversity and how historical events have differential impacts on groups.

As the histories that help us make sense of our experiences, these accounts become central to how we understand our personal identity, that of others, and our role in the nation. Given our investments in our identity and attachments to our pasts, these stories also ensure that history becomes politically significant in the public sphere. That the public intuitively recognises this can be seen in the debates, protests and highly emotive engagements with public statues associated with controversial figures, such as the imperialist Cecil Rhodes or US confederate leader Robert E. Lee , or in museum displays associated with local conflicts, such as The Troubles in Northern Ireland or Aboriginal-settler conflict in Australia. What is represented in public histories becomes central to debates about who we are, who is included and excluded, who holds power, and the production of contemporary values and rights.

These ‘everyday histories’ are related to academic scholarship in important ways. The popular histories that are taught at school and museums and appear on television, in children’s books, even fiction, typically draw on academic research. If they are sometimes less rigorous or flatten complex arguments, they nonetheless draw on a body of research conducted by professional historians. Increasingly academics also produce public-facing historical writing to aid with this process. The histories that shape identities grow from academic scholarship. Historians play a significant role in determining what is important to remember. A move from histories of monarchs and diplomacy to that of women and workers may have been encouraged by grassroots civil rights movements in the middle of the twentieth century, but it was historians who determined the key features of the new social histories that emerged.

Historical research is often considered an art because the historian plays such a key role in shaping their accounts of the past. It is the questions that they consider to be important that determine what they look for in the archive. It is their sifting and selection from often sizeable collections of material that determine what makes it into history books and what is forgotten. It is these choices, and that others might make different choices, that produce historical debate and argument, and which informs the evolution of the field as a new generation of scholars bring a different set of concerns to the material that survives from the past. Thus the knowledges that we grow up with and that shape our understanding of ourselves and identities reflect the trends and critical questions within the historical discipline in our formative years. It is perhaps natural then that new histories produced by a new generation of scholars can be challenging to those whose identities were shaped by older understandings of the past, just as those same histories have been liberating for many – such as women, the LGBT community, or ethnic minorities – who lacked stories of people like them when they were growing up. Yet this evolution is critical in producing history that remains relevant to our contemporary experience and identity-making, and to answering questions raised by new circumstances and contexts.

Research and teaching history

In recent years, the value of historical research, and indeed humanities research in general, has been questioned. Right-wing commentators have suggested that universities are increasingly driven by ‘identity politics’ . Critics fear that the history curriculum has fragmented into a wide range of modules driven by the politics of their teachers. Others have questioned the value of research that is not seen to hold a direct and measurable social, but especially economic, impact. This has become particularly significant for the student market where degrees are increasingly promoted with claims of a direct and obvious employment route. Both criticisms demand a straightforward account of what a history degree teaches, and a single type of job that those with history degrees take up. Without this, critics argue, history is useless knowledge. Universities have sought to counter such claims by locating the value of history not in historical knowledge – the content of what was learned – but in ‘critical thinking’, ‘writing and communication’ and similar important but generic skills . For such commentators, the historical content is of less significance than the opportunity to read widely, think deeply, research, and solve problems, a skillset that can be applied in any context.

No one would contest that a history degree offers these benefits, but it is an account that fails to recognise the importance of historical knowledge in the everyday. The histories we use are significant in interpreting everyday experiences and identity. Indeed, critical thinking requires historical knowledge. What we determine to be ‘common sense’, how we understand the world to operate, does not arise naturally but is based upon the everyday histories that we are taught in childhood and across our lives. This is the case when we, for example, make an assumption about normative family forms in the past, or when we draw on an interpretation of the causes of the First World War when producing foreign policy. Such ‘common sense’ histories are always partial, reflective of our experience and our encounters with the historical knowledge available to us. Access to a broader, more sophisticated body of historical research counters these ‘common sense’ accounts by offering a firmer grounding for decision-making and critical analysis. This can be seen in the now famous example of the US Supreme Court decision for marriage equality, that referenced the scholarship of key marriage and sexuality historians , and transformed the legal rights of LGBT individuals across the US.

New histories are therefore important for the work they do in shaping individuals and society. A democratic society – one where all members of the polity have a place – requires inclusive accounts that acknowledge and recognise all parts of the community. This is even more critical for groups who have been subject to disadvantage, harm or exploitation, where their histories act as an acknowledgement and first step in redress for past wrongs. It is vital for minorities who need histories of others like them to explain their experience and role in the world. New histories are also important in giving us accounts of art, culture, science, technology, business, economy and more that help us interpret the present, much as History & Policy promotes. Importantly, for a rich account of the past to emerge, a variety of topics and perspectives becomes critical.

In the present moment, a popular television show such as Downton Abbey, exploring changing social relations in early twentieth-century Britain, can draw on histories of war, economy, society, fashion, popular culture, material culture, accent and language use, technology, medicine and more, in its rich ‘world-building’. This is possible due to the work of dozens of scholars and years of effort, which itself builds upon generations of earlier work, though this work is usually unacknowledged within television credits. Such a history is richer, more interesting, perhaps a fuller capture of the past. Its strength lies in collaboration and the representation of a diversity of perspectives. With significant viewing figures both in the UK and internationally, Downton Abbey is an account of the past that will inform how many of us interpret our present experiences. Yet it is an account that is not usually acknowledged as either ‘history’ that people will use in making sense of themselves, nor as rooted in academic historical research – despite it being both. Remarkably, despite the fact that governments and increasingly university campaigns targeting students have sought to instrumentalise historical knowledge by emphasising its benefits for public policy , for productivity and growth, and for future employment, the important and everyday impacts of history – the ways that it is used by ordinary people in their own lives – is rarely considered as a domain shaped by historical research.

For an informed and productive society, the historical knowledge disseminated to the public must be broad, diverse and evolving to reflect new research. Universities are a key space where new accounts of the past can be taught and disseminated. That there is not a core history curriculum taught at every university, as some conservatives suggest there should be, is not a flaw, but a feature. It is not possible for every member of society, nor every historian, to know everything about the past. History courses thus specialise, and disseminate diverse accounts of the past. As history students from different institutions spread outwards, taking their specialist knowledges to an array of workplaces nationally and internationally, they share their educations with others, increasing the opportunity for knowledge to reach those that will find it most useful. Acknowledging the significance of the historical content of degrees may also offer opportunities for individuals to be targeted by employers or communities for historical learning that gives them expertise and critical thinking in specific areas.

Importantly, this is not an account of historical knowledge that attends only to the modern histories that explain the immediate experiences of those in the polity. Historical knowledges have long legacies in culture and society, requiring investment and dissemination in histories both deep and wide. This can be seen most recently in the use of crusading history both by the Christchurch shooter and by conservative political parties in Australia (where Senator Cori Bernardi recently tabled a motion asking the Senate to note the anniversary of the breaking of the siege of Vienna in 1529), to promote a right-wing agenda. But it can also be seen in our contemporary understanding of love and sex that was first forged in conflicts within the medieval church. Knowing this – like our more well-known modern histories of sex and gender – may well open up new ways of thinking about something so central to our everyday lives. A successful and inclusive democratic state requires not just research skills, but historical knowledge.

Historical knowledge shapes how people interpret their experiences, and those of others. It aids critical thinking and decision-making. Providing people with richer, more sophisticated, and up to date historical content therefore contributes not only to a better educated public but one that can make better decisions in a vast array of areas of life. Acknowledging this requires a move from promoting history degrees for their generic critical thinking and communication skillset to celebrating historical knowledge as a key form of information required by productive members of society. This has implications for how universities promote their history research and teaching, but also for policymakers as they seek to produce the best outcomes in areas as diverse as education, health, industry, politics, economy, technology, arts, and society.

Barclay, Katie
History in practice

About the author

Katie Barclay is Deputy-Director of the ARC Centre for Excellence in the History of Emotions and Associate Professor in History, University of Adelaide. Her research explores the transmission of knowledge across generations within families and the implications for self, identity and nation.

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How history matters now, ludmilla jordanova | 27 november 2008, in defence of applied history: the history and policy website, john tosh | 10 february 2006, why history matters, john tosh | 20 november 2008, why history matters - and why medieval history also matters, john arnold | 28 november 2008, related opinion articles, back to the past for the school history curriculum, nicola sheldon | 20 february 2013, papers by author, papers by theme, digital download.

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Supplement to Critical Thinking

This supplement elaborates on the history of the articulation, promotion and adoption of critical thinking as an educational goal.

John Dewey (1910: 74, 82) introduced the term ‘critical thinking’ as the name of an educational goal, which he identified with a scientific attitude of mind. More commonly, he called the goal ‘reflective thought’, ‘reflective thinking’, ‘reflection’, or just ‘thought’ or ‘thinking’. He describes his book as written for two purposes. The first was to help people to appreciate the kinship of children’s native curiosity, fertile imagination and love of experimental inquiry to the scientific attitude. The second was to help people to consider how recognizing this kinship in educational practice “would make for individual happiness and the reduction of social waste” (iii). He notes that the ideas in the book obtained concreteness in the Laboratory School in Chicago.

Dewey’s ideas were put into practice by some of the schools that participated in the Eight-Year Study in the 1930s sponsored by the Progressive Education Association in the United States. For this study, 300 colleges agreed to consider for admission graduates of 30 selected secondary schools or school systems from around the country who experimented with the content and methods of teaching, even if the graduates had not completed the then-prescribed secondary school curriculum. One purpose of the study was to discover through exploration and experimentation how secondary schools in the United States could serve youth more effectively (Aikin 1942). Each experimental school was free to change the curriculum as it saw fit, but the schools agreed that teaching methods and the life of the school should conform to the idea (previously advocated by Dewey) that people develop through doing things that are meaningful to them, and that the main purpose of the secondary school was to lead young people to understand, appreciate and live the democratic way of life characteristic of the United States (Aikin 1942: 17–18). In particular, school officials believed that young people in a democracy should develop the habit of reflective thinking and skill in solving problems (Aikin 1942: 81). Students’ work in the classroom thus consisted more often of a problem to be solved than a lesson to be learned. Especially in mathematics and science, the schools made a point of giving students experience in clear, logical thinking as they solved problems. The report of one experimental school, the University School of Ohio State University, articulated this goal of improving students’ thinking:

Critical or reflective thinking originates with the sensing of a problem. It is a quality of thought operating in an effort to solve the problem and to reach a tentative conclusion which is supported by all available data. It is really a process of problem solving requiring the use of creative insight, intellectual honesty, and sound judgment. It is the basis of the method of scientific inquiry. The success of democracy depends to a large extent on the disposition and ability of citizens to think critically and reflectively about the problems which must of necessity confront them, and to improve the quality of their thinking is one of the major goals of education. (Commission on the Relation of School and College of the Progressive Education Association 1943: 745–746)

The Eight-Year Study had an evaluation staff, which developed, in consultation with the schools, tests to measure aspects of student progress that fell outside the focus of the traditional curriculum. The evaluation staff classified many of the schools’ stated objectives under the generic heading “clear thinking” or “critical thinking” (Smith, Tyler, & Evaluation Staff 1942: 35–36). To develop tests of achievement of this broad goal, they distinguished five overlapping aspects of it: ability to interpret data, abilities associated with an understanding of the nature of proof, and the abilities to apply principles of science, of social studies and of logical reasoning. The Eight-Year Study also had a college staff, directed by a committee of college administrators, whose task was to determine how well the experimental schools had prepared their graduates for college. The college staff compared the performance of 1,475 college students from the experimental schools with an equal number of graduates from conventional schools, matched in pairs by sex, age, race, scholastic aptitude scores, home and community background, interests, and probable future. They concluded that, on 18 measures of student success, the graduates of the experimental schools did a somewhat better job than the comparison group. The graduates from the six most traditional of the experimental schools showed no large or consistent differences. The graduates from the six most experimental schools, on the other hand, had much greater differences in their favour. The graduates of the two most experimental schools, the college staff reported:

… surpassed their comparison groups by wide margins in academic achievement, intellectual curiosity, scientific approach to problems, and interest in contemporary affairs. The differences in their favor were even greater in general resourcefulness, in enjoyment of reading, [in] participation in the arts, in winning non-academic honors, and in all aspects of college life except possibly participation in sports and social activities. (Aikin 1942: 114)

One of these schools was a private school with students from privileged families and the other the experimental section of a public school with students from non-privileged families. The college staff reported that the graduates of the two schools were indistinguishable from each other in terms of college success.

In 1933 Dewey issued an extensively rewritten edition of his How We Think (Dewey 1910), with the sub-title “A restatement of the relation of reflective thinking to the educative process”. Although the restatement retains the basic structure and content of the original book, Dewey made a number of changes. He rewrote and simplified his logical analysis of the process of reflection, made his ideas clearer and more definite, replaced the terms ‘induction’ and ‘deduction’ by the phrases ‘control of data and evidence’ and ‘control of reasoning and concepts’, added more illustrations, rearranged chapters, and revised the parts on teaching to reflect changes in schools since 1910. In particular, he objected to one-sided practices of some “experimental” and “progressive” schools that allowed children freedom but gave them no guidance, citing as objectionable practices novelty and variety for their own sake, experiences and activities with real materials but of no educational significance, treating random and disconnected activity as if it were an experiment, failure to summarize net accomplishment at the end of an inquiry, non-educative projects, and treatment of the teacher as a negligible factor rather than as “the intellectual leader of a social group” (Dewey 1933: 273). Without explaining his reasons, Dewey eliminated the previous edition’s uses of the words ‘critical’ and ‘uncritical’, thus settling firmly on ‘reflection’ or ‘reflective thinking’ as the preferred term for his subject-matter. In the revised edition, the word ‘critical’ occurs only once, where Dewey writes that “a person may not be sufficiently critical about the ideas that occur to him” (1933: 16, italics in original); being critical is thus a component of reflection, not the whole of it. In contrast, the Eight-Year Study by the Progressive Education Association treated ‘critical thinking’ and ‘reflective thinking’ as synonyms.

In the same period, Dewey collaborated on a history of the Laboratory School in Chicago with two former teachers from the school (Mayhew & Edwards 1936). The history describes the school’s curriculum and organization, activities aimed at developing skills, parents’ involvement, and the habits of mind that the children acquired. A concluding chapter evaluates the school’s achievements, counting as a success its staging of the curriculum to correspond to the natural development of the growing child. In two appendices, the authors describe the evolution of Dewey’s principles of education and Dewey himself describes the theory of the Chicago experiment (Dewey 1936).

Glaser (1941) reports in his doctoral dissertation the method and results of an experiment in the development of critical thinking conducted in the fall of 1938. He defines critical thinking as Dewey defined reflective thinking:

Critical thinking calls for a persistent effort to examine any belief or supposed form of knowledge in the light of the evidence that supports it and the further conclusions to which it tends. (Glaser 1941: 6; cf. Dewey 1910: 6; Dewey 1933: 9)

In the experiment, eight lesson units directed at improving critical thinking abilities were taught to four grade 12 high school classes, with pre-test and post-test of the students using the Otis Quick-Scoring Mental Ability Test and the Watson-Glaser Tests of Critical Thinking (developed in collaboration with Glaser’s dissertation sponsor, Goodwin Watson). The average gain in scores on these tests was greater to a statistically significant degree among the students who received the lessons in critical thinking than among the students in a control group of four grade 12 high school classes taking the usual curriculum in English. Glaser concludes:

The aspect of critical thinking which appears most susceptible to general improvement is the attitude of being disposed to consider in a thoughtful way the problems and subjects that come within the range of one’s experience. An attitude of wanting evidence for beliefs is more subject to general transfer. Development of skill in applying the methods of logical inquiry and reasoning, however, appears to be specifically related to, and in fact limited by, the acquisition of pertinent knowledge and facts concerning the problem or subject matter toward which the thinking is to be directed. (Glaser 1941: 175)

Retest scores and observable behaviour indicated that students in the intervention group retained their growth in ability to think critically for at least six months after the special instruction.

In 1948 a group of U.S. college examiners decided to develop taxonomies of educational objectives with a common vocabulary that they could use for communicating with each other about test items. The first of these taxonomies, for the cognitive domain, appeared in 1956 (Bloom et al. 1956), and included critical thinking objectives. It has become known as Bloom’s taxonomy. A second taxonomy, for the affective domain (Krathwohl, Bloom, & Masia 1964), and a third taxonomy, for the psychomotor domain (Simpson 1966–67), appeared later. Each of the taxonomies is hierarchical, with achievement of a higher educational objective alleged to require achievement of corresponding lower educational objectives.

Bloom’s taxonomy has six major categories. From lowest to highest, they are knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation. Within each category, there are sub-categories, also arranged hierarchically from the educationally prior to the educationally posterior. The lowest category, though called ‘knowledge’, is confined to objectives of remembering information and being able to recall or recognize it, without much transformation beyond organizing it (Bloom et al. 1956: 28–29). The five higher categories are collectively termed “intellectual abilities and skills” (Bloom et al. 1956: 204). The term is simply another name for critical thinking abilities and skills:

Although information or knowledge is recognized as an important outcome of education, very few teachers would be satisfied to regard this as the primary or the sole outcome of instruction. What is needed is some evidence that the students can do something with their knowledge, that is, that they can apply the information to new situations and problems. It is also expected that students will acquire generalized techniques for dealing with new problems and new materials. Thus, it is expected that when the student encounters a new problem or situation, he will select an appropriate technique for attacking it and will bring to bear the necessary information, both facts and principles. This has been labeled “critical thinking” by some, “reflective thinking” by Dewey and others, and “problem solving” by still others. In the taxonomy, we have used the term “intellectual abilities and skills”. (Bloom et al. 1956: 38)

Comprehension and application objectives, as their names imply, involve understanding and applying information. Critical thinking abilities and skills show up in the three highest categories of analysis, synthesis and evaluation. The condensed version of Bloom’s taxonomy (Bloom et al. 1956: 201–207) gives the following examples of objectives at these levels:

analysis objectives : ability to recognize unstated assumptions, ability to check the consistency of hypotheses with given information and assumptions, ability to recognize the general techniques used in advertising, propaganda and other persuasive materials
synthesis objectives : organizing ideas and statements in writing, ability to propose ways of testing a hypothesis, ability to formulate and modify hypotheses
evaluation objectives : ability to indicate logical fallacies, comparison of major theories about particular cultures

The analysis, synthesis and evaluation objectives in Bloom’s taxonomy collectively came to be called the “higher-order thinking skills” (Tankersley 2005: chap. 5). Although the analysis-synthesis-evaluation sequence mimics phases in Dewey’s (1933) logical analysis of the reflective thinking process, it has not generally been adopted as a model of a critical thinking process. While commending the inspirational value of its ratio of five categories of thinking objectives to one category of recall objectives, Ennis (1981b) points out that the categories lack criteria applicable across topics and domains. For example, analysis in chemistry is so different from analysis in literature that there is not much point in teaching analysis as a general type of thinking. Further, the postulated hierarchy seems questionable at the higher levels of Bloom’s taxonomy. For example, ability to indicate logical fallacies hardly seems more complex than the ability to organize statements and ideas in writing.

A revised version of Bloom’s taxonomy (Anderson et al. 2001) distinguishes the intended cognitive process in an educational objective (such as being able to recall, to compare or to check) from the objective’s informational content (“knowledge”), which may be factual, conceptual, procedural, or metacognitive. The result is a so-called “Taxonomy Table” with four rows for the kinds of informational content and six columns for the six main types of cognitive process. The authors name the types of cognitive process by verbs, to indicate their status as mental activities. They change the name of the ‘comprehension’ category to ‘understand’ and of the ‘synthesis’ category to ’create’, and switch the order of synthesis and evaluation. The result is a list of six main types of cognitive process aimed at by teachers: remember, understand, apply, analyze, evaluate, and create. The authors retain the idea of a hierarchy of increasing complexity, but acknowledge some overlap, for example between understanding and applying. And they retain the idea that critical thinking and problem solving cut across the more complex cognitive processes. The terms ‘critical thinking’ and ‘problem solving’, they write:

are widely used and tend to become touchstones of curriculum emphasis. Both generally include a variety of activities that might be classified in disparate cells of the Taxonomy Table. That is, in any given instance, objectives that involve problem solving and critical thinking most likely call for cognitive processes in several categories on the process dimension. For example, to think critically about an issue probably involves some Conceptual knowledge to Analyze the issue. Then, one can Evaluate different perspectives in terms of the criteria and, perhaps, Create a novel, yet defensible perspective on this issue. (Anderson et al. 2001: 269–270; italics in original)

In the revised taxonomy, only a few sub-categories, such as inferring, have enough commonality to be treated as a distinct critical thinking ability that could be taught and assessed as a general ability.

A landmark contribution to philosophical scholarship on the concept of critical thinking was a 1962 article in the Harvard Educational Review by Robert H. Ennis, with the title “A concept of critical thinking: A proposed basis for research in the teaching and evaluation of critical thinking ability” (Ennis 1962). Ennis took as his starting-point a conception of critical thinking put forward by B. Othanel Smith:

We shall consider thinking in terms of the operations involved in the examination of statements which we, or others, may believe. A speaker declares, for example, that “Freedom means that the decisions in America’s productive effort are made not in the minds of a bureaucracy but in the free market”. Now if we set about to find out what this statement means and to determine whether to accept or reject it, we would be engaged in thinking which, for lack of a better term, we shall call critical thinking. If one wishes to say that this is only a form of problem-solving in which the purpose is to decide whether or not what is said is dependable, we shall not object. But for our purposes we choose to call it critical thinking. (Smith 1953: 130)

Adding a normative component to this conception, Ennis defined critical thinking as “the correct assessing of statements” (Ennis 1962: 83). On the basis of this definition, he distinguished 12 “aspects” of critical thinking corresponding to types or aspects of statements, such as judging whether an observation statement is reliable and grasping the meaning of a statement. He noted that he did not include judging value statements. Cutting across the 12 aspects, he distinguished three dimensions of critical thinking: logical (judging relationships between meanings of words and statements), criterial (knowledge of the criteria for judging statements), and pragmatic (the impression of the background purpose). For each aspect, Ennis described the applicable dimensions, including criteria. He proposed the resulting construct as a basis for developing specifications for critical thinking tests and for research on instructional methods and levels.

In the 1970s and 1980s there was an upsurge of attention to the development of thinking skills. The annual International Conference on Critical Thinking and Educational Reform has attracted since its start in 1980 tens of thousands of educators from all levels. In 1983 the College Entrance Examination Board proclaimed reasoning as one of six basic academic competencies needed by college students (College Board 1983). Departments of education in the United States and around the world began to include thinking objectives in their curriculum guidelines for school subjects. For example, Ontario’s social sciences and humanities curriculum guideline for secondary schools requires “the use of critical and creative thinking skills and/or processes” as a goal of instruction and assessment in each subject and course (Ontario Ministry of Education 2013: 30). The document describes critical thinking as follows:

Critical thinking is the process of thinking about ideas or situations in order to understand them fully, identify their implications, make a judgement, and/or guide decision making. Critical thinking includes skills such as questioning, predicting, analysing, synthesizing, examining opinions, identifying values and issues, detecting bias, and distinguishing between alternatives. Students who are taught these skills become critical thinkers who can move beyond superficial conclusions to a deeper understanding of the issues they are examining. They are able to engage in an inquiry process in which they explore complex and multifaceted issues, and questions for which there may be no clear-cut answers (Ontario Ministry of Education 2013: 46).

Sweden makes schools responsible for ensuring that each pupil who completes compulsory school “can make use of critical thinking and independently formulate standpoints based on knowledge and ethical considerations” (Skolverket 2011: 15). Subject syllabi incorporate this requirement, and items testing critical thinking skills appear on national tests in history, Swedish, mathematics and physics that are a required step toward university admission. For example, the physics syllabus emphasizes the importance of “critical examination of information and arguments which students meet in sources and social discussions related to physics” (Skolverket 2011: 124). Correspondingly, the 2013 national test on physics included a question asking students to provide arguments for a recommendation to the Swedish minister of energy on what energy sources to use for electricity production. Other jurisdictions similarly embed critical thinking objectives in curriculum guidelines.

At the college level, a new wave of introductory logic textbooks, pioneered by Kahane (1971), applied the tools of logic to contemporary social and political issues. In their wake, colleges and universities in North America transformed their introductory logic course into a general education service course with a title like ‘critical thinking’ or ‘reasoning’. In 1980, the trustees of California’s state university and colleges approved as a general education requirement a course in critical thinking, described as follows:

Instruction in critical thinking is to be designed to achieve an understanding of the relationship of language to logic, which should lead to the ability to analyze, criticize, and advocate ideas, to reason inductively and deductively, and to reach factual or judgmental conclusions based on sound inferences drawn from unambiguous statements of knowledge or belief. The minimal competence to be expected at the successful conclusion of instruction in critical thinking should be the ability to distinguish fact from judgment, belief from knowledge, and skills in elementary inductive and deductive processes, including an understanding of the formal and informal fallacies of language and thought. (Dumke 1980)

Since December 1983, the Association for Informal Logic and Critical Thinking has sponsored sessions at the three annual divisional meetings of the American Philosophical Association. In December 1987, the Committee on Pre-College Philosophy of the American Philosophical Association invited Peter Facione to make a systematic inquiry into the current state of critical thinking and critical thinking assessment. Facione assembled a group of 46 other academic philosophers and psychologists to participate in a multi-round Delphi process, whose product was entitled Critical Thinking: A Statement of Expert Consensus for Purposes of Educational Assessment and Instruction (Facione 1990a). The statement listed abilities and dispositions that should be the goals of a lower-level undergraduate course in critical thinking.

Contemporary political and business leaders express support for critical thinking as an educational goal. In his 2014 State of the Union address (Obama 2014), U.S. President Barack Obama listed critical thinking as one of six skills for the new economy targeted with his Race to the Top program. An article in the business magazine Forbes reported that the number one job skill, found in nine out of 10 of the most in-demand jobs, was critical thinking, defined as “using logic and reasoning to identify the strengths and weaknesses of alternative solutions, conclusions or approaches to problems” (Casserly 2012). In response to such claims, the European Commission has funded “Critical Thinking across the European Higher Education Curricula”, a nine-country research project to develop guidelines for quality in critical thinking instruction in European institutions of higher education, on the basis of the researchers’ findings of the critical thinking skills and dispositions that employers expect of recent graduates (Dominguez 2018a; 2018b). The Centre for Educational Research and Innovation of the Organization for Economic Development (OECD) in early 2018 issued a call for institutions of higher education to participate in a two-year study, with control groups, of interventions in undergraduate or teacher education designed to improve creative and critical thinking (OECD Centre for Educational Research and Innovation 2018).

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Why History Matters: Understanding Our Past to Shape Our Future

By: Author Paul Jenkins

Posted on April 6, 2024

Categories Culture , History , Society

History isn’t just a dusty collection of names and dates from the past. It’s a mirror reflecting our societal evolution, a guidebook to our present, and a compass pointing to our future. Let’s explore why history holds the key to understanding ourselves and the world we inhabit.

Key Takeaways

Historical study fosters an understanding of societal trends and human nature.
A sense of identity and a shared narrative are cultivated through history.
History is crucial for developing analytical and critical thinking skills.

Understanding the Value of History

The value of history lies in its power to elucidate the past events, inform the present conditions, and guide future decisions. Through a structured analysis and application of historical context, one appreciates its role as an essential discipline.

Analyzing Past, Present, and Future

History provides a detailed record of past events which significantly influence present societal structures and future trajectories. Historical research identifies patterns that have shaped societies, cultures, and traditions. This analysis allows individuals to learn from past decisions and understand the possible implications for future outcomes.

The Importance of Historical Context

Understanding historical context is crucial for interpreting events accurately. It ensures a nuanced view of past actions and decisions within the context of their time. Recognizing the value of historical context prevents the misrepresentation of events and promotes a deeper appreciation for the complexities of past societies and their decisions.

History as a Discipline

Studying history as a discipline involves meticulous research and fact-checking . It equips historians with frameworks and techniques to construct accurate accounts of the past. This discipline underscores the credibility of historical narratives and validates their relevance to current understandings. It fosters an awareness that present conditions result from human choices that can be influenced by further action.

The Role of History in Society

History serves a critical role in society by fostering informed citizens, preserving the collective memory, and enhancing an understanding of cultural and religious diversity. Each of these aspects contributes to a society that values its past while shaping its future.

Developing Informed Citizens

Informed citizens are the bedrock of a healthy democracy. Historical knowledge equips them with the context necessary to understand current policies and their impact on rights and responsibilities. They learn not only about historical events but also how to engage critically with sources and discern patterns that influence modern governance. Recognizing the evolution of societal norms and laws from historical precedents contributes to a more engaged and analytical electorate.

Key Point : History teaches critical thinking skills.
Impact : Engaged citizens contribute to a more robust democracy.

Preserving Collective Memory

Societies with a strong sense of their history possess a collective memory that safeguards against cultural and memory loss. The preservation of this memory through documentation, oral traditions, and historical landmarks helps communities maintain a sense of identity and continuity. Without this, societies risk becoming rootless, lacking the connection to shared experiences that guide collective values and traditions.

Examples of Collective Memory Preservation :

Historical literature

Understanding Cultural and Religious Diversity

History illuminates the traditions and beliefs of different cultures and religions, revealing the rich tapestry of human experience. By studying the historical contexts of societies, it becomes possible to appreciate the diversity of perspectives and practices that exist. This understanding fosters tolerance and can help mitigate conflicts arising from cultural or religious misunderstandings.

Benefits of Historical Understanding :

Enhances social cohesion.
Promotes mutual respect.

Collectively, the role of history in society is multifaceted, playing a pivotal part in shaping the narratives that societies live by, guiding principles of democracy, and contributing to the rich mosaic of human cultures and religions.

Learning from Historical Events

Historical events offer invaluable insights into the complexities of human experience, from the sobering repercussions of wars and conflicts to the transformative power of significant milestones.

Lessons from Wars and Conflicts

Wars and conflicts stand as stark reminders of both human frailty and resilience. For instance:

The Holocaust encapsulates the extremity of human cruelty and the importance of empathy and courage. Remembering the Holocaust is essential for understanding the impact of prejudice and the necessity of standing up against it.
Courage is highlighted by stories of resistance and survival, which provide a deeper understanding of the Jewish experience and the capacity for individuals to enact change amidst adversity.

The Impact of Significant Historical Milestones

Significant historical milestones shape the course of world history and inform current societal norms. They are moments that echo through time, prompting reflection and adaptation.

The end of slavery in the United States marked a drastic turn in human rights and freedoms, encouraging a global reassessment of racial equality.
Signified the end of the Cold War and the start of a new era in international relations, and it serves as a potent symbol of liberation and the desire for unity.

Connecting Personal and Collective Histories

Connecting personal and collective histories enhances understanding of societies by intertwining individual experiences with broader historical narratives. This synthesis fosters empathy and helps individuals appreciate the depth of the human experience.

Embracing a Broader Human Experience

Individuals often perceive history through the lens of their personal stories, which are fundamentally tied to the larger tapestry of society’s past. For instance, the Holocaust is not merely a chapter in a history book, but a profound part of many personal histories that still resonate today. Examining both personal memories and collective histories allows people to engage more deeply with being human. Such engagement provides grounding, as histories give context to present circumstances, ensuring that individuals are not rootless but connected to a continuum that defines cultures and communities.

The Dangers of Historical Amnesia

Forgetting or ignoring the past, a condition akin to societal memory loss, poses a significant risk to societies. It is crucial to remember the trials and lessons of history, such as the horrors of the Holocaust, to build resilience against repeating past atrocities. Neglecting to connect personal experiences with the collective memory of societies can lead to a lack of empathy and understanding. This disconnect also stymies learning and growth, as historical amnesia prevents societies from effectively rooting themselves in history, which can guide better decision-making and foster a more inclusive understanding of the human experience.

Educational Perspectives on History

The study of history occupies a crucial role in academic curriculums, offering methodologies that cross into various disciplines and fostering a wide range of competencies critical to intellectual development.

History’s Place in Academic Curriculums

History, as an academic discipline, grounds students in the temporal dimensions of human experience. Educational systems globally include history to various extents, recognizing its role in cultivating critical thinking and an understanding of how societies have evolved. The reasons to include history in curriculums hinge on its ability to provide context for current events and to enhance civic literacy .

Methodologies and Approaches in Historical Studies

Historical research harnesses diverse methodologies ranging from diachronic analysis , which tracks changes and continuities over time, to comparative historical study , which juxtaposes past and present to foster deeper understanding. The approach to studying history typically emphasizes the diachro-mesh of events, ideas, and figures, offering students a toolkit for discerning and interpreting complex narratives.

The Interplay between History and Other Academic Disciplines

History does not exist in isolation. It actively engages with and enriches other fields, like economics, literature, and political science. This interplay underscores the multidisciplinary essence of historical education, thereby illuminating the interconnectedness of knowledge and the multiplicity of perspectives. By situating historical events within broader intellectual landscapes , students learn to appreciate the nuanced interdependencies that have shaped human societies.

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Critical Thinking in United States History

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Critical Thinking in United States History uses fascinating original source documents and discussion-based critical thinking methods to help students evaluate conflicting perspectives of historical events. This process stimulates students’ interest in history, improves their historical knowledge, and develops their analytical skills for assessment tests. For each lesson, students examine two or more perspectives of an event using analysis and evaluation skills such as identifying types of reasoning and evaluating sources. Through debating historians’ evidence, inferences, analogies, and assumptions, students come away with a deeper understanding of specific events. They also learn to examine any historical, or current, event with a more critical mind. Instruction/Answer Guides - (included) A separate Instruction/Answer Guide is included and contains objectives, teaching suggestions, focus questions, and answers. Use of the guide is highly recommended.

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Utilizing Creative and Critical Thinking to Build Knowledge and Comprehension through Inquiry-Based and Art-Based Learning: A Practical Tool for Teaching Local History in Pre-Primary and Primary Education

Submitted: 20 June 2023 Reviewed: 27 July 2023 Published: 24 August 2023

DOI: 10.5772/intechopen.112688

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Studying local history can be approached in a modern way that encourages young students to utilize the methods and skills of a historian. This includes collecting, recording, comparing, and interpreting data from primary and secondary resources. Inquiry-based and art-based learning are effective frameworks for exploring local history. Students can gain a deeper understanding of the subject by focusing on inquiry, fieldwork, thorough recording, and constructing historical narratives based on critical interpretation of all information, including opposing and alternative views. Art-based learning allows students to analyze the forms and social aspects of artifacts, constructions, events, and phenomena and then express their knowledge and understanding in various multimodal and symbolic ways. It’s essential for children to take the initiative, and be involved in the learning process, and work in collaborative environments that support their free thinking and exploration. This approach is conducive to critical thinking and encourages creativity in learning history. This chapter outlines the conditions that define inquiry and art-based learning environments and offers a tool with practical suggestions for pre-primary and primary teachers to develop their local history lessons. The tool covers four major dimensions: learning interactions, understanding historical times, art-based learning, and practical strategies specific to local history.

local history
pre-primary and primary education
inquiry-based learning
art-based learning
practical strategies

Author Information

Maria ampartzaki *.

University of Crete, Rethymno, Greece

*Address all correspondence to: [email protected]

1. Introduction

Local history is localized history. The study of local history is focused on a specific geographical area and the societies that existed there in the past, viewed through the lens of individuals who lived in these societies. This area could be a small community, a town, or even a wider geographical area [ 1 ]. Often, local citizens who are not professional historians take on the task of writing about their community’s history, driven by a desire to preserve and share what they believe is important. By delving into local history, one can gain a deeper understanding of the broader national narrative, as the two are closely intertwined [ 2 ].

Stefaniak et al. [ 3 ] argue that influencing memories through teaching local history could become a powerful strategy for enhancing place connection and, by extension, fostering more community participation. History classes do not have to be boring if teachers plan activities that encourage students to use primary sources to learn interesting, relevant, and applicable information about the past. The study of local history is one of the best ways to gain insight into the relevance of the past. Public historical materials and re-creating individual histories could be the subject of such research [ 4 , 5 ]. Stories about real-life local heroes or landmarks in a children’s community capture their attention and captivate their minds. Also, a great technique to get children interested in history is to find interesting links to their own family and community’s past. The Bradley Commission on History in Schools [ 6 ] argues that teaching children about their local history might serve as a “robust bridge” to teaching them about larger historical periods.

The “new history” concept moved away from the traditional emphasis on chronology and historical facts. Instead, it highlighted the importance of history as a unique field of knowledge that required specific skills and conceptual understandings to fully comprehend. It has been argued that students can achieve a higher level of understanding of history if it is perceived as a unique form of knowledge and a means of reasoning through the use of second-order concepts such as change and continuity, causation, significance, accounts, and evidence [ 7 , 8 ]. Research came to a consistent conclusion that children can possess remarkably advanced ideas at a young age. This presents an opportunity for educators to develop a structured curriculum that builds on their existing knowledge, allowing for a more comprehensive understanding of history. One of the key concepts presented in this work is that students should have a solid grasp of the foundational principles of their subject. This includes understanding how historical knowledge is created, evaluated, and debated. Therefore, history education’s main focus is to examine students’ ideas and beliefs about the past. To acquire or develop their knowledge, they must be able to comprehend and apply key concepts. As a result, history educators and scholars must be attentive to students’ conceptions and perceptions of history as both a subject and a discipline [ 9 , 10 ].

Academics have suggested the need for “big picture” frameworks to help students understand their place in time [ 11 ]. They also propose a “conceptual framework of human history” that would allow students to connect different elements of the past and present in a meaningful way ([ 12 ], p. 93). Lee ([ 11 ], p. 68) emphasizes the importance of developing a comprehensive historical literacy that promotes an “active historical consciousness,” enabling students to navigate the constantly evolving past and present. Historical consciousness relies on historical competence that involves a multifaceted approach. It requires the ability to ask meaningful questions, analyze sources, and evaluate historical accounts. It also involves connecting the past to our own lives and society and developing a deep understanding of historical concepts. By honing these skills, we can better appreciate the richness and complexity of our shared history [ 9 , 13 ].

2. The creative perspectives of learning local history

Historians become creative when they use their imagination to make sense of the past, which often involves striving to understand unfamiliar practices, frameworks, and worldviews. Good historians can put themselves back in time and visualize the world as it was. Historical imagination is crucial for learning about other cultures, times, and worlds. Thinking creatively and imaginatively is the key to the capacity to see situations under different parameters and frameworks [ 14 ]. This is the capacity we call historical empathy [ 10 ].

Inquiry approaches such as, tackling historical problems; collecting and analyzing data; evaluating and verifying previously established accounts and pieces of evidence; interpretations, revisions, readings, and understandings; discovering new sources; applying new modes of communication; and altogether new historical narratives. Understanding the past in new ways sheds light on how it influences the present.

The capacity of the historian to make connections, discriminate between, and draw similarities between different, intriguing, and valuable aspects of history, situating the information within a broader context.

Borrowing ideas, concepts, theories, and methods from other frameworks or disciplines (e.g. philosophy, anthropology, cultural studies, literature, the arts, etc.) in order to examine a problem from a fresh angle.

Alternative history is also a good way to be creative, as long as the goal is to get people to think.

Historians face the challenge of interpreting and making sense of the past’s intricate social structures by using a big-picture approach, all the while working with limited data. Making meaning of contradictory and partial evidence requires imagination too.

Being a part of a bigger team that carries out in-depth investigations can also require the use of creativity.

In the present chapter, we are focusing on two learning strategies that can promote creative and critical thinking in studying local history: the strategy of inquiry-based and the strategy of art-based learning [ 16 , 17 , 18 ].

3. Inquiry-based learning

Inquiry-based learning is an approach that prioritizes the learner by encouraging questioning and discovery. Students are given the opportunity to explore their interests to find answers to their inquiries. Students collect, record, and organize relevant data and information and prepare summaries, reports, and/or presentations of the culminated knowledge at the end of the process [ 19 ]. Personal assessment and reflection are important components too [ 20 ]. The core of inquiry-based learning is discovery, which is achieved through research using primary and secondary resources. Fieldwork is also an important component, which includes not only site visits but also measurements, experimentation, object examination, and oral source investigation. This approach requires active learning, both individually and in groups, necessitating a supportive learning environment that caters to the material, emotional/psychological, and social needs of the learners [ 21 , 22 , 23 ]. In a spiral mode, the components could evolve in any sequence and traverse through phases. An inquiry may take the shape of cycles, with each cycle including querying, investigating, and concluding, or formulating new, more specific questions and returning to the research cycle.

When the aforementioned procedures are not confined to strict guidelines, they have the potential to encourage creativity. This is primarily because handling, utilizing, and examining information, materials, and ideas is a key aspect of creative endeavors for individuals of all ages. The cultivation of critical thinking skills (which are imperative for comprehending information) is equally vital. Moreover, knowledge and creativity are interconnected. Creativity can be a product of engaging with the regulations and principles of particular domains. The aforementioned necessitates excellent investigative abilities, which will empower learners to discern, obtain, and assess intricate structures and data to fuel their own creative pursuits [ 24 , 25 ].

4. Art-based learning

Encouraging children to present what they have learned in various ways that incorporate multiple modes of expression can transform inquiry-based learning into a powerful, constructive, and expressive process, as stated by Wallace [ 26 ]. Art offers numerous avenues for expression and can serve as an additional means of discovery. Exposure to diverse cultural artifacts allows children to investigate different perspectives, ideas, and cultures, particularly when introduced in a social studies context, such as geography, history, citizenship, etc. One effective method to fight against prejudice is to educate oneself about various cultures and ethnicities. By assimilating new knowledge into their pre-existing frameworks, children can develop a deeper appreciation for the differences and similarities among individuals, rather than relying on broad racial or ethnic stereotypes [ 26 , 27 , 28 ].

In addition, artmaking provides a platform for exploring various means of expression and symbolically conveying personal experiences. Through visual, verbal, musical, and physical semiotics, art serves as a medium of communication and a way of constructing meaning [ 29 ]. According to Atkinson ([ 30 ], p. 77) children “use drawing and other practices such as painting or constructing, for a rich variety of expressive and representational purposes. Children use such art activities to construct narratives, to depict time sequences, to play games, to represent actions, to describe objects, to describe object and spatial relations, and much more. In these activities, children are developing semiotic strategies as well as conceptual understanding” (see also [ 22 , 31 ]). In essence, artmaking is a valuable tool for exploring and constructing concepts, ideas, and perspectives.

5. The benefits of inquiry-based and art-based learning for creative and critical thinking

Inquiry-based and art-based learning foster the holistic growth of students as they engage their cognitive, social, and psychological aspects [ 32 , 33 , 34 ].

When students participate in inquiry-based learning, they are able to acquire genuine, practical knowledge that is relevant to their personal lives as it occurs in a particular social and individual setting, which encourages students to form connections and engage actively in the learning process [ 32 , 35 ]. Experiential learning is beneficial for the development of practical life skills with emotional and social dimensions that are closely linked to personal and social values [ 21 ]. This benefits creativity which is primarily driven by personal relevance and meaningfulness [ 36 , 37 , 38 ].

When students have control over the timing, materials, and participation in the process of inquiry or artistic creation, they tend to develop a sense of personal ownership and self-worth. This, in turn, helps them regulate themselves better and increases their self-efficacy [ 35 , 39 , 40 ]. Considering the student’s desires, thoughts, and perspectives during discussions can also enhance their self-assurance, self-respect, sense of belonging, and self-worth [ 35 , 41 ]. The development of well-being matters for creativity. Self-identity, self-awareness, self-confidence, and a sense of belonging enable individuals to unfold their creativity with confidence [ 42 ]. Moreover, the development of well-being is also a product of creativity [ 43 ].

Students experience cognitive, social, and emotional growth when they take charge of their own learning [ 32 ]. Additionally, engaging in creative pursuits fosters a sense of independence and agency, enabling individuals to better understand themselves [ 42 ].

Collaborative learning allows learners to pool their unique knowledge, skills, and attitudes toward a shared goal. This approach, as noted by Chu et al. [ 44 ], fosters co-construction of learning outcomes. Similarly, creativity in the humanities and creativity, in general, celebrates diversity and inclusivity [ 42 , 45 ].

Explorations such as those carried out in inquiries into history and the artistic and cultural creation of different societies promote children’s social development and comprehension. This also helps them develop historical empathy and empathy in general, which involves understanding the emotions, viewpoints, and motives of others [ 16 , 35 ].

Working together in inquiries and artistic creation fosters a space for learning and growth, where effective communication skills are developed and refined, ultimately enhancing creativity [ 35 , 42 , 44 ].

Inquiry-based and art-based learning allow students to enhance their analytical abilities, which can lead to sharp and perceptive interpretations of real-world situations [ 44 , 46 ]. This skillset can greatly improve their quality of life. Additionally, since inquiries often stem from the world around us, this type of learning promotes “social knowing” ([ 47 ], p. vii; [ 35 ]). Developing analytical skills and insightful interpretations is a hallmark of creative thinking [ 38 , 48 , 49 ].

Interactions are important to inquiry-based, art-based learning and creativity since they enable children to develop a healthy reliance on each other, vivid social interactions, good relationships, and “positive feelings towards peers” ([ 40 ], p. 10; [ 46 ]). According to Zhou [ 50 ], an effective method of recognizing creative learning and its qualities is through social interaction with others. Engaging in positive peer-to-peer interaction can enhance learners’ motivation to build interpersonal connections through collaborative efforts. Such efforts may foster creative thinking, generate innovative ideas, and lead to practical solutions.

Inquiries cater meaningful engagement to learning, which means that children are emotionally involved in learning activities. This affects dispositions as it breeds children’s natural curiosity, eagerness, and motivation to learn [ 28 , 40 ]. Moreover, art allows for the expression of emotions, thereby promoting emotional intelligence [ 35 ]. Helm and Katz report that “research suggests that there is a relationship between the role that children have in determining their own learning experiences and the development of social skills” ([ 22 ], p. 5). They also argue that “when students are energized by their own work, their disposition to solve problems and to seek deeper understanding can be developed and strengthened” (p. 5; see also [ 51 ]). According to a study by Nakamura and Csikszentmihalyi [ 52 ], persistence is a key trait for creativity in the later stages of life.

Art can facilitate emotional regulation and positive emotional development in children [ 53 ]. Moreover, it enables children to express emotions and fears visually, providing control and reflection on their triggers, and contributes to the reduction of stress since pursuing art boosts serotonin levels, fighting depression, and promoting well-being [ 35 ].

On the whole, inquiry-based and art-based learning can contribute to resilience, therapeutic healing [ 54 ], and a “stronger performance regardless of race, gender, or prior achievement” ([ 40 ], p. 4).

6. Conditions that embed and enhance creativity and critical thinking in inquiry-based and art-based learning

6.1 conditions that empower the role of the teacher.

Whether in history or art, conducting an inquiry or implementing inquiry-based lessons requires a teacher with advanced skills. In order to promote student involvement in personal inquiry or artistic exploration, it is essential that teachers first become proficient in inquiry and remain up-to-date with the latest advancements in art education. It is critical for teachers to possess a thorough understanding of the inquiry process and maintain a solid grasp on current developments in the field of art education [ 19 , 20 , 55 , 56 , 57 , 58 ].

Seek out various sources of information, techniques, and ideas in order to gain knowledge on a particular topic. This can involve reading books, conducting interviews, visiting museums, and verifying through cross-checking [ 23 , 59 ]. Especially in art, teachers can seek to explore diverse forms and genres, media, and techniques before introducing them into their class [ 59 , 60 ].

Explore other perspectives and opposing information related to the topic at hand [ 23 ].

Explore the underlying concept behind a topic (the big idea) or important questions, or the message behind an example of artwork and conduct thorough research [ 59 , 61 ].

If fieldwork is planned, visit the location and take note of various details such as exciting features, potential discoveries for children both independently and with adult guidance, the presence of people in the area, any safety hazards, areas where children can make observations and recordings, places for rest, and areas requiring adult supervision [ 22 ].

A crucial aspect of inquiry-based teaching is for teachers to relinquish control [ 23 ]. According to Kidman and Casinader [ 19 ], this means teachers must be willing to shed their title and authority and instead take on the roles of coach, mentor, facilitator, and critical friend. However, it’s important for teachers to make this transition gradually. Students may not possess the necessary skills, maturity, or intellectual sophistication to take on full responsibility for their learning. Teachers can encourage students to lead the creative process and sometimes engage in playful interactions with them to create a more relaxed and enjoyable learning environment [ 46 ]. Therefore, teachers must teach students the necessary skills and gradually increase their independence and intellectual capacity over time [ 55 ].

Teachers can adopt several key roles during the transition process: “direct instruction provider,” “organizer,” “questioner,” “discussion facilitator,” “mentor,” and “facilitator of interpretation” ([ 19 ], p. 44; see also [ 56 , 61 , 62 ]). It’s important for teachers to switch between these roles depending on the needs of their students. For instance, with less experienced students, teachers should focus more on direct instruction, while with more independent and advanced students, they should take on a facilitator role. The balance between these roles may also vary depending on the topic being studied. For new and unfamiliar topics, students may require more guidance in the initial stages of exploration. Studies have shown that presenting challenges to children and empowering them to find solutions can enhance their creativity [ 59 ].

The teacher’s feedback plays a critical role in this process, as it guides the learners in making decisions and taking independent actions [ 63 ]. Collaboration and inquiry-based processes are fostered in both inquiry-based and art-based learning, leading to the development of trust among students, which allows them to take risks and learn from their failures without fear, creating a positive classroom climate overall [ 31 , 64 ]. Furthermore, students are encouraged to be open and honest about any outside issues that may affect their work [ 23 , 46 , 65 ].

Teachers play a crucial role in helping children interpret data and information without bias. As a “facilitator of interpretation,” they can guide children to differentiate between theories, opinions, and evidence, while also encouraging them to generate and evaluate new interpretations and ideas. This support promotes children’s independence as inquirers and problem-solvers, as well as their conceptual knowledge, metacognitive strategies, and creativity. To ensure effective teaching, assessment should also be used to inform responsive teaching, with modes of assessment tailored to the varying capabilities of young children [ 63 ].

Another important condition in inquiry-based and art-based learning is exploring the materials, instruments, and tools involved. Skilled teachers select materials that aid their students’ learning and are appropriate for the key concepts being taught. The equipment provided should encourage experimentation and exploration, and risk-taking which are aspects of intellectual quality [ 20 , 23 , 31 , 46 ].

6.2 Conditions that empower children’s learning processes

Studies have revealed that children possess the ability to plan various things, such as deciding what they want to learn or where they wish to go. To facilitate planning with children, teachers can adopt the K-W-L pattern, which involves identifying what they already Know about a subject, what they Want to learn about it, and what they have Learned after investigating it [ 66 ].

Children may be unfamiliar with asking inquiries. In learning processes, it is necessary to cultivate a culture of inquiry and inquiry-based discovery [ 63 ]. In this case, teachers must place children in the proper mindset and engage them in activities that cultivate their question-asking and discussion skills [ 62 , 67 ]. If teachers switch to a different mode of instruction or interaction, children who are accustomed to sitting and listening silently do not comprehend what is expected of them [ 55 ]. Children must also be taught to observe and respond to one another in brief conversations on a topic. They must comprehend and acknowledge the significance of waiting their turn and maintaining composure during a discussion. Finally, children must develop an understanding of what a query is and how it facilitates learning and information gathering. In other words, teachers must ensure that they address the aforementioned concerns and devote sufficient time to familiarizing students with the inquiry and discussion processes [ 16 , 20 , 23 , 56 ].

Another factor that could prevent children from asking pertinent questions is a lack of information about the topic at hand. Children may know very little about certain subjects, while others may know only the bare minimum. If that’s the case, children might have trouble articulating what they find engaging. Here is a case in point: The town square features a memorial. Many children have seen it and walked by, but they have not been able to process it any further. They have no other information, and they are unable to formulate any questions. In this situation, educators are tasked with sparking students’ curiosity and pique. There are several ways to ignite curiosity, which can be used separately or in combination. These include going on a field trip to the place of interest, reading a book, story, or poem, or utilizing audio-visual resources such as TV shows, videos, websites, newspapers, magazines, and films. Teachers can also initiate classroom discussions, create incidental experiences, or establish ongoing projects that can lead to new areas of interest as experiencing a situation is necessary before questions develop [ 68 , 69 ]. Additionally, arranging a learning environment that showcases related objects or creating interactive learning centers can pique children’s curiosity and stimulate conversations about the materials and where they can take us [ 23 , 66 , 70 ].

Extensive knowledge and profound understanding of objects, images, phenomena, or events, which is elaborated with clarity and repleted in detail in their artwork or other types of work [ 23 , 31 , 46 , 58 , 71 , 72 , 73 ].

Complex problem-solving skills, and advanced thinking abilities which allow children to combine semiotic elements, and form messages and ideas in new creations [ 23 , 31 , 46 , 58 , 71 , 73 ].

Use of technical terms and/or art language with mastery and understanding, for effective communication by students in their work (although with young children, teachers might downplay the vocabulary to the benefit of concrete exploration and learning of the major concepts) [ 20 , 31 , 46 , 58 , 71 ].

Originality which brings unusual or unexpected results. Rather than copying or emulating someone else’s work, students are encouraged to be innovative, explore new possibilities, and tap into their creativity to produce original and authentic pieces of work. In this effort, children are encouraged to use their own knowledge, thinking, expressive skills, and semiotic modes [ 23 , 31 , 42 , 46 , 72 , 73 , 74 ].

Flexibility in thinking which allows children to move beyond the boundaries [ 31 ].

Enjoying the process of inquiry and art and feeling positive about them is a crucial aspect of intellectual quality [ 23 , 31 , 46 , 58 , 71 ].

Creating compositions that present “unity, balance and harmony” and the expression of emotions ([ 31 ], pp. 128–129).

Intellectual quality involves also understanding the technical and expressive aspects of art forms or other artifacts. This is achieved through analyzing carefully chosen works of art and artifacts [ 18 , 46 , 58 ].

Meaningful learning is closely the empowerment of children [ 75 ]. According to Gibson, Anderson, and Fleming [ 46 ], this is accomplished by tapping into prior knowledge and personal identities, as well as taking into account external contexts and diverse viewpoints beyond the classroom. With reference to young children, meaningful learning might as well occur when children are given the opportunity to satisfy their natural curiosity and when they are involved in the planning of learning activities [ 28 , 76 ].

In addition, it is vital for students to collaborate with others to express their emotions, co-construct or share their knowledge and creations, consider diverse perspectives, offer constructive feedback, and critically evaluate both the learning processes and outcomes of inquiry-based and art-based learning. Classes are turned into a “community of learners” or a “community of practice.” Encouraging students to express themselves beyond verbal critique and feedback is important. There are various means of communication available to them ([ 46 ], p. 117; see also [ 64 , 72 , 74 ]).

The conditions mentioned above are prevalent in both learning approaches (inquiries and art-based approaches) and the contemporary interpretation of studying local history. Additionally, a high-quality learning environment is crucial for facilitating these intricate processes.

7. Creating conducive learning environments for creative and critical thinking in inquiry-based and art-based learning

A quality learning environment in inquiry-based and art-based learning is characterized by deep focus, sustained engagement, and a loss of sense of time, similar to Csikszentmihalyi’s concept of “flow” [ 46 , 77 ].

The learning experience encompasses not only the curriculum but also the physical surroundings and the timeframe within which artistic expression takes place. The environment should be practical [ 46 ] and offer students the appropriate materials and technical guidance or demonstrations at key moments [ 31 , 73 ]. In Reggio Emilia schools, space and environment are regarded as the “third teacher” [ 78 ], and it is critical to provide physical spaces that serve, showcase, and recognize the students’ own work, enhancing their confidence and sense of ownership [ 23 , 31 , 46 , 73 ].

According to Kidman and Casinader’s proposal ([ 19 ], p. 39), there are two distinct types of learning environments: the classroom learning environment (CLE) and the field learning environment (FLE). It would be beneficial to explore the characteristics of these environments further.

7.1 Classroom Learning Environments (CLEs)

CLEs could feature resource displays and interactive learning centers. Teachers must select and evaluate these materials with great care. Books and audiovisual or multimedia content must be chosen based on their compatibility, with large pictures and photographs and appropriate content being two major considerations. Teachers can mediate if there are challenging terms used, either by explaining them to students or by including additional narration into a multimedia piece (such as a video, PowerPoint, or movie segment) created with modern technology [ 23 ].

Choosing appropriate resources can be challenging, particularly in the early years, when children may not have the skills to conduct independent research on primary and secondary sources [ 19 ]. In order to optimize the use of resources by young children, it’s important for teachers or designers to carefully choose resources that align with the learning objectives and assist children in making appropriate selections [ 20 ]. This approach not only enhances the effectiveness of resources for young children but also benefits older children who may struggle with processing information. Additionally, it promotes the perception of information resources as a means to an end, rather than the end itself [ 79 ]. If teachers read books to children, they may want to avoid reading complex sentences and focus instead on reading the most important parts. Children that are at a reading level are free to peruse the content and read as much or as little as they can manage [ 80 ]. Fiction and nonfiction books for children of all ages are accepted, if available [ 16 ].

As previously stated, resources on alternative perspectives, nontraditional or sidelined genres, and conflicting information (as long as they do not infringe on human rights) should be included [ 16 , 17 ]. This has the potential to promote democratic values and foster children’s attitudes of tolerance and acceptance toward diversity, while also enhancing their ability to analyze and interpret multiple viewpoints (see, for example, a discussion by Jones [ 81 ]).

7.2 Field Learning Environments (FLEs)

The Field Learning Environment (FLE) [ 19 ], commonly known as Fieldwork, is highly valued by educators due to the significant role sensory learning plays in education. Field trips offer a complete sensory experience of the environment, making them an essential teaching tool. Classroom learning cannot offer the same level of firsthand and sensory experience as other forms of education. Children can explore and become acquainted with their surroundings through movement. This also helps them to orient themselves and navigate their way [ 66 , 82 ]. Excursions also offer chances to practice map-reading, introducing children to decoding and understanding spatial diagrams and representations [ 15 , 66 , 83 ]. This could also be achieved with support from ICT [ 84 ].

Moreover, children have the opportunity to interact with a variety of workers or experts (art and history experts included) and observe how they each play a role in daily life [ 22 , 23 ]. For example, they may encounter the bus driver, the shop owner, a housewife shopping, a museum guard, or individuals working at a ticket desk.

One of the primary benefits of fieldwork is that it allows children to utilize inquiry skills and tools, such as observing and recording information about their surroundings [ 16 , 22 ]. In addition, it offers chances for children to engage in shared experiences and participate in group activities [ 66 ]. Visits can be accompanied by parents, providing ample opportunities for parental involvement [ 22 , 23 , 66 ]. And as previously mentioned, it has been argued that this approach stimulates fresh ideas and promotes learning by piquing children’s curiosity and presenting new inquiries that require solutions [ 22 , 66 ].

Seefeldt, Castle, and Falconer ([ 66 ], pp. 66–68) identified various types of fieldwork including “walking” trips around the school or neighborhood, “small-group trips,” “specific purpose field trips” that focus on a particular issue, “virtual field trips” to distant places, and “WOW” trips that offer an element of surprise without being tied to any particular project or topic. Our focus is on “repeated fieldwork” trips, which can enhance in-depth investigations. The excitement of the first visit may cause children to miss details and opportunities for exploration. Experience shows that returning to the same place allows for a re-examination of the subject, uncovering new issues for observation and recording. This may prompt new questions and perspectives, leading to further visits that build on the findings of the initial trip [ 22 , 23 , 66 , 85 ]. From a social-emotional perspective, returning to a familiar location can provide children with a sense of mastery and security to take risks in new learning opportunities. Continuity in field trips can also enhance learning, connecting the intentions of repeated trips or complementing different trips. For example, a visit to a monument could be followed by a trip to a museum or library to gather additional information about the topic. Lastly, an initial visit to a place of interest can serve as a starting point for children’s investigations, inspiring good questions and guiding their inquiry toward deeper levels of learning [ 23 ].

7.2.1 Preparing fieldwork

As previously stated, adequate preparation is crucial for a successful trip. Teachers should involve the children in the planning process, encouraging them to consider transportation options, map usage, and necessary equipment [ 16 , 23 ].

Explicitly discussing and laying out standards of behavior and safety rules is also important. Seefeldt, Castle, and Falconer [ 66 ] suggest reviewing these standards with both children and adults attending the trip. When everyone is clear on what is expected of them, the trip becomes safer. It can be helpful to chart certain rules for quick and easy reference. As part of an emergency plan, parents and children need to be aware of what steps to take in case of an accident, such as identifying an emergency meeting point, understanding who is responsible for calling emergency services, and knowing who is certified to administer first aid.

According to the literature on inquiry-based learning, it is recommended that children have a background experience and some questions prepared before going on a trip to aid in their investigations. However, this may not always be possible or necessary, especially if the children lack prior knowledge on the topic. Teachers may choose to wait until visiting the place to encourage the children to ask questions and support them in expressing their curiosity about the situation, object, or phenomenon. Sometimes, direct experience is needed to truly observe and appreciate something, which can lead to a desire to learn more [ 23 ].

When visiting a new place, there is an important issue to consider: When it comes to children and travel, simply visiting a site and listening to a tour guide is not enough for an enriching experience. Teachers should avoid acting solely as guides and instead focus on creating opportunities for inquiry-based learning. While adult involvement is still important, it should be thoughtfully planned out [ 22 , 23 ].

Observing, listening, or experimenting and then attempting to answer questions that were previously recorded in the classroom before heading out. Move around in an organized manner, and use their senses to smell, touch, hear, look, and feel everything around them. They can also discuss their thoughts and feelings with each other and with adults [ 22 , 23 ].

Completing assignments such as collecting leaves, stones, or bugs, recording details in journals, or checking off items on a list. Children can also take pictures themselves or use a audio recorder and camera to collect evidence that is going to be used in the classroom afterward to recall important information and discuss their findings [ 22 ].

Organizing a treasure hunt where children can search for clues and answer questions that guide them through historical sites or museums. This encourages children to collect information in a playful way and allows them to work in groups or individually with appropriate adult supervision. Still, it is best for children to work in groups with minimal adult guidance.

The aforementioned conditions allow for the creation of CLEs and FLEs that aid and encourage the exploration of local history through creative and critical thinking processes.

8. Focusing on local history: the importance of space and time concepts

As children interact with their daily and local surroundings, they naturally begin to take notice of places, monuments, objects, and ceremonies. This familiarity allows their surroundings to gain meaning and significance [ 16 ]. Through hands-on exploration and observation of historical objects, children can actively develop their historical thinking and learn the so-called “procedural concepts of history” which are “cause and effect” “continuity and change,” “similarity and difference” ([ 16 ], pp. 27, 43). They can also develop historical empathy, that is a greater understanding of how past individuals may have thought, felt, and acted differently due to knowledge, societal, economic, and political differences [ 16 ].

Children’s innate curiosity about history aids in developing their personal identity in relation to others and time. Studying local history increases children’s awareness of how society’s members are interconnected and helps them embrace differences by recognizing that a community can consist of individuals with diverse cultural backgrounds [ 16 , 22 ].

Exploring historical sites, monuments, and museums, or conducting research using primary and secondary resources can foster inquiry skills and be a focal point in history studies [ 18 ]. Such experiences help children appreciate the connection between the past and present, the importance of cultural heritage, and the necessity of preserving it. Additionally, they develop a love for the environment, which enhances their sense of responsibility and care.

Children, like adult historians, learn about the past by tracing the causes and effects of changes over time or continuity, understanding that there can be multiple accounts of the past and making deductions and guesses about remaining artifacts. Thus, working with time concepts is essential because if children become aware of the skills and concepts involved in learning about the past, they can become independent learners [ 16 , 83 ]. To become increasingly aware of historical changes, children need to build and apply knowledge of cause and effect, motivation, and consequence; to become able to draw parallels and dissimilarities (what shared features existed between the ‘before’ and the ‘now,’ and what new features emerged, and why); to gradually determine how much time has passed (hours, days, weeks, months, and years); and learn to organize the order of events (from personal experience, recent memory, and future projections) [ 83 ].

Studying space concepts is also vital for understanding history. Children can better comprehend time and change by identifying and describing features of places, observing and recording patterns and processes related to space and the environment, reading spatial representations, and recording places and routes themselves using all senses [ 83 ]. Therefore, it is highly beneficial to work systematically on understanding concepts and language related to direction, measurement, positions, perspective, spatial patterns, feature names, and spatial representation skills such as maps, maquettes, floor plans, and birds-eye views [ 83 , 86 , 87 ].

9. A four-dimensional tool with practical suggestions for developing creative and critical thinking in learning local history

I would like to share a helpful tool for teachers who want to develop local history lessons using inquiry-based and art-based learning methods. The tool is comprised of four lists of practical strategies, covering important aspects such as learning interactions, understanding historical times, art-based learning, and specific strategies for local history (see Tables 1 – 4 ). Each strategy is backed by reasoning to justify its effectiveness. In general, this tool ensures that the conditions discussed earlier are met, and it allows teachers to establish a setting that promotes creative, critical, and analytical thinking while exploring local history.

Practical strategies teachers may consider and apply	The reasoning behind the strategies
Instead of relying heavily on whole-group instruction or carpet time, teachers focus on group work. Group work involves 2–4 children at their desks or moving around the classroom.	This approach can help promote collaboration and active participation among students. It can nurture children’s ability to engage in meaningful conversations, take the lead in various situations, and work collaboratively with others to overcome challenges.
It is best to use open-ended questions. For example, instead of asking, “Did you understand” it’s preferable to ask, “What did you understand”?	This promotes children’s verbal contributions and allows them to share their ideas, insights, and interpretations, including those related to history, using their own vocabulary.
It is important that teachers refrain from offering explanations to children. Instead, they could focus on understanding their thoughts, perceptions, and interpretations of their findings.	For adults, the goal is to avoid imposing their own interpretation on children. Instead, we encourage them to develop their own understanding of events, people, and objects.
Instead of simply answering children’s questions, teachers suggest that they become co-researchers with the children to better understand and explore the topic together.	Teachers can be positive role models by promoting inquiry-based learning and openly expressing research-related emotions like curiosity, determination, and persistence, even in the face of failure. By demonstrating processes such as conducting library searches, seeking information from specialists, and closely examining relevant artifacts, teachers can help students learn important skills. It’s also important to teach students that it is acceptable not to know everything and that knowledge gaps can provide valuable opportunities for learning.
To avoid the effect of continuous questioning the children, teachers should consider increasing group discussions. This can be achieved when a central question is provided, and students are encouraged to discuss it among themselves (in small groups) before presenting their answers and share their conclusions with the rest of the class. This offers the class the opportunity to expand upon the conversation.	It’s important to foster questioning and answering skills among students. To achieve this, teachers should relinquish some control during discussions and allow students greater freedom and initiative. By implementing this method, teachers can facilitate a more engaging and interactive learning experience for their students.
Teachers could prompt young students to articulate their reasoning, requesting that they clarify the basis for their assertions and the evidence that supports their conclusions. This may involve explaining the reasoning behind their perspectives or outlining the thought process that led them to a particular viewpoint.	As part of their history education, children must learn to formulate and express explanations and interpretations, particularly in a historical context. They need to learn to utilize their research to back up their arguments and viewpoints. Additionally, they are trained to identify and articulate cause-and-effect relationships that are observable in events or phenomena.
Teachers aim to provide their students with diverse resources on a given topic, rather than relying on a singular resource such as a book, picture, or computer. In situations where a unique resource is available, rotating groups can take turns utilizing it. It is important to avoid limiting children’s interaction with a unique resource through teacher-directed teaching and provide opportunities for students to explore resources in a more open manner.	Children should have ample time to interact with various objects such as books, computers, and other resources to enhance their personal perceptions and gather information from the environment using their senses. This helps them develop their independence and self-confidence in handling situations like turn-taking and waiting patiently. The aim is to reduce teacher control and provide more freedom to children in using available resources.
Teachers motivate children to document their discoveries as much as possible. Whenever something piques their interest, they urge them to find a method to “preserve” what they observed. If they need to recall research findings, a captivating story, or something that left a deep impression on them, they must figure out a way to document the specific details they wish to remember. This can be achieved through manual means, such as writing or drawing, or via electronic devices like an audio recorder, a camera and more.	Children will learn that taking notes and making recordings is essential to the research process. By doing so, they can store information for future reference and easily compare it with other pieces of data. It is also important to understand that recordings showcase not only their knowledge but also their personal perspectives.
Children are encouraged to learn how to make recordings using different methods such as drawing, note-taking, sound recording, and video recording. It is important for children to review their recordings and compare them later to enhance their learning experience. Additionally, older children can create engaging multimedia presentations such as PowerPoints, animated films, or movies that combine visual, sound, and kinetic elements.	The aim is to encourage children to explore and utilize various semiotic modes and modes of communication and technology to express their knowledge, ideas, thoughts, findings, analyses, conclusions, and messages.

Dimension 1—Practical strategies for learning interactions.

Practical strategies for fundamental work on concepts of time	The reasoning behind the strategies
As an educational tool, teachers can introduce lessons centered around time concepts like yesterday, today, tomorrow, before, after, and now. For older students, exploring concepts like prior to, simultaneously, in the past, period, century, millennium, and between events can deepen their understanding of time and history.	The goal is to enhance children’s grasp of time and improve accuracy in using the relevant vocabulary.
Children are encouraged to organize their thoughts and memories by creating timelines. Younger children can start this process by keeping daily diaries and constructing a routine timeline each day. Gradually, they can create monthly and yearly timelines to record important events and moments of the school year. At a later stage, children can also make timelines for significant events they learn about in their history lessons. It’s essential to incorporate digital resources such as word processors, online tools, and visual graphics programs, in addition to traditional paper and pencil methods.	It’s important for children to comprehend the reasoning behind using a number line or following a storyline. They should also be taught how to interpret and decipher the information presented on a timeline.
Children can create a timeline that outlines important events and pivotal moments in their personal narratives.	By examining the events that have occurred throughout their lives, children can better understand the developmental process. Creating personal timelines can help students find significance in this process and increase their motivation. Additionally, children can learn that certain things or circumstances may change over time, while others remain consistent.
Teachers prompt students to share their news with a small group of 2–4 peers, followed by the option to share with the entire class.	One can enhance children’s storytelling abilities and practice the utilization of past tenses to describe events that commenced and concluded in the past, or those that began in the past and are still ongoing in the present.
The teachers intend to teach their students about time sequence, change, continuity, cause, and consequence by encouraging them to create short stories in small groups. This exercise is also suitable for older students who can analyze the structure of a narrative, a report of connected events, or a longer story, whether it is fiction or non-fiction. Following this, they can examine other events, whether they are contemporary or historical, and apply the same analytical approach.	The aim is to comprehend the concepts that are crucial for understanding and learning about historical events or sequences of events, such as the progression of an experiment.
Teachers aim to improve children’s observational skills through systematic observations that involve recognizing changes in life, nature, school history, and society. Children are encouraged to record their observations and changes using various tools, materials, and methods.	One way to enhance children’s observational skills is by encouraging them to pay attention to changes and specific events.
In a classroom setting, teachers can present various versions and adaptations of a story, such as the classic tale of the big bad wolf. They encourage students to analyze and compare these versions to develop diverse interpretations.	It is important for children to learn that events can be viewed and interpreted from various perspectives.

Teachers devise activities that aid children in comprehending and utilizing spatial concepts, such as forward, backward, in front of, behind, left, right, next to, near, far, and so on.	It is important for children to gain a confident and accurate understanding of concepts such as space, direction, and movement.
Teachers create engaging activities to help children comprehend the concepts of size, scale, and perspective.	It is important for children to develop skills in reading, drawing, and using maps.
Teachers organize activities that focus on spatial representation, such as constructing maquettes, and creating maps of the classroom and the neighborhood, among others.	It is important for children to develop their skills in spatial representation.

Dimension 2—Concept work to understand historical times.

Practical strategies teachers may consider and apply	The reasoning behind the strategies
After completing a phase of inquiry, we encourage the children to showcase their knowledge and understanding through artistic expression. They can work individually or in groups and are encouraged to use various materials, including recycled items like plastic water bottles, newspapers, and cartons, as well as wire and plaster.	The main objective is to teach children how to communicate effectively using various forms of expression and semiotics. It is essential to provide children with a wide selection of materials in order to unleash their expression ways.
Children are encouraged to develop a message related to the “big idea” and use art to convey it in a way that reflects what they have learned and how it connects to real life.	Multiple semiotic modes enable the conveying of ideas that may be difficult to articulate through words, as well as linking acquired knowledge with personal experiences, thoughts, and perspectives.
To inspire the children, we showcase representative artworks that demonstrate different techniques for handling materials, combining materials and elements, discussing the artwork’s size, scale, and perspective, and the message conveyed through the artwork.	It is anticipated that increasing the children’s exposure to a variety of mediums, processes, and styles of artwork will boost their expressive capacity.
Exploring works of art in their natural surroundings is recommended for optimal results. Whether it’s the original or a copy, the experience can be enriching. Alternatively, virtual tours offer exciting opportunities to visit places with works of art. If there are copies of artifacts in the classroom, it’s best to have multiple copies or organize group rotations to ensure every child has a chance to appreciate them up close. Ultimately, combining these methods can create a comprehensive learning experience.	It’s imperative for children to spend ample time observing works of art and artifacts from various distances and angles to fully grasp their significance.
The analysis of a piece of artwork includes three levels:

The artwork on display features various elements such as people, animals, and plants which children are encouraged to describe. Its purpose is to enhance children’s observational skills and ability to derive information from artifacts by studying these elements. This includes the behavior and attitude of the subjects depicted, as well as their clothing and facial features. Indicative questions that can be asked about the artwork include its medium (such as sculpture, painting, engraving, or woven/ceramic), and what it represents.	One way to enhance children’s skills in observation and information gathering is by encouraging them to study artifacts and derive insights from them.
: Could you please specify the type of artwork you are referring to? Is it a sculpture, painting, engraving, woven piece, or ceramic? Also, what is the intended meaning or representation of the artwork? Could you kindly give me a detailed description of the artwork, including any movements or multimedia used?

Considerations include the mental state and emotions of those involved, the impact of the artwork on children, and the relationships between the elements within the piece. Additionally, one can generate questions or hypotheses to explore the immediate past and develop historical interpretations.	One can use the process of formulating questions or hypotheses to find answers about events that have occurred in the recent past. Additionally, it is important to be able to develop and express historical interpretations.
: What emotions does this artwork evoke in you? Can you describe your feelings about it? What words come to mind? What do you think causes these emotions? Do you think you can guess what the artist was feeling when creating this piece? Would you say this artwork is quiet or noisy, happy, or sad, calming or disturbing? Can you create a story based on it? Can you provide different interpretations of the elements in the artwork?

Children focus on the colors, the materials, the techniques, and other forms of expression used.	Encourage children to explore and engage with various semiotic modes and forms of communication.
: Can you speculate about the techniques employed by the artist in creating this artwork/artifact? Additionally, what materials and tools were utilized? Are there any notable colors or any one color that stands out in particular? Does the artist incorporate any shapes or symbols, and if so, what types?

Dimension 3—Art-based learning.

Practical strategies teachers may consider and apply	The reasoning behind the strategies
Children acquire the skills to analyze and gather information from relevant local sources, irrespective of their significance. Furthermore, children are provided with access to a diverse selection of historical sources. Teachers aim to help children identify the connection between events and aspects of national or general history and their reflections on local history.	It’s important for children to recognize that we can gain knowledge about the national or general history through various local sources such as oral stories, pictures, artifacts, literature, artwork, museums, stamps, games, and digital media. They should also realize that the significance of these sources may have differed in other historical periods.

Children carefully observe and then document their discoveries about the artifact or furnishing (hereafter object) through various methods.	Teachers can enhance children’s understanding by utilizing various semiotic techniques and technologies to acquire knowledge, generate ideas, communicate messages, conduct research, draw conclusions, and more.
Children develop hypotheses about the construction, time period, and purpose of the object. To ensure accuracy, they scour various information sources to cross-check their findings.	The objective is to formulate questions and hypotheses about events, behaviors, and usage and attempt to answer them. Children are encouraged to discover connections among events, individuals, and objects. This will aid in cultivating a chronological understanding, particularly for younger children.
: Can you help me identify this object? What are your thoughts on what it could be? How would you describe its appearance and functionality? Do we have any information on its age and origin, and if not, where could we research it? Additionally, what other relevant details should we gather? Who used or wore it, in what context, and from what materials was it made? Is it still in existence, and if not, what could be the reason behind its disappearance? If it still exists, has it undergone any changes over time, and for what reasons?	It is important for children to recognize that people, especially children, lived differently and engaged in different activities in the past. They should also understand that while some things and situations change over time, others remain the same. Additionally, children should be encouraged to consider and understand the cause-and-effect relationship between events and their consequences.

: Can you identify the building materials used for the walls, such as bricks, stones, wood, or cement? Please describe the various shapes present in the structure and indicate their number. Are there any doors and windows? What is the roof like? Does it have any specific shape, such as hollow or flat, quadruple, or with pediments? Could you provide an interpretation of the patterns and symbols?	The goal for children is to understand that people, especially children, lived differently and had different lifestyles in the past. They should also comprehend that some things or situations change over time, while others remain the same. Additionally, children should be encouraged to think critically, develop and articulate historical interpretations.
: Why did they build it like this? What was it used for? Can you guess who lived in it and why?	Children must formulate hypotheses about the immediate past and try to answer them. They attempt to develop and articulate historical interpretations.
: Can you determine if it’s an old or new item? What characteristics suggest that it is “old”? When you describe something as “old,” what do you mean? Any idea about the time period it was constructed and the builder’s identity?	One way to enhance children’s skills and ability to observe and gather information from artifacts is by providing opportunities for practice and refinement. Thinking critically over cause-and-effect relationships or conclusions is also important.
: Does it resemble the buildings, fountains, or doors of today? What do you think?	One of the goals is to teach children about the differences in how people, especially children, lived and acted in the past. Additionally, it is important to help them comprehend that while some things and circumstances change over time, others may remain constant.

When organizing museum visits and programs, it is important to handle each stage with care, including preparation, fieldwork, reflection, feedback, presentation of results, and final product.	Museum visits pertain to fieldwork. The circumstances necessary for successful fieldwork are those that have been addressed previously.
To ensure a successful visit, it is recommended to focus on a specific area or artifact rather than attempting a comprehensive tour of the entire museum.	The sheer volume of information and artifacts housed in museums can make for daunting environments. Children can better sustain their attention and depict info pertinent to their inquiry when the subject of the visit is narrowed down.
It may be beneficial to visit the museum multiple times to fully explore and understand its offerings.	Children’s inquiries can benefit from revisits because they allow for reprocessing as well as the addition of details and depth.

Has anything changed since then? (What we spent our time learning about).	Question that helps children comprehend the concept of .
How does it function in the modern world? Do we still make use of it, or is it more of an artifact from the past that we consult for information? In what ways does it still impact us today?	These questions help children grasp the concept of , which is a crucial concept for understanding history.
What does this have to do with the era that we are currently studying?	A question that assists children in comprehending and drawing with the historical period or periods that are the subject of the discussion.

Dimension 4—Approaching local history.

When approaching local history several sources can be utilized: artifacts and furnishings; monuments; buildings, entrances, and fountains; artworks; museums; places of worship such as monasteries, churches, mosques, and temples; photographs, books, albums, and sound recordings; letters and stamps. Different sources call for unique approaches and provide distinct opportunities. In Table 4 , we focus on strategies for work with artifacts and furnishings, monuments, buildings, and other large constructions, and museums.

10. Conclusions

Learning about local history can help children develop a historical perspective and better understand the connections between different groups, cultures, and civilizations. This can also help children become more self-aware and learn about the challenges of their time. Inquiry-based and art-based learning methods can create a learning environment where children act as investigators, gathering and analyzing information from primary and secondary sources, and expressing their conclusions creatively. I hope that the learning principles, practical strategies, and conditions outlined above, will give teachers the confidence to develop their own creative approaches to teaching local history in pre-primary and primary students.

Acknowledgments

Classroom implementations were conducted to test the effectiveness of the practical tool mentioned earlier in the “Early Childhood Education – building sustainable motivation and value paradigm for life (MOV UP)” project, funded by Erasmus+ (580339-EPP-1-2016-1-BG-EPPKA3-IPI-SOC-IN).

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Arts Academy

in the Woods

How Art Education Fosters Critical Thinking and Why It Matters

These days, the ability to grasp the logical connection between ideas is a necessary skill.

Unless you’re a hermit living in a cave, there is so much information coming at all of us at any given moment.

Being able to discern which information is of worth – and which is not based in reality – requires critical thinking.

So What Exactly Is Critical Thinking?

Critical thinking is often synonymous with reflective and independent thinking. It means knowing how to take in the data and then come to a reasonable conclusion.

Those who engage in critical thinking are constantly questioning ideas and assumptions rather than just accepting what’s being peddled to the masses.

Critical thinkers want to know that the incoming information is representative of the bigger picture. If they determine that it’s not, they’ll take the necessary measures to get that additional information.

Critical Thinking Versus Being Critical

Critical thinking is not the same thing as being argumentative or critical/judgmental of other people. Sure, critical thinking can expose errors or poor reasoning.

But it’s also crucial for cooperative reasoning and then moving toward constructive tasks. Because acquiring more knowledge improves and strengthens one’s theories and arguments. And this subsequently leads to enhanced work processes.

How Art Improves Critical Thinking

Because critical thinking tends to incorporate logical and rational thinking and veers from instinct, many people see it as a hinderance to creativity.

After all, creativity requires breaking the rules, right? (Well, yes and no .)

Still, critical thinking truly requires out-of-the-box thinking. Rather than just taking popular approaches and swallowing them whole, critical thinkers challenge the consensus. This means they often have to pursue less popular thoughts or approaches.

So if you think about, critical thinking is an absolutely necessary component of creativity. Without it, how can the creative person continue to evaluate and improve upon his or her ideas?

It’s this very process of observation and study that teaches students of the arts to more intensely observe and analyze the world. And it gives them the skills that build the foundation of critical thinking.

But Why Does It Matter?

You might think that if your path leads you to work in research, law, education, management, finance or medicine, then you’ll absolutely need this skill. And you’re right.

But no matter what you choose to do with your life, the ability to think clearly and rationally is important.

Knowing how to receive information, clearly consider it and then use it to systematically solve problems is an asset for any career. Especially in light of this new knowledge economy. To be successful in such an economy requires one to able to handle changes quickly and effectively.

There is an increased demand for workers to be able to analyze a lot of information from diverse sources, then integrate it in order to find solutions. Critical thinking promotes these skills.

It also enhances language and presentation skills. The simple act of learning to think in a more systematic and logical fashion can also improve the way one expresses ideas.

Furthermore, in having to analyze the structure of different information sources, critical thinking also improves one’s ability to comprehend.

And as we mentioned above, critical thinking actually promotes creativity. Coming up with creative solutions is more than just having new ideas. There has to be an understanding that the new ideas are useful and relevant to the required task. Critical thinking plays an important role in this.

That’s right. Critical thinking is even important for this. It’s nearly impossible to structure a meaningful life without the ability to justify and reflect on our own values and decisions. And critical thinking provides the tools for this process.

So yeah, it’s safe to say that critical thinking definitely matters.

Learning Critical Thinking with an Arts Integration Education

Arts integration education merges the important skill of critical thinking achieved through art education and blends it in with academics.

There’s no disputing the importance of STEM. The above mentioned knowledge economy requires students to understand facets of science, technology, engineering and math.

With arts integration though, there’s the added importance of art – hence the term STEAM. Arts integration isn’t looking to bypass STEM. It strives instead to create an integrated program that includes all of those, while teaching the application of skills learned through the arts – such as critical thinking.

Arts integration helps students see the world from multiple angles, and to take a design-thinking approach in finding solutions.

Teaching young people to be careful and deliberate observers can go miles toward expanding their worldview. And this, in turn, can create a stronger democracy.

Do You Want to Explore An Arts Integration Education?

So take a look at what our students have to say . And/or request a tour of our school and see what we have to offer.

Then get ready to put those critical thinking skills toward a higher purpose.

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COMMENTS

Critical Thinking > History (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
History. This supplement elaborates on the history of the articulation, promotion and adoption of critical thinking as an educational goal. John Dewey (1910: 74, 82) introduced the term 'critical thinking' as the name of an educational goal, which he identified with a scientific attitude of mind. More commonly, he called the goal ...
Using History to Teach Critical Thinking Skills
Dictionary.com defines critical thinking as clear, rational, open-minded, and informed by evidence. In a good history class, one that moves beyond the textbook, thinking critically is part of the package. Students of history look at an event from many different perspectives. The use of both primary (first-hand accounts) and secondary ...
A Brief History of the Idea of Critical Thinking
A Brief History of the Idea of Critical Thinking
Critical thinking
Critical thinking | Definition, History, Criticism, & Skills
Putting critical thinking at the center of history lessons in primary
Putting critical thinking at the center of history lessons in ...
PDF History Critical Thinking
II. The Elements of Critical Thinking 6 10 common errors of logic in argumentative writing 14 III. Nurturing Critical Thinking in the Classroom 23 30 classroom techniques that encourage critical thinking IV. Primary Sources on Wisconsin History Available Free Online 29
[C10] History of critical thinking
As for the English term "critical thinking", a popular view is that it was coined by the American educator and philosopher John Dewey, who wrote about critical thinking and reflective thinking in his 1910 book How We Think. However, the actual history of critical thinking is somewhat more complicated. First, many of the so-called Presocratic ...
Historical Thinking, Epistemic Cognition, and History ...
Introduction. Historical Thinking has become an important touchstone in History education research and practice. Anna Clark describes historical thinking as "the skills of scholarly historical practice and disciplinary method." 1 In the classroom, this often takes the form of building students' understanding of historical methodology by ...
Revisiting the origin of critical thinking
Abstract. There are two popular views regarding the origin of critical thinking: (1) The concept of critical thinking began with Socrates and his Socratic method of questioning. (2) The term 'critical thinking' was first introduced by John Dewey in 1910 in his book How We Think. This paper argues that both claims are incorrect.
Critical Thinking
Critical Thinking - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
History of Critical Thinking and Some Models of Critical Thinking
Three classic critical thinking models are introduced: Socratic questioning method, Cartesian doubting method, and Baconian empirical method. We discuss their potential for critical thinking as foundational methods. The material in this chapter is distributed in three parts. In Part I, we provide a brief history of critical thinking.
Full article: History is critical: Addressing the false dichotomy
Blevins and Salinas (Citation 2012) applied the term "critical" in their findings to differentiate those teachers who, despite enacting engaging curricula intended to promote critical historical thinking, sidestep that criticality. What makes this theoretical contribution unique is that it asks teachers to consider their own historical ...
Historical content matters: a response to the critical thinking skills
Executive Summary. Historical knowledge is a significant form of 'common sense' knowledge that shapes decision-making. Academic histories play a key role in shaping this 'common sense' knowledge. As a result, academic historical scholarship plays a significant and undervalued role in producing social, economic and political outcomes in ...
Critical Thinking > History (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy/Summer
History. This supplement elaborates on the history of the articulation, promotion and adoption of critical thinking as an educational goal. John Dewey (1910: 74, 82) introduced the term 'critical thinking' as the name of an educational goal, which he identified with a scientific attitude of mind. More commonly, he called the goal ...
Historical Thinking
Over the past three decades, expanding scholarship on history teaching, learning, and cognition has promoted the development of historical thinking in response to the broader academic rejection of history education as a mere function of knowledge transmission and memorization. However, any attempt at defining historical thinking presents an immediate difficulty.
Critical thinking and the humanities: A case study of
Moore's (2011) ethnographic study of conceptualizations of critical thinking by scholars in the fields of philosophy, history, and literary studies suggests that scholars tend to associate critical thinking with practices that happen to be typical of their own discipline. Philosophers seem to believe that critical thinking is about the ...
Why History Matters: Understanding Our Past to Shape Our Future
Educational systems globally include history to various extents, recognizing its role in cultivating critical thinking and an understanding of how societies have evolved. The reasons to include history in curriculums hinge on its ability to provide context for current events and to enhance civic literacy.
Critical Thinking in United States History
Social Studies. Critical Thinking in United States History uses fascinating original source documents and discussion-based critical thinking methods to help students evaluate conflicting perspectives of historical events. This process stimulates students' interest in history, improves their historical knowledge, and develops their analytical ...
Let's Think about "Thinking" Before We Teach "Critical Thinking"
In particular, Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow identifies ways that humans think and the shortcuts we use in thinking (heuristics), which sometimes get us into trouble. Having a better sense ...
Utilizing Creative and Critical Thinking to Build Knowledge and
Studying local history can be approached in a modern way that encourages young students to utilize the methods and skills of a historian. This includes collecting, recording, comparing, and interpreting data from primary and secondary resources. Inquiry-based and art-based learning are effective frameworks for exploring local history. Students can gain a deeper understanding of the subject by ...
What Are Critical Thinking Skills and Why Are They Important?
What Are Critical Thinking Skills and Why Are They ...
Critical-Thinking Skills in the Museum
Critical-thinking skills, then, are the tools that help. evaluate a situation, idea, or object. They are the skills. simple observation, or acceptance of someone else's. realm of analysis. In simpler terms, critical thinking. yourself." The articles in this issue each define critical thinking in a slightly dif-.
How Art Education Fosters Critical Thinking and Why It Matters
Critical Thinking Versus Being Critical. Critical thinking is not the same thing as being argumentative or critical/judgmental of other people. Sure, critical thinking can expose errors or poor reasoning. But it's also crucial for cooperative reasoning and then moving toward constructive tasks. Because acquiring more knowledge improves and ...

Using History to Teach Critical Thinking Skills

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Historical content matters: a response to the critical thinking skills agenda

Executive Summary

Introduction

Histories and the everyday

Research and teaching history

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Why History Matters: Understanding Our Past to Shape Our Future

Key Takeaways

Understanding the Value of History

Analyzing Past, Present, and Future

The Importance of Historical Context

History as a Discipline

The Role of History in Society

Developing Informed Citizens

Preserving Collective Memory

Understanding Cultural and Religious Diversity

Learning from Historical Events

Lessons from Wars and Conflicts

The Impact of Significant Historical Milestones

Connecting Personal and Collective Histories

Embracing a Broader Human Experience

The Dangers of Historical Amnesia

Educational Perspectives on History

History’s Place in Academic Curriculums

Methodologies and Approaches in Historical Studies

The Interplay between History and Other Academic Disciplines

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Utilizing Creative and Critical Thinking to Build Knowledge and Comprehension through Inquiry-Based and Art-Based Learning: A Practical Tool for Teaching Local History in Pre-Primary and Primary Education

Pedagogy, Learning, and Creativity

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1. Introduction

2. The creative perspectives of learning local history

3. Inquiry-based learning

4. Art-based learning

5. The benefits of inquiry-based and art-based learning for creative and critical thinking

6. Conditions that embed and enhance creativity and critical thinking in inquiry-based and art-based learning

6.2 Conditions that empower children’s learning processes

7. Creating conducive learning environments for creative and critical thinking in inquiry-based and art-based learning

7.1 Classroom Learning Environments (CLEs)

7.2 Field Learning Environments (FLEs)

7.2.1 Preparing fieldwork

8. Focusing on local history: the importance of space and time concepts

9. A four-dimensional tool with practical suggestions for developing creative and critical thinking in learning local history

10. Conclusions

Acknowledgments

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How Art Education Fosters Critical Thinking and Why It Matters