Historical experiences: A framework for encountering complex historical sources

Introduction

In daily life, we are inundated with information about the past. We encounter history in historical narratives in television documentaries, films, books and games with historical topics, and through complex historical sources – such as historic sites and eyewitness accounts of the past – that are comprised of multiple media and/or levels of interaction, and that engender intellectual, affective and physical engagement in the learner. Yet, we know very little about what and how people learn from these complex historical sources. Investigations of how people engage with complex historical sources have traditionally sought to explain the encounters as life-changing peak experiences (for example, Latham, 2013) or as atomized source work (for example, Baron, 2012). While these elements are both essential for explaining parts of the experience of engaging with complex sources, more integrated approaches (Endacott and Brooks, 2013; Wineburg, 2010) are needed to truly ‘get at’ the historical experience. Previous holistic models (Dierking and Falk, 1992; Hooper-Greenhill, 2004) offer generic outcomes for learning about museums, which are useful for thinking about the entirety of the experience in museums, but do not capture the complexity of the unique disciplinary experiences that unfold when encountering complex historical sources.

While differences exist in the particulars of how people engage with complex historical sources, their motivation for doing so is the same: people seek out historic sites and eyewitnesses because they regard them as the most ‘authentic’ (Angvik and Von Borries, 1997; Jones, 2016; Rosenzweig and Thelen, 1998; Van Boxtel et al., 2016) ways to connect directly to the people, objects or places that stood witness to the past because ‘The bones are right there. The bones don’t lie’ (Rosenzweig and Thelen, 1998: 106). These encounters are primary experiences unmediated by a video/computer screen or a text, rendering them distinct learning experiences (Greene et al., 2015; Landström et al., 2005; Ramlogan et al., 2014; Reiß et al., 2014). Attempts to discern and measure the effect of that sense of authenticity on learners, and build a pedagogy that builds on it or deconstructs it, are complicated by the disparate verbiage around it, and the ineffability of that which researchers are trying to define. Struggling to define that sense of something special about an eyewitness account or a historic place, researchers have generated an array of terms with overlapping meanings: ‘aura of authenticity’ (Sabrow, 2012, translated by the author), ‘the numinous’ (Latham, 2013), ‘authentic’ (Hampp and Schwan, 2014; Rössner and Uhl, 2012), ‘authority’ (Rosenzweig and Thelen, 1998; Trofanenko, 2006) and so on.

Further, the personal and subjective nature of that sense of authenticity further complicates the notion. For example, how does the learner encountering the piece of the True Cross at the Jerusalem Chapel in Bruges, Belgium, attribute its authenticity? Is it as a physical artefact that was present at the crucifixion of Christ or as a medieval relic about which believers over centuries have imbued greater meaning? Similarly, what is the proximity to historical events that an eyewitness must have in order to be considered an ‘authentic’ source? Did they have to physically be removing pieces of the Berlin Wall when it came down or merely have been in East or West Berlin to be considered to have ‘been there’? Arguments can be made in either direction, and they rest on a multitude of subjective factors. While there is a general sense in the research literature that there is something larger happening when people engage with these sources, it remains tantalizingly unknowable, with descriptions veering closer to poetry than science.

At the opposite pole sits the discussion of source work in history education, which has largely focused on exploring the use of historical documents from a cognitive perspective (for example, Wineburg, 1991). While researchers are building on that work with other types and combinations of sources (for example, buildings: Baron, 2012; Gussmann et al., 2017; documents and images: Baron, 2016; paintings: Glaser and Schwan, 2015; sound: Lee et al., 2015), the pace and line of this work pose considerable problems for understanding what people learn from historical sources. Although this is a fruitful and necessary path for understanding these isolated sources, outside laboratory or formal schooling settings it is a rare occasion when individuals work with historical sources in isolation. Rather, the power of the experience of engaging with complex historical sources requires consideration of the full range of the embodied experiences – including the thoughts and emotions, and the sensory and physical engagement – that learners employ to learn about the past. Therefore, we must consider how individuals engage with the complex historical sources, and what that tells us about the historical experience and how that shapes learners’ understanding of the past.

Although history education should enable students and educators to handle these sources competently, we know little about the actual effects that engaging with historic sites and eyewitnesses of the past have on learners, besides some first hints on the particularity of these sources (Baron, 2013; Baron et al., 2019; Bertram et al., 2017; Savenije, 2016). Consequently, studies on the effectiveness of these immediate experiences with the complex sources on learning processes are needed. If we understand the components of these encounters better, we might be able to derive methods for educational practitioners to use these sources effectively, minimize the risks that acritical oversimplification poses and, thus, empower learners to become reflective citizens.

For the last thirty years, we have focused largely on understanding the cognitive underpinnings of historical sources. Specifically, this has meant using historical documents to assess individuals’ historical thinking (Wineburg, 1991, 1998) or historical reasoning (Van Drie and Van Boxtel, 2008). While these and other researchers noted that there are affective elements of historical source work (for example, Sakr et al., 2016; Savenije and De Bruijn, 2017; Zembylas, 2016) that are both inherent in and complicating our understanding of what people learn, extant frameworks do not offer a systematic way to consider these experiences working with historical sources. The work of two of this paper’s authors (Baron, 2012; Bertram et al., 2017) has focused on understanding what people learn from complex historical sources – buildings, images and eyewitnesses. With those contributions, we recognized the limitations of this line of inquiry about historical sources.

While these studies expanded the range of historical sources that researchers could consider, it became clear that even if we identified the cognitive underpinnings of how individuals work with every type of source found at a historic site or encounter with eyewitnesses, it would still not help us understand what people learn from the experience of being at a site or working with eyewitnesses. Rather, much of the power of these historical experiences requires consideration of the situated embodiment of the learner and the ways in which their experiences inform them about the past. Situated learning shifts the unit of analysis of learning from either the individual historical source or the learner towards an interaction between the individual and the source and/or environment in which it is set. These interactions encompass the cognitive, social and cultural contexts of learning (Cobb and Bowers, 1999; Greeno and Engstrom, 2014; Hutchins, 1995; Kirk and Kinchin, 2003; Nardi, 1996; Resnick, 1987).

Similarly, embodiment is ‘grounded in the relationship between a system and its environment. The more [one] can perturb an environment and be perturbed by it, the more it is embodied’ (Fong et al., 2003: 149). Herein, embodiment is intended to highlight, in part, the frequently overlooked importance of the physical body and its role in the agency of the learner and the multi-sensory, multimodal interactions inherent in engaging with complex historical sources and associated historical experiences. While thought, affect and bodily sensations have distinct elements to them, embodiment speaks to the interdependence and interactivity between them: an idea (thought) might make us angry (emotion), which we express on our faces and a host of autonomic responses, such as quickening of the pulse or postural changes (physical; Maiese, 2014). Thus, while our framework attempts to delineate observable responses into cognitive/affective/physical responses that individuals have when encountering complex historical sources, we recognize that within the body, these systems work in concert.

The historical experiences to which we refer are direct experiences with historical sources not mediated by a video screen or an interpretative text (such as a museum panel) that prompt a larger consideration of that source’s role, import or effect on historical events or persons. Standing on Omaha Beach, your feet sinking into the sand as the tide rolls in, pondering how men in heavy gear could charge up the beach; listening to a Holocaust survivor describe what she felt when her camp was liberated; the brutal power of the noonday sun beating down on you, making visceral the inhumane treatment of slaves labouring on a Louisiana rice plantation – these are not purely intellectual experiences leading to the development of mental models. These are complex sensory interactions between the learner and the presence of the eyewitness or physical environs of the historic place, contextualized by the learner’s knowledge of the persons and events of the past. More than just cognitive engagement, affective experiences or physical sensations, the complex interplay of all of these modalities plays a considerable role in understanding complex historical sources and the historical experience. Yet, we currently have no model or mechanism for assessing historic sites or eyewitness encounters as sources at that level of complexity. In essence, we are missing a deep understanding of how people experience these encounters with the past, which is a crucial precondition for encouraging historical experiences that engage a deep learning process.

The conceptual model offered in this paper considers learners’ cognitive, affective and physical engagement with what we have termed complex historical sources. Due to the subjective nature of determining authenticity, we rest our delineation of complex historical sources – such as historic sites and eyewitnesses of the past – as being distinct from atomized historical sources – such as single documents – by their irreducible composite nature. Complex historical sources are comprised of multiple media and/or levels of interaction, and they engender an interplay of intellectual, affective and physical engagement in learners. In this article, we use examples from our own research into how people learn from eyewitnesses and historic sites to illustrate the model, although the model is applicable for use with complex historical sources beyond those examples.

Considerable work has been done to understand how individuals read historical documents and images (for example, Wineburg, 1991), and this work has been essential in shaping our understanding of how people learn history. The framework offered here is intended to consider historical materials beyond traditional text. However, in certain circumstances, documents would merit consideration as complex historical sources. For example, the US Declaration of Independence is a document that is housed in a grand rotunda in the US National Archives Building in Washington DC. In this instance, a visitor to the National Archives is likely to encounter the document as a historical or cultural artefact, rather than as a text for analysis. Here, the Declaration of Independence becomes a part of the complex historical source that is the National Archives Rotunda, and the historical experience of engaging with those materials in that place.

Additionally, we use the term ‘engagement’ to describe the range of possible ways in which someone could interact with a complex historical source – for example, talking to an eyewitness, climbing the stairs of the Duomo, analysing an artefact. Our model synthesizes research across multiple fields (including media studies, museology, anthropology, cultural geography and educational psychology) in both English and German to help us frame learning encounters with complex sources presumed to have some assignation of historical authenticity that is satisfying to the learner. Unlike other models that focus on historical thinking or consciousness, which almost exclusively consider cognition, this model, written from a situated embodied perspective (Dawson, 2014; Korthagen, 2010; Wilson, 2002), reverses the microscope and allows us to consider the holistic historical experience when encountering complex historical sources.

Research question

With the current article, we aim at taking the first step to understand learning with complex historical sources by building a conceptual framework to describe and define the learning experience in detail, its characteristics and the processes involved. We were guided by the following research question: What elements comprise the experience of encountering complex historical sources? From a situated embodied perspective, we argue that engaging with complex historical sources involves the interplay of cognitive, affective and physical experiences.

Method

To approach our research question, we conducted a comprehensive literature review, drawing upon a wide range of English- and German-language sources to identify and delineate the overlapping terms and their attributes, and the limitations that are associated with the complex encounter. Next, we held a series of small conferences in the United States and Germany, inviting researchers and practitioners across the educational, historical and psychological landscape to discuss the range of questions that arose around learning with complex historical sources and experiences. The first conference, held in Germany, brought together approximately ten researchers from a range of subjects, over the course of a week, to consider Walter Benjamin’s (1965) notion of ‘aura’, and how the notion of the ‘authentic’ drove engagement and learning in history. From this, a smaller subgroup gathered three more times in the United States, and once more in Germany, to consider how to capture learning related to authentic historical sources and experiences, and thus to develop this framework. First, we conducted a systematic review of the research literature in history, social studies and museum education to identify fully articulated theories or frameworks related to what and how people learn history. To deepen our understanding of the educational research literature, we drew upon sources in philosophy, history, museology, medicine and beyond. From there, we used snowball sampling to identify empirical and theoretical literature related to the ideas or phenomena that were emerging as essential. As part of the refinement process, at each stage of development, external reviewers, including individuals who participated in the initial conference, were asked to provide feedback to help shape the framework. Our queries to the reviewers related to the clarity, veracity and coherence of the framework.

Finally, we synthesized the literature and discussions, identified crucial concepts from across different disciplines associated with the experience of interest, and built an integrated model. The constructs we used are deduced and defined by the respective discipline. For simplicity, whenever possible we used extant terms (for example, contextualization) that were already well-understood or had specific meaning in the field, rather than generating novel terms. Even within their respective disciplines, some of these constructs have ambiguous meanings, which made their use in our framework challenging. Our goal was to avoid overlapping constructs within our conceptual framework. Using respondents’ accounts of their encounters with eyewitnesses and historic sites from existing data sets from our prior research, we tested and refined the model to ensure clarity in the categories.

The following sections give a brief overview of the key concepts and theories that inspired and guided the development of our framework. Drawing from the literature in media psychology, we adapted transportation theory (Green and Brock, 2000) and the model of narrative comprehension and engagement (Busselle and Bilandzic, 2008), both of which focus on the psychological processes and effects of narrative persuasion. We identified the aesthetic encounter with artworks, researched by Csikszentmihaliy and Robinson (1990) through an anthropological perspective, as a framework for a similar experience. Also coming from anthropology, specifically anthropological museum research, we use Cameron and Gatewood’s (2003) and Latham’s (2007, 2013) work related to ‘numen-seeking’, which identifies the near-spiritual connection that visitors seek at historic sites and with historic objects. We took these considerations on the same topic (with regard to historic sites) as part of our framework, but we argue that we can add to this understanding through the consideration of cognition, emotion and embodied learning.

Another construct that we explored to develop our framework is the concept of historical empathy (De Leur et al., 2017; Endacott and Brooks, 2013, 2018; Huijgen et al., 2017; Savenije and De Bruijn, 2017). Situated in social studies education – in particular, history education in the United States – historical empathy describes the cognitive and emotional aspects of empathy, as distinct from purely human affective empathy, to foster learning about the past (Endacott and Brooks, 2013). Finally, we adapted the concept of presence, which describes a state of feeling to be in a mediated world without feeling the mediation. This concept comes from computer science and psychology, in particular virtual reality research (Frank, 2015; Lombard and Ditton, 1997). We argue that all of these different theories, as well as other constructs, contribute to a better understanding of the complex encounter with historic sites and eyewitnesses of the past, and, thus, we have synthesized them into the conceptual framework that follows.

We assigned the identified constructs to three main dimensions: cognitive engagement, affective engagement and physical engagement. While situated embodied cognition would subsume affective and physical engagement into cognition, our model flattens those distinctions and positions cognition as ‘first among equals’, so as to be able to identify observable behaviours or ideas across the range of possible responses.

We use the terms ‘cognition’ and ‘affect’, rather than ‘thought’ or ‘emotions’, as these terms are drawn from the affiliated literature and indicate a recognition of the greater scope that cognition and affect encompass, compared to just singular thoughts or emotions, as well as the underlying interrelatedness of these dimensions. For example, according to Zembylas (2007), affect encompasses an emotional and a physical response to stimuli (for example, crying at a sad film). Determining how to delineate the differences between when someone says ‘I’m sad’ (emotional response) and then begins crying (physical response), versus someone starting to cry and then squeaking out an ‘I’m sad’, or someone saying ‘I’m sad’, but not crying, or crying, but saying nothing, becomes something of an infinite loop. In short, we acknowledge the interrelationship of these feelings and actions, and we offer ways to categorize observable behaviours without severing the underlying interconnections between them. Further, from this stance, being able to denote either a physical or an emotional response in the absence of the other allows for the possibility of connection, but remains agnostic on whether those connections occurred in a particular instance.

Identified within these three dimensions are differentiated responses to the historical sources that appear frequently in people’s interactions with them. We understand these responses not necessarily to occur in every experience, but they display a range and constellation of possible responses that might happen. We partially renamed these responses and provide our own definitions to satisfy the specific needs of our context of complex historical sources. Additionally, we provide model statements similar to those used by respondents to help delineate the type of response each category engendered, but also the way in which the participants positioned themselves in relation to the source – that is, at arm’s length or standing in the shoes of – as that distance was critical for understanding whether they were engaging with the source in ways that were predominantly cognitive, affective or physical. Finally, we identify the unifying experience that draws together engagement across the three modalities. Although we tried to define the responses as distinctly as possible, they are, of course, interconnected. We acknowledge that an individual’s responses are embedded within personal and situational characteristics: different learners might respond differently to the complex source depending on their multiple subjectivities and experiences; also, different complex historical sources will presumably lead to different qualities of historical experiences. The conceptual framework is displayed in Figure 1, summarized in Table 1 and will be explained in detail later in the article. Table 2 outlines the literature from which we draw our categories.

Figure 1:

Conceptual framework of encountering complex historical sources

Framework for encountering complex historical sources

Application

In order to show how this framework could help researchers, we offer two examples of how to use the framework to code learner responses. These examples are drawn from our existing research data sets and were chosen for the variety of framework elements they represent and compactness (that is, the greatest range of responses in the shortest section of text). Note that we indicate ways in which coding can overlap to draw out the depth of the experiences in which learners engaged.

The first example (see Table 3) is a female US high-school teacher on a study-abroad professional development tour reflecting on her visit to the Hiroshima Peace Museum in Japan, a site that explores the effects of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima during the Second World War by the American armed forces. This teacher has 18 years of classroom experience and a master’s degree in American history. We intentionally chose this example to show what a strong emotional response to a historic site might be, even for someone who has deep prior knowledge of the site and the events relating to it.

The second example (see Table 4) is an interview with a 15-year-old female student who participated in an in-school intervention with eyewitnesses of the past talking about their roles in the opposition movement in the Peaceful Revolution of the German Democratic Republic. The interview captures the student’s impression of the encounter, and her feelings about meeting eyewitnesses of the past in the history classroom in general. We chose this example because she also discusses possible responses on a meta-level, rather than only her own immediate responses.

Figures 2 and 3 provide radar charts to sum up the quantities of the particular historical experiences given in the examples above. The axis displays the number of codings for each response within the example.

Figure 2:

Hiroshima Museum example, showing the coding frequency for each response

Figure 3:

Coding frequency for each response for the student interview about the eyewitness encounter

For the teacher, the Figure 3 indicates that the historical experience at the Hiroshima Museum in Japan is driven by the visitor’s physical engagement (most codings are within this dimension) and affective engagement. The learner mentioned only one response (imagination) that referred to her cognitive engagement with the site. For the student engaging with the eyewitness, Figure 4 indicates that the experience of meeting an eyewitness in person is especially made up of the cognitive and physical dimensions. The student mentioned only one response (personal attachment) that referred to the affective engagement with the eyewitness.

The utility of these examples and the radar charts rests on their ability to show us patterns of interactions/responses within the range of elements identified that would normally be obscured by overly general descriptions of complex responses (for example, ‘the learner had a strong emotional reaction’) that typifies the current literature. In this way, we are able to see how learners respond to complex historical sources and can build pedagogy or interventions that take into consideration the whole of the historical experience and the whole person experiencing it.

Conclusion, limitations and outlook

We developed a conceptual model to describe and define the learning experience with complex historical sources – namely encountering eyewitnesses of the past and visiting historic sites. We drew upon empirical, theoretical and conceptual works from a range of related disciplines, including media studies, museology, anthropology, cultural geography and educational psychology, to develop a deeper understanding of what is part of this complex experience and how we can grasp it. We argue that embedded within perceiving these sources as authentic, learners cognitively, affectively and physically engage with the learning material. In the same way that we identify a range of possible interconnected responses that can occur as part of the historical experience, the unifying experience is possible, but it is neither required nor guaranteed.

The framework is the first endeavour to conceptually encapsulate the learning experience with complex historical sources. In particular, our model contributes to a better understanding of the complex and intertwining responses involved in learning about the past. However, we recognize the disequilibrium in a model that delineates far more cognitive elements and fewer physical ones. This is a result of the extant state of the literature, rather than a determination that there are fewer physical considerations for learners. We offer this model as the beginning of the conversation about how to understand learning with complex historical sources, not the ending. We invite fellow researchers to test this model, qualitatively and quantitatively, to deepen our understanding of the elements we have identified and further delineate underlying processes and mechanisms of these encounters. At this point, we do not know if response to one element triggers or is a prerequisite for another. Nor do we know if certain elements cluster together, and, if so, under what conditions. Further, we recognize that there are differences between encounters with historic sites and encounters with eyewitnesses that may become sharper as researchers engage with this framework. The more this model is used and refined, the more it may reveal further complexities in the intertwining dynamics of historical experiences that contribute to a better understanding of the learning processes behind these experiences.

Notes on the contributors

Lisa Zachrich is a PhD candidate at the LEAD Graduate School and Research Network and the Hector Research Institute for Education Sciences and Psychology in Tübingen, Germany. Her main research interests are complex classroom settings, especially learning historical thinking with eyewitnesses of the past and how these classroom settings affect students’ motivation and learning.

Allison Weller is a high-school history teacher in Long Island, New York and a PhD candidate at Teachers College, Columbia University, New York. Her dissertation research focuses on teachers’ affective practices and meaning-making at sites of difficult history.

Christine Baron is Assistant Professor of Social Studies at Teachers College, Columbia University, New York. Her research explores historical engagement with non-traditional texts, teaching and learning in museums/informal settings, and the use of museums and historic sites in teacher education.

Christiane Bertram is Assistant Professor of Social Studies at the University of Konstanz, Germany. Her research focuses on learning to think historically with eyewitnesses of the past, assessing historical competencies and speech education in history lessons. Prior to this, Bertram has worked as a high-school German and history teacher.