Foreword

This volume of HSSE Online continues our conversation on history education. In this volume, history educators, pre-service teachers, and experienced practitioners reflect on the “knowledge-turn” within the history curriculum. In recent years, the subject of history is no longer seen as the mere acquisition of facts about the past. Rather, it is seen as a study of how these pieces of ‘truths’ about the past were constructed and deconstructed. While acknowledging the constraints of the classroom, our contributors discuss the value of this knowledge-turn in classroom History – what are the opportunities and challenges, and their implications on classroom practice.
There are two key concerns shared by the contributors of this volume: (a) what does it mean to engage in knowledge work in the discipline of history, and (b) how best to introduce disciplinary aspects of historical knowledge work in the classroom?
The first two papers addresses these concerns through the idea of vertical progression. In her paper, Going Beyond Facts: Developing Conceptual Understanding in Young Historians, Candice Seet and her team examines the opportunities within the curriculum to engage in knowledge work through a conceptual lens. Furthermore, they propose that the same concepts should be revisited each academic year as a student progresses through their secondary education.
Lloyd Yeo et al complements the preceding authors by giving the reader a timely reminder that students do not enter the history classroom as tabula rasas. In their paper, Use of Cartoons to Identify Students’ Alternative Conceptions of History in a (Singapore) School, they demonstrate how students enter the classroom with preconceived notions of what the past is, and how novel classroom activities such as cartooning can transform these alternative conception into incision points for educators to engender conceptual change, and help students transit from a presentist sense to a historical lens.
The discussion over the role of knowledge work in the historical classroom continues in the next two papers. They collectively argue that historical knowledge work is best facilitated through the alignment of curriculum and practice with the functions of the discipline. In Oh Ying Jie’s paper, Historical Investigation: The Importance of Process over Product in the Historical Discipline, she reflects on the role of inquiry in developing historical thinking dispositions in students. She argues that the spirit of a Historical Investigation lies in the authentic process of inquiry as a learning experience, and not in the end products.
The next paper is similarly interested in helping students acquire how historical knowledge is constructed. In his paper, Asking ‘How’ to Infuse Temporality into Upper Secondary Historical Inquiry, Ying Xuan argues that the questions educators use to guide inquiry in the classroom has an influence on the manner students interact with the past, and therefore beyond merely asking why things happened, how things happened is an equally valuable inquiry question.
The last two papers view the knowledge turn through the lenses of historical writing. Similar to the preceding set of papers, these contributors argue that there remains room for greater alignment between the discipline of history and the classroom teaching and assessment of history. In his paper, Using LORMS to Assess Conceptual Understanding of Change and Continuity in Upper Secondary History Examinations, Seow Yongzhi argues that the second-order concept of “Change and Continuity” has been underserved in summative assessments in Singapore. He proposes the integration of explicit questions assessing for Change and Continuity in the Singaporean secondary school context, and examines how student responses built upon this concept can be mapped onto a level of response marking scheme (LORMS).

The final paper in this issue asks the question What does it Mean to Make Comparisons?, and Edward Tan is concerned with how better to align the act of making source-based comparisons to disciplinary practices in history. He demonstrates the role of comparisons and corroborations within the discipline, and how they are used to generate historical knowledge — first by breaking down the different modes of comparisons historians carryout, then by examining how historians compare. Viewing comparisons as an act of classification, the paper goes on to examine the heuristics of comparisons and corroboration and some possible tools to translate these into the classroom.

Edward Tan Yu Fan and Suhaimi Afandi

Singapore

July 2022