By Roli S
Social studies teachers know that thinking deeply about history as a story—and about the values and learning of the people who write those stories—is perhaps the most crucial work in social studies classrooms. Historians read skeptically by nature. They assume that somebody is trying to shape things in a particular way, and they’re always looking for bias. That is why it becomes very important to teach students in the classrooms to approach history in that more negotiated sense—to understand that there are facts, but they’re contested, and you must read multiple texts to understand that.
How can we equip students in schools and colleges with these skills? One way is to encourage them to collapse the distances between historical eras and their current lives. By allowing students, for example, to inhabit the role of a central political or ruling figure, or speak from the perspective of an historical political figure or freedom fighter or social reformer, teachers can provide them with the experience of tackling complex, real-world issues that foster the sort of critical thinking and inquiry that prepares them for their lives as active citizens, consumers, and even employees. By collapsing the distance between historical eras and the present day, we motivate students to ask hard questions and dig deeper into the past.
Immersing students in history can also be far more engaging and lead to better academic outcomes. How can teachers bring historical thinking into their classrooms? To begin with, encourage students to study micro histories all around us. The history that surrounds a few important inventions. By merging historical thinking with science and posing hard questions and provocative miscalculations about groundbreaking inventions that students use every day, students can not only list the changes it has made to the material world, but also to the less tangible ideas and concepts, like human psychology and belief systems. Students can create a timeline of the invention’s history, along with a second timeline that tracks a new history in which the invention never happened.
For example, to go deeper students may study a topic like the internet and its effect on modern life. Researching the birth of the internet and discussing what its initial goals were and how it changed along the way. How it has impacted human psychology and made nations and societies more vulnerable to its good and bad effects. How it has become more difficult to govern a nation and keep people convinced due to these inventions. Does being more connected help or hurt us? Does the internet bring us together or divide us? Does it promote a fair society in a harmless way? In other words, did the internet achieve its initial stated goals? These kinds of classroom discussions will demystify scientific advancements by revealing their messy historical reality and examine the cultural subtexts and micro-histories that are present all around us.
In the heart of history is embedded the intent of many founding documents. Ask students to become delegates to the Constitutional Conferences. Get students thinking deeply about the reasons and intentions of founding fathers in framing our constitution and to enliven discussion about whether, and to what extent, we should remain faithful and committed to the founders’ initial aspirations and goals. Engage them in debates on controversial constitutional issues. Ask them to role play arguments over key issues such as division of power, such as meaning of ‘secular’ in the emerging new economically progressive Bharat. This activity gives students a chance to learn and then apply—rather than simply read—foundational texts such as the Constitution of India.
It also helps students in a history class if teachers will let them analyse structure and artifacts like a future historian. They can ask students to sharpen their analytical skills by choosing a modern-day structure or any artifact from a museum and imagine what any historian hundred to two hundred years from now might infer from the structure or artifact about the nation today. This activity fits into a variety of curricula, as it gets students to practice evaluating artifacts, structures, monuments so that they can make hypotheses about a society from its material culture and weigh how different interpretations of historical objects can shape our understanding of the past. Everything from a musical instrument, an electronic gadget to any modern architectural wonder falls under the umbrella of that definition.
For teachers, part of this setup work also includes discussing and modeling for students how to analyse any object. For example, students can consider, the newly inaugurated ‘Sansad Bhavan of Bharat’, two to three hundred years from now, by attempting to answer questions like these: What is its significance for the India of that time? What does it tell you about the people and architects who made it? What does it tell you about technology and culture of the land? What does it suggest about the political role and the aspiration of the society of that era? Why was it considered ‘Pride of Bharat’ by many at that time? Why was it considered as a symbol of new, independent, self-reliant India? While the exercise might seem simple, it demands that students make several cognitive leaps to situate themselves in the future and apply deep, analytical thinking about a seemingly inane object.
To get students thinking deeply about what it means for a historical narrative to be “accurate” and how bias often creeps in, look at the facts through the eyes of another culture or country. Students can look at the language and framing around the Freedom Movement of India in the textbook and then compare it to the language and framing of the same freedom movement in a textbook or newspaper, or another primary document of any other country. As part of this activity, students consider disparate historical perspectives, interpret the biases and limited perspectives present in textbook accounts, and evaluate the quality of historical sources of information. Some questions students can consider: How are the historical accounts similar? How are they different? What possible biases or limited perspectives exist in our textbook’s account of this event? What possible biases or limited perspectives exist in the textbooks of other countries on the account of this event? Students should also be asked, explain why you think, or do not think, that one of these textbook accounts is more accurate than the other. By doing so they can dig deeper into what the concept of accuracy even means when it comes to history. As social studies teachers it is important to put students themselves as historians, who are often tasked with examining as many points of view as possible, as well as the limited perspectives of those viewpoints, in their attempt to understand the historical significance and impact of an event, object or incident.
Developing bold and fair thinkers in school involves nurturing students’ critical thinking skills, fostering a love for history, and encouraging them to engage with the subject in a meaningful way. Remember that developing bold historical thinkers is a process that takes time and consistent effort. It’s important to create a supportive and intellectually stimulating environment where students feel comfortable exploring and challenging historical narratives and ideas.
(Roli S is an Educator, Teacher Trainer, Author and School Reviewer based in Thane)
