Abstract:

How can we help secondary school students to think critically about history? The discipline of history is built on theoretical and epistemological ideas about knowledge, time, and history. Helping students to explore these philosophical topics provide opportunities to stimulate their critical thinking skills as it challenges students to take a bird’s eye perspective on the nature of history. This contrasts with historical questions that are usually discussed in history education, questions that can be answered by studying historical sources. Philosophical questions about history cover topics such as the nature of time, knowledge, ethics, or causation, e.g. ‘Is it possible to live outside of time?’ or ‘Does a historian understand the war better than a victim?’. Through philosophical dialogues, teachers can stimulate reflection about theoretical concepts as the teacher acts as a dialogue facilitator scaffolding the thinking process of students by asking further questions. These are questions that inspire students to provide arguments, clarifications, or new perspectives.

Through Educational Design Research, this project (2022-2024) cyclically develops a teaching method to stimulate students’ critical thinking about history inspired by philosophical dialogue. This study aims to determine the design criteria for the method (RQ1), capture how (student-) teachers respond to this approach (RQ2). First, a literature review and expert interviews allow to formulate a first version of design criteria for the teaching method, leading to the development of the prototype of the didactic material. Subsequently, the teaching method is introduced in four Flemish secondary school classes and in four groups of (pre-service and in-service) teacher development. Teachers interviews allow answering RQ2.

RQ1 Four design criteria surfaced in our study: (I) use simple and inspiring philosophical questions to enhance student reflection, (II) challenge students through different thinking exercises to stimulate taking alternative perspectives and exploring different philosophical ideas, (III) imbed the philosophical approach in different historical contexts to connect abstract to concrete ideas, (IV) facilitate the dialogues by taking the Socratic stance, meaning that the teacher refrains from expressing his/hers- opinion during the dialogue.

RQ2 In the try-outs, teachers indicate that they already work on students’ knowledge about the discipline, but interviews revealed that they often only did in an implicit way. Teachers observe that the philosophical approach helps to explicate the nature of historical knowledge. Furthermore, teachers indicated that they have some resistance towards allowing doubt in class. Indeed, in a society where fake news and uncertainty about scientific and historical facts is rife, a logical response may be to emphasize that some knowledge is fixed and banish doubt in class. However, engaging in philosophical dialogues about doubt and knowledge can scaffold students’ thinking about knowledge and truth.

We will discuss the opportunities and challenges of implementing philosophical dialogue in history classes, and explore what this approach means for teacher training programs.

Keywords:

Secondary education, nature of history, philosophical dialogue, critical thinking.