scholarly journals Story education: Assessing history education in light of narrative therapy

2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. Lucas-Frederik-Garske
Author(s):  
Lucas-Frederik Garske
Keyword(s):  
Narrative Therapy ◽  
History Education ◽  
Historical Thinking ◽  
Declarative Knowledge ◽  
Social Psychological ◽  
Psychological Functions ◽  
Selection Of

This paper discusses the obstructive dimension of specific declarative knowledge on historical thinking. Through considering the anthropological and social-psychological functions of stories, the author identifies potential difficulties individuals may face when trying to decipher, understand, and evaluate particular stories, as intended by historical thinking. By comparing the incapacity to cope with complex historic narratives with the effects of trauma, the paper discusses how approaches in narrative psychotherapy may add interesting insights to the domain of history education. The paper concludes that selection of declarative knowledge needs to be critically reviewed from a pathological perspective if historical thinking is set to be one of the main functions of history education.

scholarly journals Of dragons and dinosaurs: How children’s toys and games create ideas of the past, of history and of fiction

2021 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Christoph Kühberger
Keyword(s):  
Historical Fiction ◽  
History Education ◽  
Historical Thinking ◽  
Evidence Base ◽  
Ethnographic Research ◽  
The Past ◽  
Historical Culture ◽  
Fictional Representations

This article outlines a trend in popular historical culture which has seen the increasing replacement of a concept of history that rests on some form of evidence base by visions of fictional pasts, or – to put it more precisely – by an ambiguous blend of the past and fictional pasts. Drawing on ethnographic research focused on the contents of Austrian children’s rooms, this paper explores traceable manifestations of history and historical fiction, particularly toy dragons and dinosaurs, in their properties as objects and as focuses of their owners’ interpretations as ascertained in interviews. The research finds little clear demarcation in the minds of the children interviewed (all between 8 and 12 years old) between imaginings and cognitive attempts to reconstruct the past. The article examines the influence of these factual–fictional representations on historical thinking from a history education perspective.

Political Ideologies and their Social Psychological Functions

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
John T. Jost ◽  
Christopher M. Federico ◽  
Jamie L. Napier
Keyword(s):  
Resistance To Change ◽  
Two Dimensions ◽  
Social Psychological ◽  
Political Ideologies ◽  
Socially Constructed ◽  
The Status ◽  
Traditional Institutions ◽  
Psychological Functions ◽  
State Of Affairs ◽  
The Right

Ideology has re-emerged as a vital topic of investigation in social psychology. This chapter proposes that political ideologies possess both a discursive (socially constructed) superstructure and a functional (or motivational) substructure and that ideologies serve social psychological functions that may not be entirely rational but help to explain why individuals are drawn to them. System justification, it argues, is the ‘glue’ that holds the two dimensions of left–right ideology (advocacy vs. resistance to change and rejection vs. acceptance of inequality) together. To vindicate and uphold traditional institutions and arrangements, the right defends existing inequalities as just and necessary. To bring about a more equal state of affairs, the left is motivated to challenge existing institutions and practices (the status quo).

scholarly journals Developmental Implications of Children’s Early Religious and Spiritual Experiences in Context: A Sociocultural Perspective

Religions ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (11) ◽  
pp. 631 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mona M. Abo-Zena ◽  
Allegra Midgette
Keyword(s):  
Future Research ◽  
Religion And Spirituality ◽  
Spiritual Experiences ◽  
Sociocultural Perspective ◽  
Religious Development ◽  
Social Psychological ◽  
Conceptual Paper ◽  
Role Of Religion ◽  
Selection Of

Religious and spiritual experiences have implications for many aspects of development across the lifespan, including during early childhood. A focus on religion and spirituality expands beyond a discrete domain of social science (e.g., cognitive development) and involves developmental, social-psychological, affective and emotional phenomena, and personality. This conceptual paper contributes to the literature regarding the understudied role of religion and spirituality in the lives of young children and their families in order to contribute to a comprehensive study of human development. After a concise review of the literature on religious development, this paper draws from the sociocultural perspective and illustrative examples of lived experiences to frame young children’s religious participation and gives particular consideration to religious minorities. While the sociocultural perspective captures the range of children’s experiences, this manuscript introduces the understudied role of emotion as a motivator for children’s selection of experiences. The paper concludes with implications for practitioners and suggestions for future research, practice, and policy.

scholarly journals Task complexity in history textbooks: A multidisciplinary case study on triangulation in history education research

2019 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Christoph Kühberger ◽  
Christoph Bramann ◽  
Zarah Weiß ◽  
Detmar Meurers
Keyword(s):  
Education Research ◽  
Task Complexity ◽  
History Education ◽  
Historical Thinking ◽  
History Textbooks ◽  
Master Narrative ◽  
Learning Tasks ◽  
Key Factor ◽  
General Linguistic

The purpose of history education in Austria has changed over at least the last decade. While the focus used to be to give students a master narrative of the national past based on positivist knowledge, the current objective of history education is to foster historical thinking processes that enable students to form transferable skills in the self-reflected handling and creation of history. A key factor in fostering historical thinking is the appropriation of learning tasks. This case study measures the complexity of learning tasks in Austrian history textbooks as one important aspect of their quality. It makes use of three different approaches to complexity to triangulate the notion: general task complexity (GTC), general linguistic complexity (GLC), and domain-specific task complexity (DTC). The question is which findings can be offered by the specific strengths and limitations of the different methodological approaches to give new insights into the study of task complexity in the domain of history education research. By pursuing multidisciplinary approaches in a triangulating way, the case study opens up new prospects for this field. Besides offering new insights on measuring the complexity of learning tasks, the study illustrates the need for further research in this field – not only related to the development of analytical frameworks, but also regarding the notion of complexity in the context of historical learning itself.

scholarly journals Urban Legend Propagation

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ian Dennis Miller
Keyword(s):  
Social Networks ◽  
Computational Simulation ◽  
Computational Modelling ◽  
Empirical Models ◽  
Social Psychological ◽  
Psychological Phenomena ◽  
Psychological Science ◽  
Urban Legends ◽  
Urban Legend ◽  
Selection Of

This chapter is an investigation of Urban Legend propagation and the computational modelling of psychological phenomena. An urban legend is an apocryphal tale that the storyteller claims is true even though it might not be. Urban legends are a type of meme that can be passed from person to person by word of mouth.The work begins with a finding from the literature: Urban legends propagate farther when they are disgusting (Eriksson & Coultas, 2014). This is an example of a phenomenon known as emotional selection (e.g., Heath et al., 2001), in whichthe emotion evoked by a message can influence how the message is treated. The current work is a conceptual replication of urban legend transmission based on aseries of studies conducted in Eriksson & Coultas (2014), which we conducted as a computational simulation. We extended their empirical models to generalize beyond the laboratory in an effort to achieve better ecological validity.This work offers two primary contributions. The first contribution pertains directly to the emotional selection of urban legends, which will be explored in a social network context. The second and more fundamental contribution pertains to the science of computational modelling for social psychological phenomena. While the investigation of urban legends is of interest in the context of memesand social networks, the computational modelling developments are intended to apply generally throughout psychological science.

scholarly journals The sidewalk is a history book: Reflections on linking historical consciousness to uses of history

2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-15
Author(s):  
Kenneth Nordgren ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Formal Education ◽  
History Education ◽  
Public Life ◽  
Historical Thinking ◽  
Historical Consciousness ◽  
International Community ◽  
Song Lyrics ◽  
Historical Representations ◽  
History Book ◽  
Broad Understanding

The ongoing discussion about what constitutes historical consciousness is intensifying within the growing international community of history-education researchers. What started as an exploration of how life outside schools affects our historical thinking has become a key concept for structuring formal education. This shift has largely been positive; however, there are reasons for caution. If practical adaption means outlining, classifying, and measuring levels of achieved awareness, it also presents a risk of losing the initial reason for considering the wider influence on our perceptions and orientations. My reflection in this article concerns this paradox and how it can affect a complementary concept, use of history. Using examples from everyday historical representations in public life, namely song lyrics, the BLM, and Sweden’s approach to Covid 19, I demonstrate why history education requires a broad understanding of historical consciousness and a readiness to work with public uses of history.

scholarly journals How younger students perceive and identify historical significance

2020 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Karin Bergman
Keyword(s):  
Small Groups ◽  
History Education ◽  
Historical Thinking ◽  
Middle Part ◽  
Structured Interviews ◽  
Historical Significance ◽  
The Past ◽  
Grade 5 ◽  
The Way

Historical significance is a historical thinking concept. Being able to identify historical significance is viewed as important for understanding change and continuity in the past, and for understanding the way ‘history’ is constructed by present society. This article discusses how Swedish students in Grade 5 (age 11 years) perceive and understand historical significance without having received prior instruction on how to identify historical significance. The results show that the students see thrilling and exciting events in the past as significant, as well as the events, inventions, ideas and values that have influenced the present or changed the course of history in some way. In this paper, I compare students’ answers to definitions of historical significance formulated by Christine Counsell (2004) and Matthew Bradshaw (2006) . For the study, 67 students were interviewed in semi-structured interviews in small groups. They attended six different schools in the middle part of Sweden and came from varying backgrounds. Regardless of their backgrounds or origins, the students see the history culture of the majority, as presented in their history education, as their own.

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