Historical Fieldwork as Reflection on the Uses of History

Abstract

History pervades public culture and everyday life: through family histories, political discourses, popular culture and media, classroom instruction, museum experiences, and commemorative events. Historical sites such as memorials, museums, and heritage places can be interpretive sites to help students actively participate in public debates about the meaning of the past and how the past is represented. Well-designed historical fieldwork offers students authentic learning experiences in historical investigation and gives them opportunities to more fully consider the “variety of voices in which the echo of the past is heard” (Gadamer in Truth and Method. Continuum, New York, NY, p. 285, 2006). This chapter provides a framework based on the systematic questioning of historical sites to support rigorous fieldwork as a central part of history education to develop students’ historical reasoning skills, conceptual understanding, and knowledge about the past. It focuses on the ways history is represented and how it has been used to communicate meanings about identity (individual and collective)—past, present, and future (Nordgren in Theory Res Soc Educ 44:479–504, 2016). The chapter calls for an interpretive approach to fieldwork to help students think about the ways different historical sites represent the past, the ways they “work” to convey particular pasts, and the different kinds of “readings” that can be done to more critically interrogate these representations. Inquiry-based fieldwork can support this kind of work by scaffolding students to more critically question sites as “representations” of the past and providing them with the means to consider how histories get constructed, for what purposes, and for whom.