Content and Pedagogy in History Teaching and Learning

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CONTENT AND PEDAGOGY IN HISTORY TEACHING AND LEARNING 1. Discuss how Lee teaches what he calls second order concepts in history. These include the historical time, change, empathy, cause, evidence and accounts. According to Lee (p. 41), the concept of time is central to history. Lee mentioned that time in the teaching of history is measured through a conventional system of dates. Dates of events, eras, tragedies, significant accounts and occurrences amongst others are equally important to students for them to develop a chronological understanding of the events that took place in history. Lee also mentioned that teachers at the elementary level often say that their students have no concept of time (p.41). He cited an example among first graders and it showed that that historical distinction between long ago and now had been assimilated into the common-sense distinctions of old versus young and old versus new. It means that students particularly those at the basic level find difficulty understanding the concept of time given that we are now living in a different era and rapidly changing environment whereas, some factors such as proliferation of media and technology have had affected the perspectives of these young students in distinguishing the old from the new. He reiterated that a sense of period is a sort of difficult achievement for students and it is a fact that it requires a good deal of knowledge (p. 42). A profound understanding of how the historians accounted past events is deemed needed by the students, along with the underlying themes that they used as basis of their thinking to construct historical facts. The concept of change was viewed by Lee as a notion whereas everything gets better and that the past can be viewed in terms of deficits. Such deficits are present in the past due to lack or non-presence of materials, non-existence of

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