Lim Ying Xuan (Chung Cheng High School (Yishun),(Singapore)

Keywords
History
Approaches to teaching history

This article proposes the usage of ‘how’ questions to develop historical understandings and an appreciation of the historical process. ‘How’ inquiries elicit a temporal dimension that is necessary for historical understanding, especially bolstering the concept of chronology. This article contends that more thought should be put into the pairings of question forms with particularities of the past. Classroom inquiry should be further modelled on the approaches used by professional historians, pairing an often neglected ‘how’ dimension to the ‘why’ dimension that predominates current inquiries. Asking ‘how’ resists a ‘flattened’ form of history that inhibits understanding of second-order historical concepts, and prevents students from falling into rabbit holes of factorization and weighing that are acutely ahistorical and unnuanced. This article contends that students are already equipped with some of the necessary tools for teachers to use ‘how’ more often in classrooms. In the quest for greater historical understanding, asking the historical ‘how’ appears as the next practicable step to help students have a better glimpse into the historian’s craft.

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