Evaluating Interpretations of our Past through Museum Visits
TEACHING FOR HISTORICAL UNDERSTANDING
One of the most intransigent and prejudiced notions that students (indeed, even adults) have is that there is only one version of “the past.” Very often, students assume that the account of history as provided in the textbook is the final, authoritative, and invariable one. It is still commonly heard being asserted that “there is nothing new that we can add to history.” Even worse are the hurtful accusations that history is only about dead people, boring events and dates that don’t matter!
It is the hard lot of history teachers to labour in the valiant attempt at correcting such awful misconceptions!
To achieve this noble end, it is imperative to accept that there is no one, sacrosanct, view of historical events. Historical knowledge, argues the historian John Lukacs, is necessarily revisionist. There are gaps of historical knowledge that are, or ought to be, filled; but even that filling can never be permanent. Historical revisionism is simply the act of critically and carefully examining sources with a view of improving or correcting prevailing understandings. [1]
The teacher’s elemental duty, therefore, is to provide opportunities for students of history to revise existing views of the past.
“INTERROGATING” HISTORICAL SOURCES
The construction of an historical narrative, or account, is always dependent on the discerning use of sources. Our lower secondary students are quickly familiar with the fact that there are many types of sources available for scrutiny – written sources (documents, diaries, journals, certificates etc), visual sources (videos, photographs, posters, postcards, paintings etc), even oral sources (contemporary audio recordings).
Many decades ago, the historian Marc Bloch suggested that the task of the historian was to deal with these very raw materials which historical understanding could be built upon. He wrote that in addition to assembling those sources and documents deemed necessary for the task of “writing history,” the historian must cross-examine and interrogate those very materials:
From the moment when we are no longer resigned to purely and simply recording the words of our witnesses, from the moment we decide to force them to speak, even against their will, cross-examination becomes more necessary than ever. Indeed it is the prime necessity of well-conducted historical research. [2]
In other words, the historian must search out all available materials on his subject, which will then prompt him to consider several perspectives before deciding on the most plausible line of reasoning. The historian must think critically about his subject matter, and not merely settle for what is commonly accepted.
In more recent times, Sam Wineburg argues that historical understanding “requires an orientation to the past informed by disciplinary canons of evidence and rules of argument.” It seeks the verification of sources and questions mere stories.
Wineburg asserts that the discipline of historical thinking involves:
… interrogating sources, putting them on the stand and demanding that they yield their truths or falsehoods….. [3]
THE “STRUCTURED ACADEMIC CONTROVERSY” STRATEGY: Learning to construct composite accounts
The Structured Academic Controversy (SAC) model of cooperative learning encourages “positive interdependence [as well as] individual and group accountability.” In the History class, the teacher’s role is to prepare sources that represent and embody different sides of a controversial issue. Students learn to synthesize historical information from different sources, “to take issue positions and make decisions based on historical evidence and reasoning,” and also attempt to find common ground among the historical controversy. [4]
As a further application of the SAC approach, I recently attempted to help my students appreciate the role of sources in the constructing of accounts of the past. Five simple stages were devised for students to engage in and interact with sources, and thereby better understand historical accounts:
(A) Current Accounts. (eg. Textbook narratives arguing that the British lost Singapore in 1942 due to over-confidence)
(B) Corresponding Accounts. (eg. Personal diaries asserting colonial over-confidence and arrogance)
(C) Constructing Accounts. (A + B)
(D) Contesting Accounts. (eg. Sources that demonstrate alternative view, that British poured soldiers into Singapore, but lacked sufficient and corresponding hardware due to fighting the war on many fronts)
(E) Composite Accounts (C + D)
Students were actively involved at two of the stages – C and E, while my task was to scour for sources providing several accounts – at stages A, B and D, of “what happened.”
HISTORICAL INQUIRY: Asking the right questions
At the heart of historical thinking is the practice of Historical Inquiry. As Seixas and Morton have explained it so well for us teachers:
Engaging students through thought-provoking questions is integral to our approach to teaching history. The right questions should prompt them to take an active stance toward engaging with the past. Inquiry questions demand more than memorizing pieces of information or looking up solutions. They involve grappling with evidence, weighing choices, and making interpretations. [5]
Through using sources to investigate historical questions, students are given the opportunity to see that history is not just a settled collection of facts, but rather a rigorously constructed set of arguments. As students encounter new and in some cases contradictory evidence, they are asked to reconsider their initial views, learning that interpretations of the past can change based on the available historical evidence. [6]
There are clear advantages of employing the Inquiry approach to the teaching of history in our local schools. For one, students better understand what they learn if they construct their own knowledge. Since inquiry is essentially “a purposeful act of seeking information or knowledge, activating prior knowledge, investigating significant questions, and constructing knowledge,” this pedagogical approach is crucial to nurturing student-centred learning. Essentially, “students take ownership of their own learning rather than receive information purely through direct instruction.” [7]
SG50 AND HISTORY FOR NATION-BUILDING
As we raced excitedly through the heady events celebrating SG50, I often paused to reflect on my dual roles as a History teacher AND National Education Coordinator. Contrary to popular belief, I grew to realise that the two roles were often far from complementary; in fact, at times, they were rather contradictory in nature.
Nation-builders often fall back on “history” to emphasize significant milestones easily identified with by all. Understandably, these milestones are raised and reiterated so as to reinforce important “lessons” for the citizenry. For example, heroic wartime resistance or tragedies such as the Battle of Britain or the Fall of Singapore are utilised to teach the importance of resilience, or of Total Defence; Rosa Parks Day in the USA is a present reminder to all of the insidious nature of racial segregation and discrimination, and Gandhi’s great Salt March is a clarion call for civil disobedience. While very reasonable indeed, from a “what can we learn from history” point of view, such dramatic exercises also underline the delicate nature of using history for nation-building purposes.
For us in Singapore, the exuberant and joyous Jubilee celebrations of 2015, while understandable, also have had the effect of entrenching the year (1965), the event (Independence from Malaysia) and the people (the “pioneer generation”) in everyone’s minds at the expense of all other significant years, events or pioneers. The celebrations of SG50 were made all the more poignant by the sad passing away of the nation’s first Prime Minister, Mr Lee Kuan Yew. The significance of Mr Lee’s passing was not lost on the nation as a whole.
In the process of fixing certain pre-designated events (Japanese Occupation, Maria Hertogh Riots, Racial Riots, Merger and Independence) in our collective psyche for the purpose of inculcating common national values there is always the danger of creating an imbalanced view of the past. As Margaret MacMillan explains:
The histories that fed and still feed into nationalism draw on what already exists rather than inventing new facts. They often contain much that is true, but they are slanted to confirm the existence of the nation through time, and to encourage the hope that it will continue. [8]
Such a utility of history – or even “abuse of history” (a term used by MacMillan) - may have been well-meaning and seemingly innocuous, but none the less, the historian finds himself or herself at odds with the nation builder.
The exercise of the historian is to construct an objective, inclusive, composite account of the past while the nation-builder is keen to extract as many "lessons" as possible from certain exclusive, pre-determined historical milestones.
From the late 1990s onwards, what has been termed “The Singapore Story” has emerged as the quasi-official version of Singapore’s national history. As historian Karl Hack explains:
From 1998, the “Singapore Story” was entrenched. First, there was the major public exhibition on the “Singapore Story,” emphasising the war years, the subsequent PAP struggle for independence and against communism, ethnic chauvinism and economic peril. Second, “National Education,” based around this narrative – and attached “lessons” about how Singaporeans must behave – was integrated into school curriculums, at first as separate lessons, and ultimately infused across subjects. Students were also taken on “Learning Journeys” to wartime and business sites to reinforce the story’s messages. There was an insistent state desire that students at all levels be imparted lessons through social studies at Primary School, and history at Secondary, such as “We Must Ourselves Defend Singapore.” There was also relentless emphasis on the need for social and economic discipline. [9]
There was an urgent political utility to this yoking of history for the cause of nation-building. For Singapore’s leaders “to function in the world system of nation-states, they needed to shape and disseminate a sense of national identity which privileges political identification at the level of the nation state.” The writing of the nation’s history thus became of great importance to those who sought to lead it.
The history that the state tells of itself, and the degree of its success in getting its citizens to embrace that history as their own, are thus central to the process of is nation-building. [10]
One of the responsibilities of history teachers in Singapore, especially those who invariably get called upon to provide National Education "NE" lessons, is therefore to find the equilibrium - somewhat elusive - between those two important roles in school.
Against this dramatic academic backdrop, I decided to redesign the ever-popular “museum visit” to help sharpen my students’ ability to think historically.
EVALUATING INTERPRETATIONS OF “THE PAST” THROUGH MUSEUM VISISTS
The newly renovated National Museum of Singapore (2016) [11] proved to be a delightful and fertile ground for putting the lesson into action. The building itself, built in 1887 as the Raffles Museum, remains a revered and much-loved cultural and architectural landmark in the colonial district of Singapore. It continues to play a vital role in preserving the nation’s unique and vibrant heritage, and best of all, it is dedicated to providing visitors with multiple opportunities to intelligently and thoughtfully reflect on our collective history.
The NMS website boldly defines itself as Singapore’s oldest museum with “a progressive mind.” It also states the museum’s clear intention to:
…adopt cutting-edge and multi-perspective ways of presenting history and culture to redefine conventional museum experience. [12]
ADAPTING THE “SAC” APPROACH
For the museum visit, I again modified the Structured Academic Controversy teaching approach so as to fit my learning objectives for the students.
Instead of selecting sources to present two perspectives of an issue, I decided to choose three generalized statements which are in common usage in schools as well as in the nation at large. These generalizations, or at least the concepts they offer, are so often quoted and so readily accepted that they are assumed to be true and inviolable.
These three are:
Generalisation #1
Singapore in the last fifty years has been transformed from a "mudflat to metropolis"
Generalisation #2
Singapore, since independence, has overcome many obstacles to become a premier global port and city.
Generalisation #3
The life that our Asian forefather lived was "a struggle, bitter and hard, and families were hungry and poor."
Students were then directed to several sections of the National Museum to search out and scrutinise the primary sources on display. They were tasked to verify the historical validity of the three common generalizations using the museum sources as evidence to either support or question the generalizations.
The rationale for this approach was to stimulate historical thinking by analysing well-known, nationally-accepted generalized-statements describing Singapore’s past, and deciding if these stand up to the test of historical investigation. The tasks assigned to the students for the visit were therefore designed to encourage a careful examination of primary sources, artefacts and documents and a re-evaluation of commonly-accepted versions of history.
MY REFLECTIONS ON STUDENTS’ LEARNING
1) Students came to have a basic understanding of how different “accounts” of the past contribute to the writing of “history.”
2) Students were well able to understand the concept that there is not necessarily one, uncontested, invariable view of the past. This concept is crucial for students to grasp the fundamental purpose of any set of Source-Based Questions; that different sources present a variety of perspectives on the same one event.
3) In this way, students also came to appreciate that the writing of history is not the monopoly of the textbook writers or even nation-builders, and that each student can craft a valid “view of history.” This liberates the student and empowers him/her with the motivation to contribute meaningfully to his or her own learning and understanding of history.
4) Students gave thoughtful and insightful written responses to the tasks assigned. Several were able to utilise the sources viewed in the Museum to re-evaluate their own existing pre-conceived assumptions about the past. This was particularly true when confronting the generalization that everyone suffered hardship during colonial times.
5) Students learnt to question existing accounts; this skill is particularly beneficial for exam source-based questions, where students need to examine a source critically for purpose, utility and reliability. In doing so, each student is answering Sam Wineburg’s call to interrogate sources and put them “on the stand.”
6) Students understood the importance of the historical context of any particular source (date written/spoken, the audience, the purpose). This was especially so with the “mudflat to metropolis” generalization, where students realised that the words were spoken in September 1965 and referring to events a hundred years earlier.
7) The learning strategy was built upon the students’ experience of Historical Inquiry in Secondary Two, where students analyze historical evidence in order to form and test hypotheses about past events.
FOOTNOTES
[1] John Lukacs, The Future of History (2011), p 143.
[2] Marc Bloch, The Historian’s Craft (1944).
[3] Sam Wineburg, “Unnatural and essential: the nature of historical thinking,” in The Historical Association (December 2007).
[4 ]“Structured Academic Controversies,” in A Guide to Teaching and Learning for Upper Secondary History produced by the CPDD, MOE, Singapore in 2012, p 174 - 176.
[5] Peter Seixas and Tom Morton, The Big Six Historical Thinking Concepts (2013).
[6] “What is an Inquiry Lesson” (teachinghistory.org)
[7] “Inquiry-based Learning as Key Pedagogy,” in A Guide to Teaching and Learning for Upper Secondary History produced by the CPDD, MOE, Singapore in 2012, p 77.
[8] Margaret MacMillan, Dangerous Games: The Uses and Abuses of History (2008), p 84.
[9] Karl Hack, “Framing Singapore’s History” in Nicholas Tarling ed., Studying Singapore’s Past: C.M. Turnbull and the History of Modern Singapore (2012), p 27 – 28.
[10] Lysa Hong and Huang Jianli eds., The Scripting of a National History: Singapore and its pasts (2008), p 1.
[11] Even at its previous major renovation and renewal project in 2006, the museum had made great inroads in terms of museum technology as well as objectives. I quote from the essay of one historian who compared the National Museum of Singapore then with the Proclamation of Independence Memorial (PIM) in Malacca, which opened in 1985:
“The latest incarnation of Singapore’s National Museum, which reopened in 2006 after a three-year hiatus, moves away from conventional presentation methods that the PIM employs, such as text-heavy explanatory panels, a single-path that viewers must embark upon, and preoccupation with political and military history. Visitors are now given a multimedia handheld device containing audio, visual and textual content complementing the display panels and artefacts in the museum, which they can retrieve in any amount at different zones, hence giving them considerable power and choice over what micro-narratives they want to consume or ignore. There are also two paths now: one covers major events and characters, the other puts forth the stories of personalities who are not necessarily incorporated into official narratives because they are not ‘Great Men’ or part of a ‘Big Event’ – hence ceding space to oft-neglected histories such as gender, cultural and social histories.”
- Eisen Teo, “The Proclamation of Independence Memorial in Malacca: History, Memory and Silences,” in Bruce Lockhart and Lim Tse Siang eds., Studies in Malaysian and Singapore History (MBRAS, 2010).
[12] National Museum of Singapore website (2016)