Threshold concept 7 |
EVIDENTIAL ENQUIRY |
Evidence rarely speaks until it is questioned
Threshold concept 7 |
EVIDENTIAL ENQUIRY |
The development of the historical process of working with evidence is also indispensable to developing knowledge and understanding of the past and should be an integral part of the History Threshold Concepts adopted by the department. It is suggested that a possible starting point for exploration of this History Threshold Concepts could be:
History is about evidence that has survived from the past like a witness and is never complete but It did not fall out of the sky and like most witnesses it should be questioned rigorously. “A document is a witness and like most witnesses it rarely speaks until one begins to question it” (Marc Bloch) “One of the most important obligations of the historian is to keep good faith with the dead and not to score cheap points off them” (John Cannon) This is an area which as received a plethora of pedagogical consideration by the history teaching community. In respect of thinking through the skill of analysing evidence the HA Website communicates that: “The use of sources within history lessons has consistently been included within the National Curriculum in England and as a specific assessment objective at GCSE and A-level, on the grounds that unless students know how claims about the past are generated and validated within the subject community, they will be poorly equipped to make sense of or to discriminate between conflicting claims about the past. While the use of sources depends on a process of critical evaluation, history teachers and curriculum designers are now very aware of the risks associated with reducing such evaluation to a series of mechanistic formulae in which ‘source work’ is detached from the enquiry process of answering specific and worthwhile questions about the past. The materials in this section help alert teachers to those risks as well as illuminating important misconceptions that may prevent students from developing a more powerful conception of the nature of historical knowledge The resources here offer a range of practical strategies, rooted in academic and practitioner research, for equipping students to use sources of many different kinds as evidence (rather than merely passing judgment on them).” |
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TH What's the wisdom on evidential enquiry?
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TH New Novice or Nervous?
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