'Why am I accused of being a heretic?' A pedagogical framework for stimulating historical contextualisation

One of the challenges facing students who want to make sense of a source or an interpretation of the past is the need to place it in its context. Various research studies have shown that students tend instead to approach sources and interpretations with a form of ‘presentism' resulting in a number of misconceptions and misunderstandings. Huijgen and Holthuis share in this article the results from a research project conducted into how students might be helped to overcome presentism through an emphasis on historical contextualisation. In particular, they outline a three-stage pedagogical model that was used to help pupils reconstruct the context of a source, and they set out their findings from their evaluation of this strategy...