Through the lessons, the students are expected to develop the following important skills:
1. Foster a historical mindset and cultivate historical inquiry skills
These include the ability to evaluate evidence, to see, assess, and understand multiple viewpoints, interpretations, and arguments. Students should feel comfortable engaging with historical materials, including non-textual sources such as images and material culture. Ultimately, students should see history not as a series of dates and narratives told by authority figures, but as a discipline of active inquiry that opens up to everyday life. That is to say, to see that everything around them, be it everyday objects, religious beliefs, news stories, has a history; these histories can become points of departure for further inquiry, linking History with everyday life.
How to cultivate this skill?
- Organize group discussions
- Provide as much as possible diverse sources in different formats (textual, non textual)
- Encourage students to approach materials with a critical mind, rather than accepting and memorizing texts.
- Challenge students with research projects, whenever possible involving interviews of local resource persons
- In upper levels, introduce historiographical inquiry through questions such as: “How do biases and prejudice influence how we interpret the past? How does our understanding of the past influence our choices in the present?”
2. Nurture a sense of tolerance and an appreciation for cultural diversity
Historical empathy is the ability to put oneself in a historical figure’s shoes, to have understanding of the historical relativity of values, conditions of possibility, and the choices available to historical actors.
How to cultivate this skill?
- Organize role plays
- Ask students about what they would’ve done in a particular situation encountered in history.
3. Cultivate “historical empathy”
These include the ability to understand and accept other peoples’ perspectives and values. The lessons should go beyond antagonisms between states or peoples, as has often been the case in the teaching of war histories.
How to cultivate this skill?
- Highlight commonalities, such as common experiences, without glossing over differences
- Encourage students to identify positive aspects of relationships, such as co-operations, trade, negotiations, and co-existence, between peoples, states, and different cultures.
- Value materials that tell the stories of everyday life, rather that that of the government and elites. These may include oral histories, myths and traditions, which need to be contextualized.
4. Initiate a love for history
The suggested lessons propose activities which aim as much as possible to enhance active learning to go beyond the mere memorization of facts. Active learning techniques is a form of learning that engage students through doing things and thinking about what they are doing. Activities become more exciting and engaging and usually foster a deeper understanding of and interest in the historical topics from students.
How to cultivate this skill?
Many active learning activities are proposed in the units, and many more can be developed and contextualized by the teachers. The list below is non exhaustive but proposed a range of activities that can be set up.
