Abstract:

History education research has recently focused on expert Historical Thinking (EHT) to accommodate emerging interpretive models of history as narrative and increasing digitization of historical evidence and investigation. Still, linear causal views and non-digital media dominate classroom practices. Current research exclusively focuses on the teacher side of the student-teacher dynamic to enact constructivist pedagogy forms of learning history by doing history in classrooms as a model of historian community of inquiry. However, study after study shows that teachers' pedagogical and content knowledge of EHT has little bearing on their successful implementation of EHT due to curricular coverage, control, and assessment requirements. In this paper, I argue that focusing on the student side of the student-teacher dynamic may be more productive. I survey online groups to show self-directed learning of six concepts of EHT is already taking place outside of classrooms through the design of rule-based rhetoric of roleplaying digital games in Twine software. I further argue that in Twine-mediated production environments, learners have access to a design vocabulary that facilitates discussion of concepts of EHT such as concepts of Historical Perspective Taking, Cause and Consequence, and Historical Significance. In that learning process, students can adapt new identities not only makers of digital artifacts, but also as historians. Classroom practices must support learners to develop and share historical themes of interest to them in connected multimodal production pedagogy environments to bring EHT inside classrooms. In the end, I argue that production pedagogy forms within a Connected Learning framework can most effectively frame history classroom practices to enact concepts of EHT in Twine for two main reasons. First, these pedagogy forms stress learners’ interests and values within classrooms. Second, they emphasize that connecting to affinity groups beyond classrooms requires paying attention to previously invisible barriers to learning that continue to exist outside of schools, particularly, for non-dominant youth and particularly within digital game communities. As a result, a connected historical production pedagogy environment can maximizes the benefits of Twine technology EHT inside history classrooms. Since most design-based and game-based learning literature is focused on STEM learning areas, this research is also addressing a gap in game-based and design-based learning approaches to humanities.

Keywords:

Game-based learning, design-based learning, history education, digital history.