Developing a pedagogy for promoting historical contextualization in classrooms

Historical reasoning competencies, such as performing historical contextualization, have become increasingly important over the last two decades in history education. However, both novice history teachers and experienced history teachers seem to struggle when they have to develop engaging learning tasks and teach historical reasoning competencies to students. This study chronicles the development of a pedagogy focusing on students’ ability to perform historical contextualization. Four intervention design principles were retrieved from previous research on historical contextualization and used to develop nine history lessons as an education intervention. This intervention was tested by 15 expert history teachers in an empirical quasi-experimental design with a pre-test and post-test. Results showed positive indicators for promoting students’ ability to perform historical contextualization. Furthermore, the results could be used for further refining the developed intervention.