Historical Thinking

Historical thinking

VCE History teaches you how to think critically and analytically, how to write, how to argue and how to be a critical consumer of knowledge. You will learn about significance, evidence, continuity and change, and causation. All this means: You will be taught how to think historically.

Historical thinking means that you will:

  • Ask historical questions: Questions create historical inquiry. You will develop argument and analysis in response to questions about the past.

  • Establish historical significance: To study the past, you need to choose what to study first. Significance is always assigned by someone. What is important to one country is not that significant in another country. This significance is about how the past was perceived at the time, how big was its impact, how many people did it affect, how long did it last, what does it reveals more generally about the period, and how is it relevant to the present.

  • Use sources as evidence: Primary and secondary sources must be evaluated before being used as evidence. You must look at who made it, why, when, in what context and how can you check these sources? These are useful skills in the age of social media, conspiracy theories and fast news.

  • Identify continuity and change: Continuity and change are multifaceted. Changes can take place in one aspect of the past while other conditions remain unaltered. Turning points are a useful way for historians to mark continuity and change.

  • Analyse cause and consequence: The exploration of causes is important in history. Historians look at a chain of causes and consequences. There are many different kinds of causes, such as social, political, and economic, short term and long term, and immediate and underlying.

  • Explore historical perspectives: Understanding the past means trying to understand how people at that time understood their world; the mindsets of people in the past may differ from ours now. What were the beliefs, values and attitudes of people in the past?

  • Construct historical arguments: The capacity to develop a well-supported argument about the past is central to historical thinking. Such arguments represent the outcome of historical inquiry.

Historical interpretations in VCE History

There are many ways to explain the past. Historical interpretations are the result of disciplined inquiry. In VCE History, students are required to evaluate such interpretations. Furthermore, they use historical interpretations as evidence in support of their own arguments about the past.

Students are not required to study historiography. Historiography traditionally is the academic study of the historian and his or her views, including their political philosophy, methods of research, upbringing, time in which the history was written and their access to new evidence and research.

Instead VCE History focuses on the historical interpretations of the key knowledge. Students describe, explain and evaluate historical interpretations. Students should be able to ask questions of historical interpretations by using the key knowledge and historical thinking, for example: ‘What does X historian identify as the significant causes or consequences of…?’ ‘How does the interpretation of historian X differ from that of historian Y when assessing historical changes?’ Students are able to evaluate historical interpretations based on their own knowledge and analysis to build a historical argument: ‘The interpretation of X historian is accurate/ inaccurate as she does not identify the importance of ABC group/ idea/event in causing the event.’ In this way students demonstrate understanding of the skill which asks students to ‘construct an argument about…using primary sources and historical interpretations as evidence’.

Source: http://www.vcaa.vic.edu.au/Documents/vce/history/HistorySD-2016.pdf