Educators have often been guided by a conventional "wisdom" that students in grades 5 and 6 do not yet have a sense of historical thinking. This idea is challenged in an article entitled "Historical Thinking in the Elementary Years: A Review of CurrentResearch" by Amy von Heyking, in which she concludes that:
1. Thinking historically does not just mean thinking
about the past; it involves seeing oneself in time, as an inheritor of the
legacies of the past and as a maker of the future.
2. Many studies support the claim that elementary
children and adolescents can develop quite sophisticated historical thinking
skills within an appropriate context of active engagement with source material,
alternative accounts and teaching that scaffolds children's emerging
understandings and skills.
3. Understanding change over time is central to
historical thinking.
4. Children who are able to appreciate the
subtleties of historical change are those who can make connections with their
own experiences.
These ideas are quite relevant to Jewish education, which
attempts to help students view themselves as part of the continuum of Jewish
history and tradition. In a recent article published in Hayedion
entitled "Inheriting the Past, Building the Future: Developing
Historical Thinking in Upper Elementary Student",
JETS associate Stan Peerless, in collaboration with Lisa Micley, apply von
Hayking's conclusions to Jewish education. In the article, they describe new
online Jewish history modules being developed by Behrman House that can be
integrated into different curricular areas in 5th and 6th
grade Jewish studies. The program utilizes the idea of a time travel app that
enables the children in the story to experience different events,
personalities, and periods in Jewish history as they search for answers to
essential questions that derive from their contemporary lives.
The article includes examples from the curriculum that
demonstrate how von Hayking's principles are incorporated in the program. These examples also indicate the degree to
which online learning can be used to make classroom learning experiential.
The authors conclude with guidelines for teachers who might
want to create their own Jewish history modules for upper elementary students:
· The first principle that can be derived is that history teaching
does not begin in the past. Rather, it must begin in the present, with the
actual experiences of the students and with issues that they or their
contemporaries face.
· The second principle is that students should be introduced to the
broad strokes of historical change in Jewish history rather than to isolated
events that occurred on specific dates.
· The third principle is that the historical changes found in
history must be explicitly tied to the personal lives of the students and their
contemporary reality. Furthermore, the students must be actively engaged in
discovering and formulating those connections.
Effective teaching of Jewish history can provide students with a
learning experience that fulfills the function of historical learning as
described by historian Gerda Lerner: "It gives us a sense of
perspective about our own lives and encourages us to transcend the finite span
of our life-time by identifying with the generations that came before us and
measuring our own actions against the generations that will follow … We can
expand our reach and with it our aspirations."
JETS online history class "Comparing the Land for Peace issues that the Jews of the Roman era faced with the Land for Peace issues that Israel faces today:
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