Historical thinking and other unnatural acts
Subtitle: charting the future of teaching the past
By: Sam Wineburg
Series: Critical perspectives on the past
Publisher: Temple University Press
Published: 2001
Place of publication: Philadelphia
Language: eng
Number of pages: 255
Subjects: History -- Study and teaching -- Philosophy; Historiography; Culture conflict -- United States; United States -- History -- Study and teaching
Description: Although most of us think of historyb7sand learn it--as a conglomeration of facts, dates, and key figures, for professional historians it is a way of knowing, a method for developing an understanding about the relationships of peoples and events in the past. A cognitive psychologist, Wineburg has been engaged in studying what is intrinsic to historical thinking, how it might be taught, and why most students still adhere to the "one damned thing after another" concept of history. Whether he is comparing how students and historians interpret documentary evidence or analyzing children's drawings, Wineburg's essays offer "rough maps of how ordinary people think about the past and use it to understand the present." Arguing that we all absorb lessons about history in many settings--in kitchen table conversations, at the movies, or on the world-wide web, for instance--these essays acknowledge the role of collective memory in filtering what we learn in school and shaping our historical thinking
Notes: Includes bibliographical references
Table of contents: title: Historical thinking and other unnatural acts; title: The psychology of teaching and learning history; title: On the reading of historical texts: notes on the breach between school and academy; title: Reading Abraham Lincoln: a case study in contextualized thinking; title: Picturing the past; title: Peering at history through different lenses: the role of disciplinary perspectives in teaching history; title: Models of wisdom in the teaching of history; title: Wrinkles in time and place: using performance assessments to understand the knowledge of history teachers; title: Lost in words: moral ambiguity in the history classroom; title: Making (historical) sense in the new millennium