Mary Lee

Current trends in history education emphasize using disciplined inquiry to teach history. Scholars and teachers promote historical thinking as a classroom practice, arguing that teachers should help students “do history.” However, history textbooks, which are the most widely used instructional material in history classrooms, stand in sharp contrast to the emphasis on historical inquiry because of the use of an omniscient voice and a didactic tone that is characteristic of the genre. This study reconsiders the value of textbook narratives as vehicles to promote and encourage historical thinking and suggests an innovative way of developing texts that would serve the instructional purpose of improving students’ historical thinking. Drawing from the scholarship on considerate and voiced texts, this study presents a new model for textbook narrative that embeds historians’ reasoning into the narrative, Explicit Reasoning Text (ERT). Based on interviews with 12 high school students, this study argues the effectiveness of the ERT to engage students in historical investigation.

Once focused primarily on European and Chinese history, South Korea's world history courses are moving toward a global approach that spans multiple regions. In the midst of this curricular shift, we examined how Korean teachers conceptualize world history for themselves and for their instruction. We interviewed eight Korean teachers using card-sorting tasks and a think aloud methodology. Findings revealed that all participants sorted the cards differently when considering instruction compared to when they sorted cards for their own understanding, suggesting the role of teachers as instructional gatekeepers even in a country with a centralized National Curriculum. The Korean teachers discussed three instructional challenges in making these changes: connecting world historical events to students’ present lives, unpacking for students events that spanned across large amounts of time and space, and managing students’ preconceived notions or attitudes about different cultures. The ways in which participants dealt with these challenges differed. Additionally, in-service teachers made more complex connections between events and focused less on regions than did pre-service teachers. We discuss the cultural tools that Korean participants used in making instructional decisions as well as implications for curriculum development and teacher education for world history in South Korea and beyond.