Presentation by: Dale Martelli, Nic Fillion
Session: Session B | Time: 10:30AM-10:50AM | Location: Room 208
This study grew out of my classroom practice. I am attempting to reconfigure analytical-hermeneutics for historical interpretation. The hope and intent in this will be to bridge the objective standards of the Rankean empirical methodology with Gadamer’s and Ricoeur’s refashioning of the hermeneutic nature of discourse with the past. This should provide a theoretical ground and justification for like ventures that try to sort out the conflicts between historians doing the work of history and the philosophers investigating how meaning is constructed in the study of the past.
For most part the practice of history in classrooms around British Columbia have moved much in the direction of employing primary source evidence in the classroom. In the recent revision of the social studies curriculum, primary source evidence is at the heart and centre of the reform. This are issues. There is the issue of privileging primary evidence over secondary evidence or debates around what constitutes primary historical evidence. What seems to be missing are tools to teach how to sort out these and other issues. Students often are asked to examine a primary or secondary text, trace or artifact, armed only with a lecture or two and perhaps a series of questions, or more disconcerting, a worksheet. If we are actually to move in a more positive direction in history education, help is needed.
This study offers the field of teaching history a tool to delineate an analytical-hermeneutic approach for historical interpretation of traces in the secondary classroom. At this point in my date collection and anaylsis, process constructs have seemed to help students understand the complex nature of historical interpretation and in effect assist them in the process of using historical evidence in building accounts of the past.