Introduction

Danielle, a seasoned American history teacher, in responding to a question that asked her to discuss what she considered history to be and the roles facts and interpretations played in the work of constructing histories, responded this way:

For me, history is never just the facts, because you really don’t know what occurred unless you go in and research it, and then you know for sure what happened during the time period. So, you can gather information about a particular historical event up to a certain point, but depending on the documents you pick or the people that you talk to, there will always be bias I guess….

In trying to understand her beliefs about history through comments such as these, we need to look closely at what she says. First, she appears to believe that the past leaves for us some brute facts to consider. Yet, in order to make sense of them, some additional digging is necessary. That digging implicates the role of an investigator. As such, history appears to emerge in an interaction between an interrogator (the knower) and the past and its residua (what is to be known, or the object of the knower’s attempt to know). So far so good it would seem.

Then Danielle shifts to entertaining more about the inner workings of that interaction between the knower and the historical objects to be known. Knowers can plumb the depths of the past, but only “to a certain point.” At that point, bias takes over. With a bit of symbolic shoulder shrugging embedded in her final phrase, “I guess,” Danielle signals that she may not think the problem of bias is surmountable. As her voice trails off, we are left wondering whether she, as historical investigator and potential knower, possesses any criteria for managing bias. In the initial portions of her comment, she seems convinced that research can provide some “sure” historical knowledge. But her trailing phrase appears to undo that confidence. Bias appears to be all we are left with and we have little hope, perhaps, of dealing with it successfully as we try to get to the bottom of what “really happened” in the past.

Why is any of this important? First, some people’s protestations to the contrary, serious historical study plunges knowers into a paradoxical position relative to what they wish to know about the past. As Joan Wallach Scott (1996) once observed, no matter how much a knower may wish to tell the past as it really happened, to tell it true so to speak, such a move is denied, because we have yet to find the means to reconstruct the past and relive it in order to know its truth. The past as it really happened is lost to us in the present. All the knower has at her disposal are shards of and remnants and residue from the past that must be interpreted. And as Danielle appears to lament, bias surfaces at every turn. The remnants all contain it and, perhaps more importantly, so does the knower, who cannot help but interpret those them from her contemporaneous temporal anchors and the inescapable perspectives she maintains. In the end, all historical investigators appear to have at their disposal, if their epistemic cognition is well honed, is what historian James Kloppenberg (1989, p. 1030) called a type of pragmatic hermeneutics that allows for nothing more than “…hypotheses, provisional syntheses, [and] imaginative but warranted interpretations”. Danielle wants to know “for sure,” but she cannot. What is she to do?

And second, this issue is of concern because Danielle is not the lone historical investigator, scurrying among the archives trying to ferret out the past’s truth for the next history she will author. She’s a secondary American history teacher with over 100 students to whom she is educationally responsible every day. If she is epistemically, and by extension, cognitively stuck on this problem of bias, what will she teach her students about how to deal with it? She had noted earlier in the interview about how important it is to teach her kids about the past using source materials that go beyond the textbook’s account. She believes it is important to her charges’ knowing and to their task of becoming better knowers. But in the process, she risks hanging them up on the same powerful, knower/knowing paradox, especially if the accounts and sources she gives them promote interpretive conflicts and are riddled with bias, something that is nearly if not wholly inevitable. If she has not resolved this problem for herself, say, via a type of pragmatic hermeneutics—and there is no evidence from her comments that she has—what will she teach her students once they encounter the issue? Will her students come away from reading bias- and conflict-laden accounts with the idea that it’s all just bias all the way down, and therefore any story one might tell would be as good as any other story because it’s all just someone’s opinion anyway? Of course, we cannot tell without visiting Danielle’s classroom. Her comments, though, are not particularly reassuring.

It has become increasingly attractive for history teachers to supplement course readings with sources other than the textbook (e.g., HICKS; DOOLITTLE; LEE, 2004). Juicy primary accounts are especially coveted among history teachers because, they say, they increase interest and engagement. Whereas textbooks perennially bore, firsthand accounts can better incite curiosity, beg questions, and otherwise stimulate attention. Such accounts have also proliferated on the Internet, making their accessibility only a matter of a few digital clicks. Yet, what are the consequences for kids of this move toward expanding accounts? How do teachers help them deal with the problem of perspective they encounter upon entering this world? And what tools do teachers have in their own epistemic toolkits for dealing with this knower-knowing problem, tools they could share in their classrooms? Where are they supposed to learn them? You cannot teach what you do not know. These questions served as the underpinning of the present study.

Relevant Literature

Over a decade since the beginning of the new millennium, we have studied history teachers such as Danielle in the context of Teaching American History grant projects in the USA. Such projects were designed to reshape how they teach. These projects endeavored to help teachers learn how to teach historical thinking practices to their students on the assumption that to understand the past more deeply, students need to upgrade their thinking practices. In short, directors and professional developers on these projects attempted to take advantage of the burgeoning research in history education in an effort to shift teachers’ practices away from the ubiquitous PowerPoint presentations of repackaged textbook histories and more towards historical study as an investigative enterprise that depends on being able to think historically. In order to teach historical thinking, the directors and developers reasonably surmised, teachers would need to know how to do it themselves. Our role as independent evaluators on these projects taught us that learning to think historically was no mean feat. We started to attune our attention to data we were collecting from the teachers that began to show us that a number of the teachers held beliefs about the nature of historical knowledge, where it comes from, and how it’s warrented that seemed to block their progress.

Effectively many were like Danielle. They could fairly quickly come to idea that history was an interpretive enterprise that relied on a capacity to think and reason historically, to realize that making sense of perspective was crucial. However, they would then become ensnared on what some of them would call the problem of bias. That is, it seemed to them that it was inescapable bias—all the way down. How could one arrive at a solid interpretation if bias and opinion crept in everywhere? And as Danielle alludes, accounts from the past—the key venue from which interpretations could be drawn—were all just people’s opinions and interpretations rooted in their own personal positionalities of the time. Many would conclude that history was whatever the investigator wanted it to be. Some histories were simply written better and some were more rhetorically persuasive, but not necessarily accounts that were closer to what actually happened. These teachers would become, sometimes rather begrudgingly and often despairingly, abject relativists, stuck in a rather uncomfortable epistemic position that one could not warrant knowledge in history except to say that histories were little more than various investigators’ opinions, and we are all entitled to hold our own. When we would visit their classrooms on occasion, we would observe them teaching (intentionally or otherwise, we could not always tell) such ideas to their students.

We hypothesized that the teachers failed to explicitly learn what Kloppenberg (1989, p.1030) called a pragmatic hermeneutics, a process he says supplants “the noble dream of scientific objectivity” while also eschewing “the nightmare of complete relativism” . Pragmatic hermeneutics, if Kloppenberg is to be believed, appears to be the way around the problem, at least in history. But how does someone develop an epistemic position framed out by pragmatic hermeneutics? We turned to the research literature to see if and how others had researched this issue, the problem of what to do when, in Kloppenberg's terms, the pursuit of objectivity becomes impossible and the alternative of complete relativism feels more like a frightening nihilism.

Epistemic cognition can be understood as “as the cognitive process enabling individuals to consider the criteria, limits, and certainty of knowing” (MAGGIONI; VANSLEDRIGHT; ALEXANDER, 2009, p. 188). An individual’s epistemic stance therefore defines what counts as knowledge and how that knowledge can be acquired and applied. These conceptions of knowledge, which shape an individual’s belief structures (HOFER, 2002), powerfully impact one’s understanding of teaching and learning within a subject matter (HOFER, 2002; HOFER e and PINTRICH, 1997; LAMPERT, 1990; SCHOENFIELD, 1983). Within the domain of history, these habits of thought are used to make sense of historical concepts, influence a person’s ability to work with historical texts, and affect the overall ways in which a he or she approaches the study of past.

When considering the ways in which people think about history, it is important to acknowledge their epistemological understandings surrounding the nature of domain knowledge. Specifically, it is important to consider the relationships between the investigator—the knower, and the past—what’s to be known. Such dimensions represent ways of knowing, which dictate how and what a learner constructs as knowledge.

Often, the literature indicates, novices approach sources in history as “decontextualized, disembodied authorless forms of neutral information that fall ready made out of the sky” (VANSLEDRIGHT, 2010, p.116). This epistemic stance is characterized by an understanding of history as a direct mirror of the past. The knower or the investigator is absent (MAGGIONI; VANSLEDRIGHT; REDDY, 2009). These learners do not decipher between the past and historical accounts, as they believe them to be one in the same. Knowledge, as presented within historical accounts, is understood to be absolute (KUHN; WEINSTOCK, 2002), or dualist—being either right or wrong (HOFER, 2001), and acquired through authoritative renderings (KING; KITCHENER, 2002). Cognitive impasses occur when evidentiary conflicts surface, such as when historical documents present differing ideas about the same event. These impasses leave the investigator mentally paralyzed and able to do little more than ambiguously choose one account as the capital-T-truth (frequently one officialized by authorities or one that sounds particularly authoritative; see PAXTON, 1999), while discounting the others as fictitious or inaccurate due to author bias or error.

Other learners have quite the opposite epistemic understanding of historical knowledge. These learners view knowledge creation in history as the result of opinion. They “tend to borrow their story from accounts or pieces of accounts on the basis of instinctive preferences or casual selection” (MAGGIONI; VANSLEDRIGHT; ALEXANDER, 2009, p. 198). Also known as “cut and paste” investigators, they have limited strategies to judge historical sources (LEE and ASHBY, 2000; VANSLEDRIGHT, 2011). They do acknowledge the active role of knower in the process of knowledge generation. But a naïve understanding of author perspective and positionality often drive them to conclude that all historical accounts are equally biased and/or equally trustworthy or untrustworthy as the case may be (LEE; SHEMILT, 2003; MAGGIONI; VANSLEDRIGHT; REDDY, 2009). Therefore, these erstwhile knowers equate the known (aka, the past) with whatever accounts they can piece together. However, they often quickly discover that cutting and pasting fails to solve for the problem of knowing and understanding. More cognitive impasses ensue. Lacking the epistemic understanding to reconcile these gaps (i.e., judgment criteria associated with the concept of reliability), these knowers often wind up frustrated and unable to move forward with the construction of historical understandings (LEE, 2004). Danielle comes to mind here.

Finally, there is yet a third epistemic position often used to characterize the epistemological stances of learners who have developed more expert ways of knowing. These knowers believe that the construction of history is neither absolute nor relative. Rather they understand the importance of disciplinary heuristics in the development of authentic historical interpretations. They view knowledge as actively constructed (KING; & KITCHENER, 2002) by the knower through the use of conjectural logic. It is always evolving and ways of knowing are coordinated with evidentiary judgment and justification (HOFER, 2001). Generally speaking, they are able to reconcile the cognitive impasses often experienced by other types of knowers by acknowledging the positionality of evidence, using procedural understandings, which demand that evidence be carefully evaluated for consistency and reliability, and bridging gaps between accounts using logical sequencing of events or contexts. This stance directly links and coordinates the role of the knower, or the historical investigator, with what is to be known (the past) via the application of criteria and tools for making decisions. These knowers appear to utilize a pragmatic hermeneutics (KLOPPENBERG, 1989).

Both learners’ prior experiences and epistemic beliefs are essential to understanding how they negotiate the conceptualizations necessary to participate in historical thinking in ways that enhance their understandings. To aide in the continued study of how historical cognition evolves, researchers have constructed progression models intended to better understand the development of epistemic stances in history (e.g., LEE and ASHBY, 2000; LEE and SHEMILT, 2003). Due to the hierarchical presentation of progression models, they sometimes carry the implication that students work from less to more powerful ideas (LEE;SHEMILT, 2003). However, scholars caution that these models are not meant to be understood as linear.

Historical thinking as a process and a method of knowing, is a cognitive domain which often proves to be quite fluid with regard to how individuals epistemically move from one level to another. Lee and Ashby (2000) suggest, however, that there is a model that can help to assess the parameters through which learners move closer to or farther away from deeper understandings of the past. Lee and Ashby’s and Lee and Shemilt’s (2003) progression models illustrate the typical advancement of individuals as they learn how to reason historically. This progression model can be illustrated by Figure 1.

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Notes