Edward Tan Yu Fan (Ministry of Education (Singapore)

Keywords
History
Approaches to teaching history

The comparison of sources forms a cornerstone of the historical discipline; however, there remains room for exploration in terms of what are the various moves that goes into the operations of comparing between sources. This article examines the role of comparisons, and corroborations, in academic History, and gleams from it meaningful considerations and processes that can potentially inform classroom practices.

Download Full Article

Related Teaching Materials

Attachment	Size
Appendix 1	143 KB
Appendix 2	221 KB
Appendix 3	234 KB

Edward Tan Yu Fan (National Institute of Education (Singapore)

Keywords
History
Approaches to teaching history

While the objective of classroom history is not to create little historians, it – at the very least – aspires to convey and inculcate a host of transferrable skills to students. The value of these skills should not be understated. The historical discipline was a product of a series of intellectual developments during the 18th and 19th century, and it was closely intertwined with that of state-formation and nationalism. This cozy relationship led to the birth of academic history in the German universities as a means of training civil servants by heightening one’s sensibilities towards competing narratives, a multitude of sources, and the need to piece them together into a single coherent narrative with causal links (Shotwell, 1939). The value of source-based skills does not lie in the training of historians, but rather the honing of critical thinkers who can make sense of an increasingly complex world around them.

While there is no single prescribed “historian’s process”, a commonality that runs across all historical work is the act of drawing inferences through the examination of sources. It is a foundational part of the discipline, yet it is also a skill that is often neglected when it comes to teaching it in the classroom; writing frameworks are always brought up but inferences are rarely taught. This is likely a product of the apparent irreducible complexity of the skill, leading many to pass it off as a thought process that cannot be scaffolded and dissected to any meaningful degree.^[i] As a result, the ability to make inferences was relegated to the innate ability of the student, with minimal actual guidance on the thought processes behind making inferences – and a lot of emphasis on how a paragraph presenting that inference should look like. This notion of irreducible complexity permeates the way we teach in the classroom, and the way we assess for this skill. Aside from the problems with the way the process of drawing inferences is being laid out in the classroom, there are also wider problems with the way the skill is currently situated within the historical inquiry process, which in turn influence how “inference questions” are asked.

Edward Tan Yu Fan (National Institute of Education (Singapore))

Keywords
History
Migration

Why should we place an emphasis on the wave of mass migration to Singapore in the years before the Second World War? Most Singaporeans already know something about this mass movement of people to Singapore, or at least they think they know. These preconceived understandings and misunderstandings formed the first obstacle for a history teacher to overcome when discussing the phenomena of mass migration that fundamentally shaped Singapore.

The pre-existing understandings of students were forged by a symbiotic combination of National Education messages and the popular media portrayals of the period. Drama serials such as The Awakening and The Price of Peace proved to have a significant and enduring impact on the popular memory of Singaporeans regarding the narratives of mass migration to Singapore.^[i] This narrative, reinforced every National Day, was that migrants came to Singapore in search of a better life, and together they built a shining city on the hill that we are still enjoying the fruits. An appreciation of the achievements of our forefathers plays an important role in the process of nation-building, by providing younger Singaporeans something they can feel proud of. Mass migration is therefore the bedrock upon which the Singapore Story was built.

There is much validity in this narrative. It is true that Singapore was a migrant society that was made up of thousands of men and women seeking a better life. However, in the context of a historical classroom, we should aspire to go beyond that narrative and give our students a deeper understanding of the complex global forces that were at work which drove the founding of Singapore, and triggered a large wave of migration to Singapore – bearing in mind that this was a wave of migration that was only second in numbers to European migration to the Americas, Australia and New Zealand during this period.