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 Historical Knowledge and Interpretations Introduction Why should this be? In my opinion, the difficulty is not one of understanding how, or even why, historical interpretations differ (though both are important), but in understanding what interpretations are - or more precisely, how they come to be formed. This requires some reflection on the nature of historical knowledge. As things stand at the moment, AT descriptors covering KS2 and KS3 seem to rest upon the assumption that pupils will be dealing with ready-formed statements about the past (in their various guises). However, without some knowledge and experience - however simple - of how historical knowledge is assembled, understanding of interpretations will be at best partial and at worst unhistorical.... The aims of this article are:
The
Nature of Historical Knowledge: If this is accepted as a working definition - albeit crude and simplified - of the way in which historical knowledge is put together, how can it be converted into what Bruner might have referred to as an 'intellectually honest' learning experience for pupils of different ages and abilities in schools? Clearly, school children are not historians. They therefore lack the kind of contextual knowledge that informs much of what historians do. The purpose, however, should not be to replicate the historian's experience, but to enable pupils to know what it is to think historically - which is a quite different thing. ¹ The term 'fact', as used here, refers to any action, event or state of affairs which requires interpretation - other 'facts', such as the date of the start of the Battle of the Somme, tend to be matters of verification. Interpretations
and Pupils' Learning: The first question is - at what stage can pupils construct their own interpretations? According to the proposed definition, this is dependent on their ability to deal with more than one source, and so cannot occur before Level 4, at which point pupils are beginning to select and combine information from historical sources. The assumption is that they are doing this in response to an historical question, but the activity could equally lead to the formulation of a simple hypothesis based upon the sources used. This could be done, for example, by giving two groups of pupils different collections of sources pointing to competing interpretations of the same topic, and asking each group to produce its own 'version'. By comparing the results, the pupils can develop a clear understanding of both how and why historical interpretations differ. The same exercise at Level 5, where pupils are expected to evaluate historical sources and identify those which are useful to answer specific questions, would allow pupils to see that interpretations differ because the sources used to construct them differ in value as well as in content or type. Notice how, according to this model, application of pupils' understanding about how and why interpretations differ is directly related to their ability to handle sources of evidence. Why not make this explicit in the level descriptors by linking statements relating to each of these competencies? In this way, the level 4 descriptor might contain the sentence: "By combining information from historical sources, pupils can produce interpretations and show how and why such interpretations differ." And at Level 5: "By evaluating historical sources and identifying those which are useful to answer specific questions, pupils begin to see that interpretations are only as good as the evidence on which they are based." The second important question is: What should pupils at the lower and higher levels be expected to know, understand and do? Currently, pupils are expected - for example at Level 3 - to be able to recognise "some of the different ways in which the past is represented". What point is there in pupils knowing this before they know something about what interpretations are, and how they are constructed? Where can it possibly lead them at Level 4, as things stand, except to the inevitable tautology that interpretations are different because they are different? This is not meant facetiously. Interpretations differ either because of the questions asked/evidence used, or because of the differing purpose of their authors - neither of which consideration would seem to be readily available to pupils at Level 3. Moreover, to appreciate the possibility of different forms of interpretation - some of which are now for some reason referred to as "representations" (museum displays, films, dramatic re-enactments and the like) - is actually to recognise, in part at least, that the past is invoked by different groups of people for differing purposes. It requires some understanding of Oakeshott's distinction between the 'practical past' and the 'historical past' (Oakeshott 1962) and arguably needs to be moved to a much higher level. The conclusion of this kind of thinking is that the level descriptor 'strand' dealing with KE3 should not appear before Level 4 (in roughly the same way that explicit references to KE1 - Chronological Awareness - seem to disappear beyond Level 3), and that ideas associated with an understanding of the purposes of different modes of interpretation should be re-cast to appear at Level 7 and beyond (including GCSE). My argument depends on the proposition that History is a 'form of knowledge', involving processes of inquiry that are quite distinct from, for example, those of Geography or Mathematics. Once this is accepted, it follows that the focus of teaching and learning should be on what those processes are; and with specific reference to interpretations, it should at this level be on the relationship between an interpretation and the available evidence rather than upon the (assumed) opinions or intentions of the author. This may in turn help to counteract the widespread assertion made by pupils - following from this 'ad homonym' approach - that all historians are in some way 'biased'.... In an important recent article (George 1997), Peggy George has done much to clarify a number of issues surrounding the teaching and learning of KE3. However, in offering an alternative progression in pupils' understanding of KE3 to that outlined in the Attainment Target, Mrs George identifies one of the higher 'levels' as: "Any evaluation of a particular interpretation must involve knowing sufficient about the author of the interpretation to make a judgement about the reliability of his/her analysis; for example to judge the historical accuracy of two contrasting biographies of Stalin one would need to know about such things as the author's age, nationality, political persuasion, any religious affiliations and his/her relationship to the subject.... " (Interestingly, she goes on to identify, at the highest 'level', "the need to be clear about the relationship between an interpretation and the evaluation of historical sources on which it depends".) Similarly, in an otherwise useful work on the teaching of history (Haydn et al., 1997), student teachers are introduced to the problem posed by pupils' lack of knowledge about the 'interpreters': "In current parlance, there is a need to know 'where they are coming from'. That background information might be correctly but superficially expressed as 'He was a royalist', or 'She was a French Protestant', or, with older pupils, 'He was a Marxist historian', but such information would need to have a fuller explanation, which requires further layers of knowledge. Should it be necessary to determine that an interpretation of a much earlier event reflected the spirit of the times of the person responsible for the interpretation, then that requires knowledge not only of the event being interpreted but also of the times of the interpreter...." This is followed by a sample classroom exercise on the murder of Thomas Becket, as part of which brief background notes on 14 different 'interpreters' from the 13th to the 20th centuries are presented to a class of 11-12 year-old pupils, who are meant to use the notes in order to 'evaluate' the respective interpretations. There is no reason why pupils of this age should not be asked to undertake a task of this kind, although it is perhaps likely to produce only slightly less superficial responses than the 'He was a royalist' type. The more pressing argument is that it requires far wider contextual knowledge than pupils of this age can possibly have to do it properly; The following comments (Ashby and Lee, 1987) are taken from a chapter dealing with children's understanding of empathy as an aspect of historical understanding, but they might equally apply to achieving awareness of the historian's context: "What sort of achievement is empathy? Entertaining the beliefs, goals and values of other people or... of other societies, is a difficult intellectual achievement. It is difficult because it means holding in mind whole structures of ideas which are not one's own, and with which one may profoundly disagree. And not just holding them in mind as inert knowledge, but being in a position to work with them in order to explain and understand what people did in the past. All this is hard because it requires a high level of thinking.... " Quite apart from the difficulties involved, ad hominem activities may reinforce the widely held fallacy that most historians are biased in some significant respect. Surely, the focus of our attention should not be on the historian, but on the history - on what he/she has written, rather than on who he/she is. Of course, it is useful to consider how a range of contextual, cultural or political factors may have influenced this or that historian and, consequently helped to form the opinions he/she expresses. However, it is necessary to proceed with caution. Historians as a rule operate according to the conventions of their craft, engaging in their respective 'dialogues with the past' with due regard to - and respect for - what their sources tell them. In this way, historians agree not on one story, but on the parameters within which several stories are valid. Their purpose is to achieve as objective a view of the past as they are able, given the questions they are trying to address and the limitations of the available evidence. Christopher Hill may adhere to an overarching Marxist interpretation of history, but to suggest that he is anything other than a great historian would be ridiculous. Having said this, it would be futile to deny that historians have been, in a sense, captives of their times. The most obvious examples were the great 'Whig' historians of the later 19th and early 20th centuries - men such as S.R. Gardiner and G.M.Trevelyan - who saw the achievements of their own time as a culmination of the long march towards parliamentary democracy, and whose interpretations of prior events were dominated by sets of assumptions deriving from this basic belief. In this way, individual historians or 'schools' of historians may be either consciously or unconsciously 'positioned' by their circumstances but, again, this does not necessarily mean that they set out to distort their interpretations of the evidence to fit some view of the world which they may hold. A
Working Classroom Model:
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seems to be generally accepted (George, 1997; OHMCI, 1998.) that Interpretations
of History presents more problems for history teachers than either
the other key elements at KS2 and KS3, or the other assessment
objectives of GCSE. This may or may not be true: In my experience,
Causation is, if anything, far less well understood (the more
damaging because teachers do not seem to recognise it as a
problem); whilst Change tends to be neglected - or simply
ignored - at KS3, despite the fact that most GCSE syllabuses contain a
'study in development' of one kind or another. Be that as it may, it
seems to be true that, when asked, most teachers report that Interpretations
is 'difficult'. 
What's
your view? Send your response