Disciplinary and idiomatic literacy: re-living and re-working the past in senior school history.
Allender, Tim ; Freebody, Peter
Introduction
The interpretation of documents is central to the study of history.
Academic history is also a discipline that is subject to the distorting
incursions of popular history, where the contemporary world is immersed
in the past yet is also detached from its scholarly intent (Tosh, 2008).
Debates about the teaching of history in schools are ongoing, intense,
and often divisive.
Over the course of more than 2500 years the practice of history has
evolved from collecting generally orally-transmitted 'epics,
chronicles, romances' aimed at advancing the legitimacy and
importance of a particular tribal or ethnic group (Burrows, 2007) to
using, critiquing and evaluating culturally diverse and sometimes
conflicting accounts of the past (Allender, 2011). History has come to
comprise potentially complex inquiries into interpretation and
theorisation, and these are usually centred on the management of
inscribed forms of some sort, most commonly written or printed
materials. Historians remain as dependent on the written word as they
are cautious in its interpretation.
Educating students in history relies heavily on their literacy
skills and dispositions. It also draws them, however, into a particular
orientation to the nature of literacy itself, where the spotlight shifts
onto the relationship between writing, belief and knowledge. This
relationship comes to be foundational to the conduct and value of
history. This paper briefly elaborates this view of both literacy and
history as they are located together in the high school classroom. For
teachers and researchers alike, studying these processes in schools is
about sharpening an appreciation of how teachers and students
orchestrate a relationship between text-based activities, epistemology,
pedagogy, and assessment in ways that align with the particular set of
literacy activities, skills and dispositions that constitute the
discipline of history.
This paper builds on the scholarship of Seixas and Morton (2006)
who have offered a disciplinary framework focusing on components of
historical inquiry that they take to be central to classroom pedagogies
and resources for teachers to support students' growing competency
in history (Seixas and Morton, 2006, p. 4). Similarly Levesque (2008)
has spelled out how personal and cultural subjectivities are crucial
resources for academic researchers and history students alike. Our work
here examines the work of experienced history teachers, whom we see as
grounded theorists, assessing the success of their activities in terms
of students' learning, skills and competencies. By looking at their
classroom praxis we aim to exemplify broader literacy issues in the
history classroom that shape students' sense of key disciplinary
features.
We have an interest in the details of how two teachers did
different things with the students: how they created an initial interest
in and engagement with the topic; how they foregrounded and used the
print and electronic source materials; and how they set up and
subsequently summarised the lesson activities that worked the students
'into' these materials. We ask: how might these exchanges,
taken together, construct different interpretive frameworks? These
activities we take to be the means by which students are worked into
different views of the literacy practices that constitute the metiers of
subject history in and for senior high school.
To set a scene around these lessons, we first summarise the
expectations on Year 11 history students as documented in history
curriculum documents. We then frame these lessons with a summary of
linguistic studies of the expectations on students as shown in the
features of reading and writing the mastery of which they are expected
to display across the school years. The contrasting perspectives from
curriculum policy documents and classroom talk give us, respectively, an
understanding of what should be, and allows for an interpretation of
what is. Next to these we can place the work of each of these teachers,
as each develops what he takes to count as satisfying the Year 11
history curriculum expectations at the same time as orienting to the
needs, interests, and capabilities of his students, with regard to the
topic at hand.
Literacy and the disciplines
Here we focus on students' understandings of the society in
which they live, as those understandings may be shaped by the knowledge
disciplines around which much formal education is organised. Language
and literacy educators from a variety of approaches have argued for
several years that this is an issue worth documenting. Shanahan and
Shanahan (2008), for instance, put forward the general observation that
policy and professional development initiatives in literacy over recent
decades have assumed that building a strong foundation in the
acquisition stages of literacy learning in the early school years--is
sufficient to allow the development of the curriculum-specific literacy
capabilities called for in the secondary years of schooling. Examining
the areas of mathematics, chemistry and history, they set out to find
out whether or not content experts read and write the texts that relate
to their disciplines of study in distinctive ways, and whether or not
specialist secondary content schoolteachers attempted to teach an
appropriately differentiated set of reading and writing strategies to
their students. They documented the composition and comprehension
strategies used in each of these discipline/curriculum areas, and showed
dramatic variations, including variations that had significant
consequences for the students. They concluded that the assumption that
early literacy success 'inoculates' students against later
curriculum-specific literacy difficulties is at best wishful, and, at
worst, potentially damaging to the educational careers of many students.
Educators have explored this issue in terms of its ethnographic
features (e.g., Freebody, Chan & Barton, 2013), its grammatical
structures (e.g., Halliday & Martin, 1993), and its discursive
patterns (e.g., Bazerman, 2011; MacDonald, 1994), circling around the
language-thought-knowledge relationship in a variety of ways (Freebody,
Martin & Maton, 2008). Shanahan and Shanahan (2008) commented on the
common thread running through these different approaches:
Together these positions are persuasive that the function
of discipline-based texts is both ideational and
social. Texts serve to advance knowledge while at the
same time serving to maintain field's hegemony. The
end result is that the literacy demands on students are
unique, depending on the discipline they are studying
(p. 48).
The specific literacy of history
What do curriculum documents posit as the demands of senior
secondary history? What have educational linguists documented as the
characteristics of historical discourse, and the ways in which the
demands placed on students' reading and writing in subject history
change over the school years? We follow summaries of these questions
with a brief description of research studies aimed at enhancing
students' history-specific literacy capabilities.
The curriculum expectations
Curriculum documents describe the potential topic areas for the
study of senior school history, and outline some of the skills and
dispositions applicable to the study of history that students should
acquire. For the most part these documents are generic to the point of
being uninformative with regard to the learning of specific literacy
capabilities and strategies in history. With regard to strategies and
dispositions for reading and writing, for example, the Australian
Curriculum in Modern History Senior Secondary (Australian Curriculum,
Assessment and Reporting Authority, 2015) mentions that students should
do the following things for each of its four units:
... the nature of the sources for the study of modern
history and build up their skills in historical method
through inquiry ... the changing nature and usefulness
of sources; the changing representations and interpretations
of the past (Unit 1) ... changing perspectives
of the value of these movements and how their
significance is interpreted (Unit 2) ... the reliability
and usefulness of evidence; cause and effect; change
and continuity; significance; empathy; contestability;
and changing representations and interpretations (Unit
3) ... changing representations and interpretations of
the past, and contestability (Unit 4).
The syllabus that was operational at the time and place relevant to
the lessons we examine here is the Queensland 2004 Modern History Senior
Syllabus (Queensland Studies Authority, 2004). It sets out a number of
general objectives concerning planning and using and historical research
processes, critical inquiry, communicating historical knowledge, a
critical approach to the evaluation of sources, and the ability to
synthesise evidence into defensible accounts. With regard to
capabilities relating to reading, writing and speaking about history, it
relied on generic, apparently common-sensically understood attributes:
understand what they read and hear ... use appropriate and
effective language ... be critically aware of the way language can be
used to exercise power ... use historical terms accurately ... use
conventions related to appropriate forms ... and genres ... use language
conventions related to grammar, spelling, punctuation and layout ... use
conventions applicable to maps, diagrams, graphs, statistics and
acknowledging sources (Queensland Studies Authority, 2004, p. 9,
emphases added).
The details of what might and might not constitute applicable
conventions, or appropriate, effective language patterns, or, more
significantly, of what might count as understanding what is read and
written in the ways that an historian might, are not outlined.
What is read and written for subject history
These curriculum statements are the formulations to which teachers
are responsible for orienting their planning and assessment activities.
Less overt, and less often documented are the actual changing patterns
of language that students encounter when they read, and the kinds of
written work they produce across the school years. Christie and
Derewianka (2008) and Coffin (2006) have surveyed the kinds of reading
and writing demands that are built into subjects English, science and
history across the school years. At the most general level in subject
history Christie and Derewianka (2008) found three general phases, each
with sub-elements, as shown in Table 1.
Coffin's (2006) extensive linguistic and ethnographic studies
have shown that there are three crucial levels at which these
developments operate. The first, as Christie and Derewianka (2008)
showed, is the level of genre: roughly recounts to explanations to
argumentation and evaluations. The second level involves the
students' growing capacity to read and make texts whose clausal
components are designed in particular ways: again roughly from sequences
of events, to settings in time, to more abstract nominalised event
clusters ('the first wave of migration...') that can be
posited as 'fixtures' in the discourse, and sometimes accorded
agency ('the renaissance brought about...'). Finally, Coffin
(2006) showed that critical changes were expected in terms of the
evaluative or appraisal procedures the students needed to read and make
in their texts: changing from author as recorder, to interpreter and
organiser, to evaluator. These three levels were shown to be necessary,
largely co-occurring in the learning process, and mutually supportive.
Significantly for our purposes here Christie and Derewianka (2008)
presented evidence that around the transition to early secondary
schooling, a large number of students seem to remain at mid-to-late
primary level forms of expression in their writing. The suggestion is
that one possible cause for this is the increased abstraction and
technicality of the language called for, and its attendant cognitive
strategies--as these researchers termed it, language becoming more
'uncommonsense' often combined with a shortage of
instructional support from teachers specifically on the key features of
this transition.
History in the classroom
In light of the curriculum expectations and the evolving language
patterns outlined above, we can ask: what are the activity structures
prevalent in history classrooms and how do they present the work of the
historian? How are the interactional features of classroom exchanges
distinct for history and what distinctive cognitive procedures might
they display? How can teachers gain insights into their knowledge
structures and processes that distinguish their specialisations to help
students' learning become more coherent, cumulative, applicable,
and distinctively historical?
In pursuing these questions Matruglio, Maton and Martin (2013)
studied Year 11 classrooms in Australia and found what they described as
two ways in which textual materials in history were worked up in the
talk: commentary, the 'unfolding drama, in which the students are
invited to participate vicariously' (pp. 45-46), and comment, where
students are drawn into exchanges in which evaluations and assessments
of the events and actors are developed. These researchers remarked:
when the teacher feels that a text needs 'unpacking' s/
he grounds it more in the everyday by metaphorically
'inserting' the students into the action and talking
about past events as though they were occurring in the
present ... Events thus become grounded and contextualised
while at the same time the language is modernised
by the teacher (p. 48)
Matruglio and others (2013) concluded that this
'grounding' potentially limits the developing abstract,
generalisable, reflective work that characterises mature historical
practice.
Hynd, Holschuh, and Hubbard (2004) documented undergraduates'
attempts to deal with conflicting accounts of the Tonkin Gulf Incident
during the conflict in Vietnam before and after explicit instruction in
the particular reading strategies that history calls upon. Drawing on
Wineburg's (1991) observations, the three unique features of the
reading practices of historians are:
1. sourcing (finding and evaluating sources);
2. contextualising (locating texts and arguments in their time and
place);
3. corroboration (searching for corroborative evidence across texts
located in different places or in different times).
Through examining the students' written and spoken work, and
through interviews with each student Hynd, Holschuh, and Hubbard found
that
students made their first shifts in disciplinary knowledge
not through instruction, but through reflection
that had been encouraged by our probing questions ...
students' reflections about what it means to engage
in discipline-specific activities and their subsequent
engagement in those activities can bring about epistemological
and strategic development. Students used
sophisticated strategies, thought deeply about issues
such as subjectivism versus objectivism, and wrestled
with the responsibility of making their own sense
(pp. 168-169).
For these researchers the breakthrough came when each student took
responsibility for the issues raised in historical considerations of
texts that provide conflicting accounts. This, they found, was more
difficult to achieve in conventional classroom instructional settings,
perhaps because of the distribution of interactional responsibility and
its consequences of that for the diffusion of cognitive and moral
engagement, features of exchanges that many classrooms are built upon.
It is worth noting that the individual setting to which these
researchers attributed the gains is analogous to the setting in which
students typically need to write their assessable history assignments.
A final classroom example comes from the work of Nokes, Dole and
Hacker (2007). They examined the comparative effectiveness for Year 10
and 11 history students of the use of multiple textual perspectives for
the learning both of history content and of a set of heuristics that
historians use to think critically about texts (sourcing, corroboration,
and context of production of use). History classrooms were randomly
assigned to different combinations of the text-instruction
interventions. Students were pre-tested on their content knowledge and
their use of heuristics, and post-tested after three weeks of focused
intervention. Central findings were that students who read multiple
texts scored higher on history content and used sourcing and
corroboration more often and more effectively than students who used
traditional textbook materials. The design of the study allowed the
researchers to conclude that it was the reading of multiple texts that
deepened content knowledge and that motivated the more frequent and
effective use of history-related heuristics.
The curriculum materials and the linguistic and classroom studies
outlined above provide us with a set of frames for our examinations of
classroom interaction in history lessons across the school years. These
linguistic and classroom studies also suggest how we might theorise the
teaching and learning processes that we observed as part of our own
research project.
The lessons
Our commentaries begin by detailing the exchange systems each
teacher put in place. For analytic purposes we can distinguish these
interactional features from the features that we take to relate
distinctively to our interests in literacy and history, but, of course,
they are neither necessarily experienced nor understood as separate
considerations by the participants in the exchanges.
To understand these lessons we must provide as full an account of
the events in question as is practicable rather than a summary of the
activities we saw, or interviews with teachers or students about what
happened, or some other proxies for the actual events. We ask first
about the phenomena we want to describe and compare, rather than
initially simply applying our research interests to pre-empt the nature
or value of the activities.
Having a sense of what the events are that make up this lesson, we
might then ask about how well each of these lessons exemplifies the aims
expressed in the documents to which these teachers are accountable, or
how well each of these lessons reflects the features documented by
applied linguists relating to the reading and writing demands of Year 11
history, or we may apply Wineburg's strategies that historians use
and Hynd and others' (2004) findings concerning moral
responsibility for evaluations in decisions and ask about how well these
lessons afford clarification of or improvement in those outcomes.
The 'exhibits' below are drawn from units each made up of
three lessons given in Year 11 classrooms. Both schools are located in
middle level socio-economic communities, with a majority of English as
first language students, and both class groups were described as
academically 'mid-level' by their teachers. In Exhibit 1 the
unit concerned Indian independence, and this lesson dealt with the
factors affecting this process, specifically Gandhi's role. The
unit of which Exhibit 2 forms a part concerns the Cold War, and the
section from which we draw transcripts dealt with the Cuban missile
crisis. First we examine the ways in which the teachers introduced these
topics, the work they wanted to be done around the topics, and the
interpretive frameworks they set up to guide the students' reading
and writing activities in that work. We then proceed to look at how the
main points of each section were drawn out for the students'
attention.
We include the following transcription symbols because the features
of interaction they indicate are relevant to how the talk was
interpreted then and there, and thus how it can be interpreted by us as
analysts now:
* '=' is utterances are closely linked to turns
immediately before and after;
* '[overlapping talk]' is words spoken simultaneously by
different speakers;
* // indicates interrupted talk;
* 'lo::ong' indicates noticeably long vowel sounds;
* ^ v indicate upward and downward inflections respectively;
* '(.)' indicates a short but noticeable pause;
* '(n)' is n-second pause;
* 'underline' is syllable stressed;
* 'run-together' is words run together quickly;
* ((transcriber's comment)).
When students' turns are numbered (e.g., S1) this indicates a
student's repeated and continual exchange with the teacher (T) or
exchanges among the same students.
Exhibit 1: 'Nice idea Gandhi'
As the students moved into the room at the beginning of this
lesson, a slideshow of photographs of cricket games held in both England
and India was running. There was an actual cricket bat leaning against
the teacher's desk. The students had watched the movie Gandhi in a
lesson the previous day and informally discussed some of the issues it
raises. In the first moments of this hour-long lesson the teacher in
this Exhibit (T1) aimed to focus the students' interest and lead
them into the core topic of the lesson, an examination of the extent to
which the Independence of India in 1947 was a result of idealism or
realism.
The engagement
T1 spent the first six minutes or so of the lesson orienting the
students to the general topic and into the specific issues he wished the
students to engage. In this initial section we observe a number of
interactional strategies most of which involved the students in the
discovery of T1's and the collection of their own cultural
knowledge and beliefs on and around that topic:
1. T1 invited students to speculate (e.g., about the meaning of the
props) and the students provided candidate answers in long strings of
tightly interconnected talk, for example:
1 T1 well let's have a look (.) what^ do you think's
going on here^ (.) ((pointing to overhead screen)) what's the
obvious connection [here.sup.v]
2 Ss cricket
3 T1 cricket-what^ (.) but what-else is going [on.sup.v]
4 Ss ((various answers)) Indians trees grass//
5 T1 //what are we seeing^ here=
6 S =lots of grass=
7 Ss =and trees=
8 S Indians
9 T1 [right.sup.v] (.) OK (.)
2. T1 overtly withheld solutions to exchanges to draw out further
candidate answers from students, for example:
9 T1 I want^ you to see if you can pick up some pattern here (.)
you've picked up on the cricket (.) but there's something else
going on (.) [here.sup.v] (.) there are a couple of patterns
24 T1 there's a cricket connection with every slide but
there's more than [that.sup.v] (.) have a look at the actual (1)
sequence (.) of (.) pictures [here.sup.vv]
32 T1 is it^ (.) Australia^
33 S England
34 Ss ((students all talk at once))
35 T1 alright well I'll give you (.) I'll (.) I'll
spell it out for you
3. T1 repeated and repurposed students' contributions,
sometimes selectively or with elaborations, and sometimes with differing
inflections indicating invitations to persist or closures to exchanges,
for example:
40 T1 what^ are we noticing^ about (.) the differences between (.)
India (.) and [England.sup.v]
41 S more green England's green and they're like um (.)
brown
42 S England's (.) got like all the proper stuff and
they've got like the (.) right fields and stuff=
43 T1 =proper stuff^ (.) good facilities^ (.) what are we noticing
about India^
44 S they're all wearing straggly clothes and//
45 S //it's simpler
46 T1 simpler^
47 Ss ((students all talk at once))
48 S they're just playing anywhere (.) they don't have a
proper field
49 S they play in all conditions (2) in any conditions
50 T1 playing in any [conditions.sup.v]
4. Candidate answers were collected, for example:
51 T1 alright (4) alright now (2) why^ (.) on [earth.sup.v] (1)
would I be bothering to (.) bring up (.) a lesson^ (.) to do with India
and starting with cricket
49 S cause that's one of their (.) like one of their (.) top
games
50 S cause that's one of the things they're most famous
[for.sup.v]
51 T1 Teresa^
52 ST cause they're known for their cricket^
53 T1 they're known for [cricket.sup.v] (.) who is^
54 Ss India
55 T1 [India.sup.vv] [alright.sup.v]
5. T1 invited Ss to chorus answers, for example:
56 T1 [India.sup.vv] alright (.) what I've got in front of me
here^ (.) is my^ old cricket bat (.) now (.) I haven't played (.)
cricket with this bat for (1) many [years.sup.v] and one^ thing I can
tell you about cricket bats (1) is that the vast majority of cricket
bats in the world (1) are made (1) in (.) [India]
57 Ss [India]
76 T1 can anyone tell me (.) what does this phrase (.) it's
not cricket (.) [me:ean.sup.vv]
77 Ss ((laugh))
78 T1 that's just not cricket (.) Angela
79 S it's not^ right^
80 T1 it's not (.) [[right.sup.vv]]
81 Ss [[right.sup.vv]]
We note immediately the dynamic interactions, and the tightly
connected and co-ordinated turns of talk. The students were worked, and
worked themselves into the talk through direct turn taking and
initiation-response-evaluation cycles; all acted out in a variety of
interactional formats. These were managed via a number of dynamics,
including T1's stress, pause, and inflection patterns. So, for both
T1 and Ss, engagement in the curriculum work was observable and observed
by all in attendance to be constituted by engagement in the exchanges,
and students' contributions were heard by all parties to be
worked--strongly or tentatively or not at all--into the ongoing
construction of the legitimate curriculum content of the lesson (Heap,
1985).
The opening engagement section of the lesson concludes with
T1's summary of the recent exchanges, a formulation of the issue
for the day's work, and a directive to consult the textbook.
86 T1 if we do talk about the English (.) in India (.) one of the
things of course that they've brought (.) to India (.) was
[cricket.sup.v] (1) not only did they bring the game not only did they
bring the:e a:ah (.) the wood^ (.) and planted the seeds in India (.)
that India had adapted (.) but they brought^ along (.) the values (.)
the culture (.) so we have to go back now (.) we need to think about (.)
why^ (.) did (.) the (.) British^ (.) come in to [India.sup.vv] so what
I want you to do I want you to make sure you've got your work books
open^ (.) and that's our question for today^ why:y^ did the British
(2) come to India (.) and form (.) an empire
There was a distinctive representation of the nature of the topic
to be presented in this series of lessons. The props, the slideshow and
the cricket bat, were used to stimulate speculations on the part of the
students about their potential symbolic value--the students were pushed
to read more into the pictures and the cricket bat's
construction--and T1 gradually led the discussion toward an analogy with
the usurpations of ownership by a colonising force. The metaphor
continued with respect to the imposition or encouragement of a certain
set of values, where T1 introduced the notion of the potential
ambivalence of colonisation and redirected the discussion from more
abstract considerations about non-violence as one of Gandhi's
motivations back into the metaphor of cricket as a civilising force.
Importantly for our purposes, the nature of the wrap-up from this highly
interactive introduction to the lesson functioned as an interpretive
framework for encountering the textbook materials.
The core activity
For the next 10 minutes or so T1 and his Ss set up the conceptual
frame that was put forward as both the interpretive framework for their
reading of the text (which occurred subsequently over the middle 38
minutes of the lesson) and the frame for the answer to what was named as
'our question for the day' in turn 86 above. In this section
T1 provides a retrospective narrative of the motivations for Indian
independence.
158 T1 now let's go back (.) we're in the nineteen
[thirties.sup.v] (.) India has been under British control (.) British
government control from the mid (.) nineteenth [century.sup.v] (.) the
British had been in India (.) for two centuries befo:ore [that.sup.v]
(.) they'd basically been controlling India for now two hundred
[years.sup.v]
...
166 T1 it's six^ generations under British control (1) they
(.) want (.) independence or (.) so far (.) the information we've
received^ says they want [independence.sup.v] (.) how do you think
they'd feel after (.) su:uch a long time of being under British
control^
167 S pretty sick of it
168 T1 sick of [it.sup.v] [frustrated.sup.vv] now when you get
frustrated (1) how do you approach [things.sup.v]
169 Ss you get angry
170 T1 you get angry (.) and (.) one of the things that Gandhi (.)
did (1) was he said lookA getting angry^ (.) causes a cycle (.) of
[violence.sup.v] (1) now (.) they'd done that with Gandhi you-know
they'd done 1919 and you had the ah:h (.) the India Act nineteen
thirty-five (.) and the Indian's had made (.) little^ (.) steps (1)
but they still^ weren't getting far enough (.) so what^ we need to
do today is we need to look at (1) was^ the idealism of Gandhi^ (2)
coming to:o fruition in-other-words coming to reality^ in (1) world war
two [during.sup.v] world war two (.) or did the Indian people say look
(.) yeah nice^ idea Gandhi^ (.) but really^ (1) we have to look at
[reality.sup.v] [so:o.sup.v] (1) what we're gonna get you to do^
(1) let's go to:o the 'Quit India Campaign'^ ((flicks
through textbook)) we've^ looked up to:o^ (1) Article C:C 7a (1)
which is on Page 54a (.) that was your homework^ (3) alright^ (2) so (.)
what we've gotta do^ (.) we're gonna be looking at article (.)
sources C7 and C8 and we're gonna look at (.) what was this
'Quit India Campaign' (.) and we're gonna look at the
idealism versus [reality.sup.v] of that and hopefully by the end of the
lesson we should be able to get some^ idea of (2) was there a change
o:or was there a continuation of [Gandhi's.sup.v] (1) idealistic
[policies.sup.v]
The explanation is presented here via a 're-enactment' of
a dialogue between 'the Indian people' and Gandhi, amounting
to a refusal of his apparent idealism. T1 posited the long period of
British rule as a cause of some common-sensical psychological dynamics
('sick of it', 'frustrated', 'angry') that
result in hypothetical dramatic scenes, with characters, dialogue, and a
moral denouement to summarise the national 'state of mind'
('we have to look at reality'). Again we see how T1 offered
the students opportunities to contribute to the development of this
account. The resolution of the apparently key choice of idealism versus
realism was placed at the centre of the task of determining the
mainsprings of Indian independence, and the guiding purpose for reading
the multiple sources found in the textbook (including C7 and C8, brief
segments from parts of the British Parliamentary Reports as presented in
sources Chopra, 1976, and Majumdar, 1963).
The resolution
Forty-three minutes after Turn 170 above, with about 5 minutes
remaining in the lesson for that day, and after the students had
completed their work with the textbook, T1 calls the students back into
whole-class interaction format and proceeds like this:
626 T1 now (.) let's^ think about (.) what happened in the
Quit India Program he:ere^ (1) we-had (1) what violence (.) going
[on.sup.v] (1) was there violence^=
627 Ss = [yes]
640 T1 now (1) does thi:is^ (.) fit (2) does this fit in with (.)
[satyagraha.sup.v]=
641 S5 =no=
642 T1 =Gandhi's policy of non-violence
643 S5 well-they're-not^ (.) violent against people (.)
they're being (.) violent against objects really=
644 S6 =yeah they are^ (.) 'cause the trains (.) if they like
wreck the tracks now and people come along and they could break
something and then
645 S5 but they're [not (.) setting out to hurt any]
646 S6 [it's just contradicting it]
647 S5 people (.) they're setting out to stop like
communications between the British=
648 S6 =but their acts are still violent
649 S it's meant to be non violent all together (.) I read a
question or something yesterday and it said (.) or the other day and it
said (.) does violence against property count as violence does it fit in
with it^ (.) and that's what you need to think about 'cause
(.) you could have difference of opinions^ (.) you could say that it
does or that it doesn't^
650 T1 see^ you could^ you could^ (.) by taking away the tra:acks^
(1) if that creates a train crash and people die in that train crash^
that's^ [violence.sup.v] (1) against people^ (1) it's not just
violence against the train tracks is [it.sup.v] (.) so:o (.)=
651 S6 =its violence to everyone=
652 T1 =does^ that go against Gandhi's (1) belief=
653 S6 =yeah=
654 T1 =it does^=
655 S =yeah
656 T1 so why^ is this happening (.) what does this sa::ay about
(.) the Indian people in nineteen-forty-two-forty-three
657 S they were sick of (.) Gandhi's thing
658 S they were really angry
659 T1 they were really angry (.) and-they-were (.) were they sick
of Gandhi's policies^
660 S they weren't^ sick of it they just thought that it
wasn't working so why not try a different way^=
661 S =it was their only solution
664 T1 alright^ so^ (1) when we think about (2) the idealism versus
realism approach here^ (.) India we know gets independence 1947 India
gets independence (.) was it^ (.1) pu:urely based on the idealism of
[Gandhi.sup.v]
665 Ss no
666 T1 alright^ there was some realism in there [sup.v]there was
some violence (.) in-fact=
667 S =there was lots^ of violence=
668 T1 =there was lots^ of violence (.) so^ (1) what^ we need to
consider is how much difference was there from Gandhi's idealism to
the reality of getting [independence.sup.v]
The resolution (665-666) was an exploration of causes, contexts and
contestations around the materials available, framed in the resolution
of the pedagogic strategy of 'realism versus idealism'. There
are no multiple, diverse materials introduced into the lesson's
main line of talk; rather there is a single account and the talk assumes
a narrative structure thus inviting a common-sensically available,
vernacular moral order for evaluating the activities of the historical
actors.
It is interesting to note that the exchange structures used in this
classroom were well suited to, and indeed encouraged the production of
idiomatic, narrative accounts of historical events. T1 drew students
into choosing one or the other potential answer to a large historical
question, encouraged them to argue among themselves common-sensically,
about what, for example, is and is not to count as 'violence'
(e.g., Turns 643-648), and used invented conversational exchanges to
mimic the mood of the populace at large ('look yeah nice idea
Gandhi,' Turn 170), or to draw out some conclusion he favours
('if I said to you ...' etc., Turn 37). So the historical
events were 'enacted', offering ready, vernacular judgements
about intentions and moral value, the exchange structure required
students to contribute from their general cultural knowledge about human
conduct, and the resolution that is the goal of the lesson (to determine
'how much difference was there from Gandhi's idealism to the
reality of getting independence,' Turn 670) was worked up
collaboratively, in a sense, 'put to the vote' on the basis of
the contributions of the students, shaped by the questioning and
prompting of T1. The engagement with the textbook was framed by this
overall realism-idealism choice, rather than by any explicated goal
relating to the features expected of senior history such as explanations
using factors and cause-effect relations and site-based interpretations,
the crafting of exposition and discussion, or the use of
historiographical methods.
Exhibit 2: 'No doubt, none whatsoever'
The lesson presented as Exhibit 2 had Ss ask questions and
collectively produce a written report of their tests of particular
accounts, including accounts deliberately established as plausible by T2
himself as a preliminary to the Ss' own research. T2 had provided
Ss with a package of materials containing copies of the key documents to
which he referred in the lesson. In teaching the Cuban Missile Crisis T2
first established the 1960s narrative of Kennedy's
'victory' over the Soviets, using Schlesinger's (1965)
pro-Kennedy assessment of an unconditional Soviet 'back down'
which supposedly ended the crisis. He portrayed this tale as established
knowledge by posing several broad questions. Only then, as second step,
were new questions asked to reveal the post 1990 view. (The 1990
revisionist view focuses on a deal regarding US missiles in Turkey and
the Cold War situation in Berlin, which together offer a more complex
and less sympathetic understanding of the US administration in 1962.) On
the walls of the classroom are pictures of Bob Dylan and John Lennon,
and a clock set permanently at 11.59.
The engagement
T2's introduction was an extended monologue recounting
personal recollections of the Cuban Missile Crisis and its effects on
himself and his subsequent interest and beliefs. He drew an experiential
parallel between his own remembered feelings and Ss' recollections
of the 9/11 events in New York. He presented a contemporary protest song
as, in a sense a pre-disciplinary challenge to official accounts, that
amounts to an analogy to the students' task of using documents to
verify or challenge official accounts of events and the allocation of
morally defensible and indefensible behaviours --'there was no
doubt, none whatsoever'.
1 T2 I remember waking up on (.) the morning of Tuesday October
twenty-third just a regular morning (.) a bit like you probably woke up
on a:ah what-would-it-have-been (.) would have been September the
twelfth when we got the news about what happened in New York (.) so much
as you woke up that day to see the Twin Towers come down (.) I woke up
on October twenty-third to hear the radio (.)
(.) my friends were listening very intently to it (.) and John F
Kennedy was speaking and this is what he was saying I'll read out
what he was saying to you (.) this is what I heard (.) he said 'it
shall be the policy of this nation to regard any nuclear missile
launched from Cuba as a attack by the Soviet Union on the United States
(.) requiring a full (.) retaliatory response upon the Soviet
Union' (.) now I'd just stepped out of bed and decided to go
out to the kitchen to get breakfast (.) and I heard that (.) I heard
that (.) something had happened (.) something had clearly occurred
because Cuba had not been in the news (.) missiles in Cuba didn't
seem to make any sense (.) and the President was saying that there could
be a full retaliatory response upon the Soviet Union (1) and it was
quite clear ah that something extraordinary was happening (.) something
very dangerous was happening (1)
I remember all that day at school being concerned that ah we could
be plunged into a nuclear war (1) that afternoon sitting with my friend
(.) Claire (.) on the wall outside her house (.) we talked about it (.)
we were quite worried about it (.) and then something or rather uncanny
happened (1) we heard this rolling thunder in the distance and it just
seemed to keep going and going (.) and we looked at each other and we
thought (.) it's started maybe it's started (1) it was a
thunderstorm I-have-to-tell-you ((students laugh)) that's
all-it-was but there was that sense there was sort of a real palpable
sense that oh my god (1) maybe it has (.) maybe it's started (.)
maybe it's actually occurring (2) so there-it-was (.) a crisis a
full blown crisis much greater than any that I'd ever known (.) um
in my life and (.) for the next seven days we worried about it (.) we
listened to every new bulletin we could (.) and ah we didn't get a
lot of information about it but finally on Sunday October twenty eighth
we heard that the crisis was over (.) that um Khrushchev had decided to
take his missiles out of Cuba and return them back to the Soviet Union
(.) and everyone breathed a sigh of relief (1) and there was no doubt
(.) none whatsoever in our minds that Kennedy had [won.sup.v] (.) there
was no doubt (.) that the Russians had caused it (.) they'd been
responsible for it (.) and that Kennedy (.) the young handsome president
at that time that we all loved (.) had (.) basically stood firm (.) and
that the Russians had backed [down.sup.v]
Without drawing the students into any exchanges at all, T2 set out
to manage their attention by creating a sense of a drama with strong
personal relevance through the use of (1) reference to events to which
the Ss will have had some comparable reaction, (2) the strategic use of
pauses ('out to the kitchen to get breakfast (.) and I heard that
(.) I heard that (.) something had happened (.) something had clearly
occurred'), (3) a direct quote from Kennedy's public
announcement, and 4) the embedding of these apparently momentous events
into the mundane setting of his daily life ('I'd just stepped
out of bed and decided to go out to the kitchen to get breakfast,'
'sitting with my friend (.) Claire (.) on the wall outside her
house', 'it was a thunderstorm I-have-to-tell-you ((students
laugh)) that's all-it-was').
The talk in the phase that followed concerned how this changed his
outlook on life, and how it was that the certainty surrounding each of
the points in the last paragraph above was eroded by subsequent
historical analyses.
The core business
T2 went on to use declassified National Security Archive documents
to revisit all of these claims about the crisis, claims about which
there was 'no doubt none whatsoever in our minds'. He also
used the collection of papers referenced on the home page of that site
(Chang & Kornbluh, 1998), and had students build up a grid in which
the basic claims made in Schlesinger's A Thousand Days: JFK in the
White House (1965)--that T2 himself had outlined as his own
experience--were evaluated against sources that are more recent and from
a variety of locations and organisations.
T2 showed a map of Cuba and the USA with circles indicating
apparent ranges of the missiles with this commentary
2 T2 now this one (1) you see it's on the wall beside the
clock (.) and you have it in your beautiful package of documents as well
(.) and the island of Cuba indicating the range at which the missiles
could do some damage (.) and in fact they underestimated the range as we
will see later (1) so you can play with this yourselves you can log into
this at home or at school (.) there are some important documents and a
very good analysis of the crisis ((interruption)) ... so a lot of what
we can use to test Schlesinger here comes from the Russian source and
also the National Security Archive's sources (1) and more recent
accounts ((lists two more recent books on Cold War and Cuban missile
crisis)) there's a chapter from here in your sources that source
you have and we will use that today and then the most recent source on
the Cuban missile crisis this book was published in June this year (1)
this is the most up to date piece of information available on the Cuban
missile crisis and it's a day-by-day and ultimately minute by
minute produced by the author Martin Dobbs and he has used extensively
the material from the National Security Archive and the Chang and
Kornbluh stuff and he's put together a very very believable account
of the Cuban missile crisis (.) so in a sense it shouldn't surprise
you that what we are going to do is to ... take a good look at
Schlesinger's view
A critical aspect of the task that T2 framed for the students, in
light of our interest in literacy education and history, concerns the
direct location of the text and the work that was to be done that day.
The work was to be placed in the larger picture of the materials that
they now had access to online and in their 'beautiful
package': 'you can play with this yourselves you can log into
this at home or at school.' It is the package of diverse and
potentially conflicting materials, along with the NSA website, that the
students are to take as the textual base of the lesson, and, indeed, of
their understanding of what did or did not happen, and what might have
happened. The lesson did not constitute this inquiry; it was named as
merely the stimulus for the inquiry, and the moral implications of this
task were presented as beyond what could be afforded by an idiomatic,
personal-drama account of the Crisis.
The resolution, or not
The students' work on the Cuban Missile Crisis proceeded over
a long period of time following this lesson. It resulted in a set of
assignments that compared and contrasted a wide range of sources. The
issue of the relative reliability of these sources is exemplified in the
key task that T2 set up for this lesson as follows:
3 T2 ((writes 'reliability meter')) (.) and if
you've managed to (.) if you've searched and searched and
searched and you found no evidence to challenge (.) what Schlesinger
says (.) then your reliability meter will be up here v ((demonstrates))
OK^ for that point then the same for that one and the same for that one
... ((writes headings on three columns: 'US was not
responsible' 'crisis well managed by JFK' and 'no
deals')) if you're able to write information in here that
challenges any of these positions then the reliability meter is starting
to come down depending on whether you think Schlesinger's argument
is sustainable or unsustainable
The work was begun in the lesson but needed to be completed out of
lesson time and required working through the materials provided. The
interpretive framework consisted of locating the information that allows
a judgement on Schlesinger's three claims, and reaching a
judgement, not about what happened, or who was right or wrong, but
rather on the reliability of contrasting sources, and, therefore, the
inadequacy of T2's own initial sense that 'there was no
doubt'.
Conclusions
So in the brief snippets we provide from these two lessons we
observe different forms of engagement, both interactionally and in terms
of how the Ss were either led into an interpretive framework (T1's
'realism versus realism' device) or directed outward to
additional, potentially conflicting accounts; they were led away from or
toward the explanatory complexity afforded by a range of texts from
different sites, toward or away from an idea of history as documenting
that complexity or producing a single, durable account. These different
forms of engagement elaborate the work of Monte-Sano and De La Paz
(2012) who have identified important writing task strategies in the
classroom, as orchestrated by the teacher, that demonstratively improve
the historical reasoning of school students. Our conclusions suggest
further interactional dimensions are potentially at work relating
literacy to the history classroom through various exchange structures.
On the one hand we observe a highly interactive lesson that
successfully engaged and sustained students in exchanges of views that
they evidently expressed with some conviction, that are framed in
idiomatic terms through everyday dramatisations of individual
motivations and imaginary dialogues; on the other hand we see a more
directed, teacher-managed event where the engagement is developed
through a recollection of the significant personal consequences of the
events under study on T2 as an adolescent, including the growing
realisation as an adult historian that the convictions he held
'with no doubt' turned out to be at best questionable and at
worst just plain wrong. T2's Ss are provided with a collection of
sources from which they are to assemble their own critique of the
official accounts of the time. In a sense the course of T2's and
his Ss' lesson enacted the maturing of T2's idiomatic
reactions to events at the time into a more complex and ambiguous set of
understandings made available to him through his study of a variety of
competing documentary accounts in the context of his study of history.
There is much less interactional involvement of Ss in T2's class,
but they were with a teacher for whom the events under scrutiny, and the
process of scrutiny itself, were both live and life-changing.
Which of these lessons was more in tune with the expectations of
the Year 11 curriculum of the time? Which better prepared Ss for the
formal study of history? Or for a sophisticated approach to popular
media versions of historical events? Or for writing assignments as part
of their high-stakes Year 12 history work? For our purposes, which
exemplified best the distinctive contribution that history can make to
an understanding of, as we put it above, the shift into the spotlight of
the relationship between writing, belief, and knowledge that is at the
core of an understanding of the conduct and value of history?
In one respect contrasting these lessons shows us both the benefits
and shortfalls of 'the literate bias of schooling' (Olson,
1977), of reading and writing as the primary ways of teachers'
displays of valued knowledge forms to students, and students'
displays as they create materials to display what they have learned.
Literacy affords the indispensable benefit that we can compare texts
across a range of vantage points on human behaviour, and that we can
think technically and in abstract ways about the forces of human history
that may be partly invisible even to the people who actively took part
in key events. But, in view of the research of Hynd, Holschuh and
Hubbard (2004), literacy-based instruction alone may not afford the
sense of responsibility for adopting and defending a position, compared
to the probing that is possible in highly interactive sessions that
involve disagreements.
Expert history teachers destabilise students' assumptions (T1:
'why on earth would I...'; T2: 'there was no doubt none
whatsoever...') and untangle students' understandings about
what history provides by way of deeper and contestable interpretation.
In both lessons students and teachers are overtly positioned astride the
complex relationship that Tosh (2008) identified between academic and
popular history. A question that is central to this inquiry is whether
the discipline itself, as professional historians recognise it, can be
at least partly reconfigured in an authentic manner in different ways
when teaching school students? Our view here has been that it is
studying classroom talk that can draw our attention to students'
participation in learning activities, what resources, helpful and
otherwise, they bring to that participation as both speakers and
listeners, and how they witness the ways in which their own and
others' contributions are worked in, reworked, or worked out of the
ongoing exchanges. In the case of history, students bring the
community's imperfect understandings of the craft of the historian.
The captivating aspect of this is that students project an enthusiasm
and curiosity often sparked by instances of popular history such as
movies, television series, and family ancestral lore. But the
community's interests in popular history can consolidate
interpretive devices such as the investment of explanatory power in
notions of nationhood, race, gender, ideology, and other
'lessons' from popular history; and it is not as though
students never hear these notions inserted into contemporary political
debates (Allender, 2015).
These investments, and their misappropriation as history, already
form part of the learning resources most students bring to school.
Re-rendering these investments into the authentic academic discipline of
history involves teachers destabilising students' assumptions and
reworking them into deeper and contestable processes of interpretation
(Seixas & Morton, 2006). As Nokes and others (2007) concluded:
Certainly, living in a democratic society during the
information age demands that citizens be critical
readers of the barrage of information that inundates
them on a daily basis ... there are (sic) a variety of
sources to be read, evaluated, synthesised, and interpreted.
Therefore, exposing students to a variety of
sources and educating them in the use of heuristics,
which they can use to generate their own interpretations,
seems more like a necessity than an add-on that
is offered to only a few students in advanced placement
courses ... We all need the heuristics of a historian.
What better place to learn them than in a history classroom?
(p. 503)
Our study aims to illustrate the importance of exploring and
understanding the details of interactional features of classroom
teaching and learning as the often unseen elements in the historical
literacy frame. This frame operates 'around' teachers and
learners in the history classroom, not so visible in the academic
discipline's account of its own practices. This critical dimension,
manifest in different ways through the expertise of experienced history
teachers, is a key issue when understanding the difference between
school history and that practised by professional historians,
contributing to our understanding of the implications of these
differences (Wineburg, 2001, pp. 63-88).
But these skills and dispositions do not pertain only to history
classrooms. A 'variety of sources to be read, evaluated,
synthesised, and interpreted' faces citizens who wish to be
informed in a way that allows them to act on their knowledge, and to
mobilise their communities and societies to concerted action. The
potential ramifications of 'an historical perspective' reach
beyond school subject history into what it means to live in a
literacy-saturated society.
Acknowledgements
Some of the material included in this paper formed part of an
address by the second author to the Australian Literacy Educators'
Association annual conference in Darwin, 2014. Data used in this paper
formed part of a larger project funded by the Australian Research
Council's Discovery Program, project number DP0663300.
Co-investigating with the authors were Professor Nan Bahr, Dr Carol
Christensen, Dr Tony Wright, and Dr Georgina Barton.
Tim Allender and Peter Freebody
Faculty of Education and Social Work, The University of Sydney
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Tim Allender is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Education
and Social Work at The University of Sydney. He teaches history
education and researches the dynamics of the history classroom. He is
also interested in cross-cultural education themes. He has several
grants from AusAid's global education project; for example, he is
researching the effects of poverty on the human rights of females in
Asia. His book, Learning Femininity in Colonial India, 1820-1932, will
be published in early 2016 by Manchester University Press.
Peter Freebody is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in
Australia and an Honorary Professor in the Faculty of Education and
Social Work at The University of Sydney. His interests are in literacy
education, classroom interaction, and research methods. He is a member
of the Literacy Research Panel of the International Literacy Association
and the 2014 recipient of that Association's W.S. Gray Citation for
outstanding international contributions to the field of literacy.
Table 1. Elements of reading and writing demands for history over
the school years (Christie & Derewianka, 2008)
early mid-primary late primary
primary
Chronological recounting biography biography
personal empathetic
experiences autobiography
non-chronological period and site
studies
Rhetorical
early mid-secondary
secondary
Chronological historical
accounts
non-chronological period and site explanations
studies using factors
and causes-
consequences
site
interpretations
Rhetorical exposition and
discussion
late secondary
Chronological
non-chronological
Rhetorical exposition and
discussion using
historiographical
methods
