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'You'd Be Wanting to Knowabout the Past': Social contextsof children's historicalunderstanding in NorthernIreland and the USAKeith C. BartonPublished online: 28 Jun 2010.

To cite this article: Keith C. Barton (2001) 'You'd Be Wanting to Know about the Past':Social contexts of children's historical understanding in Northern Ireland and the USA,Comparative Education, 37:1, 89-106, DOI: 10.1080/03050060020020444

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03050060020020444

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Comparative Education Volume 37 No. 1 2001 pp. 89–106

‘You’d Be Wanting to Know aboutthe Past’: social contexts ofchildren’s historical understandingin Northern Ireland and the USAKEITH C. BARTON

ABSTRACT This research reports the results of two studies of young children’s historical thinking, oneconducted in Northern Ireland and one in the USA. In both countries, primary/elementary studentslearn about history in a variety of settings, including not only schools but also family conversations,historic sites and the media. The differing nature of historical representations in the two countries,however, leads students to contrasting conclusions about the purpose of learning about the past: in theUSA, students emphasise that history is important so that they will know about the origin of theircountry and their own place within it, while in Northern Ireland students describe the purpose ofhistory as being to learn about those who are different from themselves. In both countries, suchcomparative evidence about children’s thinking provides educators with the opportunity to considerhow they can build on and extend students’ understanding of history.

Introduction

A 10-year-old girl in the USA once told me that after learning about Martin Luther King, Jr,at school, she went home and asked her mother how old she was when he was killed ‘becauseI just wanted to know’. Three years later, another 10-year-old girl, this one in NorthernIreland, told me nearly the same thing—she had seen a documentary about Martin LutherKing on television, and she asked her mother what else she knew about him. One of thesegirls lived in a comfortable Midwestern suburb, one in a small Ulster village beset by politicalcon� ict, but their experiences reveal features of historical understanding shared by childrenin both settings—the role of both schools and the media as sources of historical information,the importance of relatives in providing personal connections to the past and, perhaps mostsurprisingly, the active attempt by young children to deepen and extend their knowledge ofthe past.

Yet the differences in the girls’ backgrounds also point to how historical understandingcan vary from one setting to another. As this study will show, children in Northern Irelandand the USA bring very different perspectives to their encounters with history, and they holddifferent assumptions about the importance of the topic. Although both these girls wanted toknow more about King, for example, their interest sprang from nearly opposite sources. Forthe girl in the USA, King symbolised a key element in her own identity—his experiences werea part of her history, part of the story of how ‘we’ as Americans learned to treat each otherfairly. As she and many of her classmates pointed out, knowing about the history of racerelations in the USA helped them understand how they should treat African Americans. But

Correspondence to: Keith C. Barton, Division of Teacher Education, University of Cincinnati, OH 45221-0002, USA.E-mail: keith.barton@uc.edu

ISSN 0305-0068 print; ISSN 1360-0486 online/01/010089-18 Ó 2001 Taylor & Francis Ltd

DOI: 10.1080/03050060020020444

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90 K. C. Barton

the girl in Northern Ireland was separated from King by differences in ethnicity, nationalityand religion; for her, King’s story was not her own—she did not suggest that his life providedher with a sense of identity or any lesson for herself in the present. Like most of the primarystudents I interviewed in Northern Ireland, she was interested in history because it was aboutothers, because it provided insight into societies removed in time and place. This researchsuggests that therein lies a fundamental difference between the historical perspectives ofyoung children in the two locations—those in the USA think the purpose of history is to learnabout themselves and their own background, while those in Northern Ireland think it is tolearn about the lives of people in other times and places.

Background

During the past two decades, researchers in North America, in the United Kingdom and onthe European continent have conducted numerous studies of students’ historical understand-ing. This work has produced a more complex—and more optimistic—view of children’sthinking than the Piagetian studies which dominated the � eld before the 1980s. Like mostcognitive researchers, those who study historical understanding have abandoned the quest foruniversal stages and have focused instead on the way children think about one particularsubject—in this case, history. (On the limitations of Piagetian studies of historical thinking,see Booth (1984); on the transition in cognitive theory from global to domain-speci� cthinking, see Gelman & Baillargeon (1983) and Wellman & Gelman (1992).) These studieshave focused on establishing what students know about history and the nature of theirthought processes as they work with historical information—including, for example, theirideas about time, evidence, causation, perspective and signi� cance (see, for example, Wineb-urg, 1991; Seixas, 1993a, 1994; Carretero et al., 1994; Barton, 1996, 1997a, b; Barton &Levstik, 1996; Levstik & Barton, 1996; Brophy & VanSledright, 1997; VanSledright, 1997;Epstein, 1988; VanSledright & Kelly, 1998; Lee & Ashby, in press).

Although researchers have investigated a variety of speci� c issues and employed a rangeof methods in these investigations, two consistent � ndings stand out. First, even youngchildren know something about the past, both about speci� c historical events and aboutpatterns of change over time. Secondly, the way students think about history—the way theyattribute causation, for example, or the way they evaluate evidence—is not always consistentwith the work of professional historians. These � ndings have important instructional implica-tions, for, by taking account of students’ prior knowledge, teachers can more effectively buildon what children already know or address their misconceptions. In addition, by becomingaware of the patterns in children’s thinking—such as how they respond to multiple sourcesto reach conclusions about the past—educators can design instruction which promotes morecomplete and sophisticated understandings of the past.

But studies of children’s knowledge of historical patterns and of their facility with themethods of historians tell only part of the story. In order to understand historical thinkingmore fully, researchers must situate perspectives on the past within the social and culturalcontexts in which they arise. In most � elds of learning, educators are well aware of theimportance of context. A generation of theory and research in cognitive psychology hasyielded widespread consensus that the study of human thought must take into account thesocial settings and purposes which guide learning; thinking cannot be regarded as a mecha-nistic, content-free activity divorced from the cultural contexts in which it is situated (Brownet al., 1989; Rogoff, 1990; Lave & Wenger; 1991; Levine et al., 1993; Cole, 1998; Wertsch,1998). This perspective accords well with the practical knowledge teachers gain in theirclassrooms: children from different economic, ethnic or geographic backgrounds bringdistinct bodies of knowledge to school, along with their own ideas about the nature and

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Children’s Historical Understanding 91

purpose of education—ideas shaped by their families and communities. To understand howchildren learn, educators must recognise the in� uence of these wider contexts.

Studies both within and outside the USA demonstrate the fundamental importance ofsocial settings for literacy, numeracy and vocational skills. But to date, researchers haveproduced few studies of the contextual factors surrounding children’s understanding of thecontent of history. Although the last decade has seen an increase in research on children’sthinking in the � eld, this work too often treats the discipline of history as a given—thushistorical understanding becomes equated either with the content of textbooks and curricu-lum guides or with descriptions of ‘historical thinking’ or ‘what historians do’. But textbooksand other historical discourses invariably are the products of particular social contexts(Kammen, 1991; Levstik & Pappas, 1992), and studies which limit their scope to populationswith shared perceptions of the nature and purpose of the discipline are unlikely to reveal therange of meanings people attribute to the past. Research in the USA, for example, suggeststhat children from a variety of backgrounds share many basic features of historical knowledgeand understanding—including their views on the nature of evidence, the direction ofhistorical change, the role of individuals in history and the purpose of learning the subject(Barton, 1997b; Brophy & VanSledright, 1997). Yet these understandings are not universal:perspectives of children from varied ethnic backgrounds can diverge signi� cantly from thoseof their peers, as demonstrated by the research of Epstein (1998) in the USA and Seixas(1993a) in Canada.

VanSledright (1997–98) thus argues that history educators—both researchers and prac-titioners—should devote more attention to students’ historical ‘position’—that is, the way inwhich their thinking is affected by the cultural or family messages they have absorbed aboutthe past. The research reported here—based on two studies of young children, one conductedin the USA and one in Northern Ireland—attempts to do just that. Although this kind ofsociocultural approach can illuminate many aspects of children’s developing historical under-standing (Barton, in press), this analysis focuses primarily on ideas concerning the purpose oflearning history—particularly how those ideas are bound up with social, political andpedagogical factors shaping historical representations in speci� c social settings in the twocountries. The comparative dimension of this research is crucial for, as the interviews withthe two girls at the beginning of this paper indicate, these studies revealed both similaritiesand differences in children’s perspectives on the past. Systematic comparisons of the ele-ments which go into these developing understandings can thus help illuminate the process bywhich individuals make use of the ‘cultural tools’ (Wertsch, 1998) surrounding history indifferent national contexts.

Research Settings and Methods

The two studies which comprise this project were conducted at a single school in the USAand at four schools in Northern Ireland. The US research focused on students in twoelementary classrooms—one a fourth grade and one a fourth/� fth combination (ages 9–11)—in a suburban region near Cincinnati, Ohio. The community consisted primarily of stableresidential neighbourhoods, and many families had lived in the area for several generations.Nearly all students in the US study were of European American descent (although a few alsoidenti� ed with Native Americans in their ancestry), and most came from middle or upper-middle socioeconomic backgrounds; a large portion had parents with college degrees and jobsin professional or managerial � elds. Slightly more than 10% of the students, though, lived inthe community’s small public housing projects, and thus the range of socioeconomicbackgrounds in the classes was wide.

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All four schools in Northern Ireland were in rural areas far from major urban centres;taken together they provided an interesting mix of locations within the region. Two wereintegrated schools in a district with a large town and several small and medium villages, andtheir students came from throughout the district; although roughly equal numbers ofProtestants and Catholics were enrolled, all students came from communities which werepredominantly Protestant. Both the other schools were in small villages, one predominantlyProtestant, one Catholic, and both drew exclusively from their immediate surroundings.Economically, all schools enrolled students from a wide variety of backgrounds, but twoincluded large portions of children whose parents were middle-class professionals; families atanother were much poorer and included a high proportion of farmers, skilled or unskilledlabourers and the unemployed; while the fourth school fell between these two extremes. Theschools also re� ected a variety of experiences related to Northern Ireland’s political violence:two were in a region which had few overt problems in community relations, but whichsporadically experienced � are-ups of tension; one was in a village which had been at thecentre of a highly controversial annual march for several years; and one was in a peacefulvillage near the border with the Republic of Ireland. Thus although the sites in NorthernIreland were limited to rural areas, they represented a wide range of social backgroundswithin the region—including students from both major religious traditions, a range ofeconomic circumstances, a combination of large and small towns and villages and variedexperiences of the region’s political con� icts.

Both the US and Northern Irish components of the study relied on two principalresearch methods. The � rst consisted of open-ended, semi-structured interviews with stu-dents, most of whom were interviewed in pairs. In each interview, students were shownpictures from the past and asked to arrange them in chronological order and to explain thereasons for their placements. This task was followed by more general questions about history:these included asking what aspects of life had changed over time and why; how people knowhow life was different in the past; why history is important and where they had learned aboutthe topic. Frequently their answers were probed or additional questions were asked to followup on issues that arose during interviews. In Northern Ireland, 121 students from ages 6–12were interviewed during a total of 60 interviews at the four schools. In the US study, 33students from ages 9–11 were interviewed during a total of 29 interviews in the twoclassrooms. In addition to interviews, both studies involved extensive classroom observation,particularly listening to and talking with students as they took part in whole-class orsmall-group discussions. In Northern Ireland, there were observations of most history lessonstaught in the integrated primary school during approximately a 3-month period, totalling 38observations lasting about 40–50 minutes each. In the US classrooms, observations wereconducted on 63 occasions—beginning in August and continuing until March—for a total ofapproximately 90 hours.

Findings

The use of similar methods in Northern Ireland and the USA allows for systematic compari-sons of the historical thinking of children aged 12 and below in the two settings. Althoughthese studies provided information on numerous aspects of that thought, this analysisconcentrates on two features that are critical from a sociocultural perspective—the forms ofhistorical representation found in the social settings in which children learned about the past,and the conclusions students had reached about the purpose of historical learning. Byexamining how these features compare cross-culturally, this research yields information onthe nature of children’s historical thinking in the two countries and points toward the

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Children’s Historical Understanding 93

possibilities and limitations of their ideas as they approach the more formal and systematicstudy of history in secondary school [1]

Sources of Children’s Historical Understanding

Although history is sometimes portrayed as the ultimate in boredom for young children,students in both the USA and Northern Ireland consistently maintained otherwise; indeed,many considered themselves historically knowledgeable individuals who were actively en-gaged in learning more about the past. During interviews, nearly every student said he or shethought history was interesting, and these avowals seemed genuine and sincere; indeed, manystudents explained that they thought history was a school subject precisely because it wasinteresting. Nor did students simply answer ‘yes’ when asked if they were interested inhistory; they brought up their interest in the topic before being asked, they gave examples ofhow they had pursued that interest, and they described themselves as consciously interestedin and knowledgeable about history. In both countries, students thought of themselves andothers as active learners about history—as people with de� nite interests in the past. Theseconceptions were intimately connected to the settings in which they had learned about thesubject—from relatives, from print and electronic media, at museums and other historic sitesand in school.

Students in both countries mentioned relatives more often than any other source ofhistorical information. During interviews, those in the USA often explained that they knewabout speci� c time-periods or events because they had learned about them from their parentsor grandparents. Referring to a picture of suffragists, for example, Amber explained that shehad learned about women not being able to vote in the past because ‘my mom taught me’,and, as Wayne said more generally, ‘My mom and dad tell about history and their parentsand a long time ago’ [2]. Similarly, students in Northern Ireland identi� ed family membersas important sources of knowledge in nearly every interview. P3 [3] Sophie noted that ‘Mygrandad was born about 60 years ago and teaches me a lot about how it was a long time ago’,and P6 Jeffrey explained, ‘I go to my granny’s, and she tells me about the wars’.

Students in both locations considered themselves willing and active participants in thesediscussions of history. They unanimously said they liked listening to their relatives talk abouthistory, and some explained that they had sought out information from their parents abouttopics covered in class. US student Kenny, for example, explained, ‘We’ve talked aboutsomething in school, and then I’d go home and ask my parents something … and then weget started on a talk about how history happened’. Similarly, P5 Maura noted that ‘My daddyalways watches � lms about them [historical times] … and I ask him different things thathappened a long time ago—he’s very old—I ask Daddy wee questions about what happenedlong times ago, and why they happened’. Students saw this exchange as a central componentof historical learning and anticipated they would one day ful� l the same role as their relatives.US student Charles, for example, explained that people study history ‘because it’s somethingthat happened a long time ago, and you want to know what happened so you can teach yourkids some stuff about it’. And as P5 Joanna observed, ‘Whenever you get older and you havekids, you can tell them what it’s like, and if it does change, you can tell them what it was likewhenever you were young’ [4].

In the US study, the second most frequently mentioned source of historical informationwas the media, particularly television and movies. Students often referred to these sourceswhen explaining how they knew about speci� c topics (such as the Westward movement) orabout life in the past generally. US students also sometimes mentioned learning about historyfrom print media, such as works of historical � ction or biographies of historical � gures.

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Although the media � gured somewhat less prominently in interviews with students inNorthern Ireland, they also frequently mentioned learning about history from books, tele-vision and videos. Sometimes they gave speci� c examples—Horrible Histories books, or videossuch as Oliver Twist—but students more often talked about these sources in general terms; asP6 Reece noted, ‘In the holidays there’s lots of programmes on about it [history], andsometimes if we’re off school ’cause we’re sick we might watch the programmes about it’.Despite their frequent lack of speci� c examples, though, these students were con� dent of theimportance of the media; as P5 Desmond said, ‘I wouldn’t have known anything about thesekind of pictures only for TV, really’.

In Northern Ireland, historic sites were particularly important sources of historicalinformation. The region has three major outdoor history parks with extensive reconstructionsof historic and prehistoric settlements, and many students had been to one or more of thesesites, as part of either a school trip or a family visit. Others had been on similar outings toother museums or historic sites throughout Northern Ireland (and in a few cases, in Englandor the Republic of Ireland). As P7 Stuart said, ‘Me and my family usually go out for an outingon Sunday, like to Devenish Island, and I learn a lot of history then’. Students in the USAalso mentioned places or events in their community as a source of historical information:several noted going to local or national historical landmarks with their families, and othersmentioned learning about history during visits to museums. Compared with those inNorthern Ireland, though, US students mentioned such sites less frequently and recalledfewer speci� c details from them.

Finally, schools provided an important source of children’s knowledge about history andof their interest in the topic. In the US classrooms—where the two teachers in this studyconsistently engaged students in inquiry-oriented historical projects—students often greetedthe arrival of the history portion of their day with enthusiasm. Although attention occasion-ally waned during some lessons, these periods were infrequent and brief. Similarly, studentsin Northern Ireland talked positively about their experiences in classrooms and seemed toenjoy the projects and discussions in which they took part; indeed, their most frequentcomplaint about studying history was that they did not do more of it! During interviews,students in both countries only occasionally mentioned school as a source of speci� chistorical knowledge, but this infrequency may be due to the fact that the content of theinterviews was not directly related to their curricular topics, and because it would have beensuper� uous—for students in whose classrooms I was a daily visitor—to explain things theyknew I had already observed.

Children’s Ideas about the Purposes of Knowing History

During the classroom observations and talking with students in the USA and NorthernIreland, there was little evidence that primary/elementary teachers in either setting systemat-ically addressed the purpose of knowing history (neither do television programmes ormuseums, for that matter); as a result, students are left to make their own inferences aboutwhy the subject is important. In the US classrooms studied here, the teachers sometimesasked students why they thought history was important, but, in keeping with the open-endednature of their instruction, they allowed students to speculate freely on the purposes oflearning about the past without ever guiding them toward a single answer. Near the beginningof the year, students often explained that history is important because ‘you would want toknow it’, ‘it’s interesting’ or ‘you would need to know’, and their attempts to elaboratesometimes went no further than referring back to the subject itself; Angie, for example, said

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Children’s Historical Understanding 95

that without studying history, ‘you wouldn’t know what the president’s names were andstuff’. Some students continued to give such vague answers throughout the year.

But after students had begun creating personal histories, investigating their familyhistories and conducting research projects on change over time, most gave more complicatedand explicit explanations of the importance of history. Nearly all students pointed to the needto create a narrative that explained the present—particularly a narrative that providedindividual and collective identities. Frequently, students talked about learning history be-cause of the need to know about their own past or that of their families. Jeremy, for example,explained, ‘I think it’s fun to learn about yourself, stuff that you didn’t know’, and Seanexplained that ‘you would want to remember special moments in your life’ and that ‘youmight have family members who were killed in World War II’. Nichole thought history wasimportant to study ‘to � nd out who all your ancestors are’; as Tonya put it, ‘If you didn’thave history, how would you know who’s related to you and who’s not?’

At other times, students focused less on their personal connections to the past andexplained instead that knowing history was a way of making sense of the present state of theworld. Near the end of the year, Kenny noted that history is important because ‘everybody’scurious’, and began to explain that whenever he starts to watch a hockey game on television,he has to go to bed before it’s over. The next morning, he explained, he’s always curious to� nd out who won. Thinking his explanation had played itself out, the researcher moved onto another topic, but he brought the discussion back to his analogy and explained that, withhistory, ‘It’s just the opposite of watching a hockey game, because you couldn’t see the wholething, but you see … how it ended; you want to know how it got started and stuff. It’s justlike seeing half of everything, I mean, you just want to get that other half, and when you � ndthat other half, it answers millions of questions that changed the world’. As with severalstudents in the US portion of this study, history provided Kenny a way of understanding howthe world got to be the way it is today.

Over the course of the year, students increasingly combined these two ideas about thepurpose of learning history by describing how history explained their own place in thebroader sweep of human affairs. As they encountered new topics in their studies, theyfrequently related them to the present day and explicitly located themselves within thathistorical context. By the end of the year they con� dently identi� ed signi� cant events inhistory that had affected their own lives in the present. Anthony, for example, noted that ‘ifthe immigrants didn’t come over, we would not be here’, while Gary also noted thatimmigration was ‘how our grandfathers, and great-grandfathers and stuff got here’; he alsoreferred to a picture of the Westward movement by observing. ‘These are our forefathers’.The use of � rst-person plural pronouns was the most obvious manifestation of students’location of themselves within history: referring to we, us, or our became a staple of historicaldiscussions throughout the year.

The two events students most frequently mentioned as having an impact on themselveswere the Civil Rights movement and the American Revolution. In both cases, studentsdescribed these events by referring to their own place in history, and they almost invariablyused the word we. Michael, for example, noted that the Civil Rights movement was importantbecause ‘if Blacks didn’t stand up for themselves, we’d still, like, be, like, beating them upand stuff’, and that the American Revolution was important because without it, ‘we’d beruled by England’. John also explained that ‘if we didn’t � ght [the Revolution], then wewould still be a part of England, and we wouldn’t be called the United States of America, andwe wouldn’t actually be completely free’. Darren explained that the Civil Rights movementwas important ‘so that we’ll understand how and why we are now’, and Brandon noted that

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it ‘affects us now, so we know not to do it. If we didn’t know about it, we would still treatBlacks like that now’.

The explanation that knowing history provides a guide to action in the present was acommon one. John noted that knowing history ‘helps us to, like, treat other people’; whenasked what he meant, he explained, ‘Like when the Nazis, like Hitler tried to rule the world,we might have, like, tried to do that in the future if it didn’t stop or something, and then, nowthat we found out what happened, everybody knows how to be, like, sort of nice to otherpeople, instead of making all these wars’. Similarly, Kathy and Curtis had been talking aboutthe importance of the Civil Rights movement when they were asked whether knowing historywould in� uence people’s opinions; in the following excerpt, Curtis anticipated the re-searchers’s question:

Interviewer: Do you think knowing about history would …

Curtis: Change your mind or something?

Interviewer: Yeah.

Kathy: Well, yeah, because if I didn’t know that there was, like, a war, kindof like, having Black people, maybe I would be really mean to Blackpeople.

Curtis: And didn’t know that immigrants came, you would probably treat theimmigrants mean and stuff because they were from another countryand talk another language.

Kathy: And if I didn’t really know about Martin Luther King and all that,then it would be like, ‘Oh, it’s just a man who did this, doesn’t reallymatter’, or something like that.

Both Kathy and Curtis considered history signi� cant because it helped them understand theirplace in the country today; knowing about the Civil Rights movement mattered to thembecause that knowledge helped explain their relationship to other people. For US students,the purpose of history was to create a narrative that provided them with a sense ofidentity—history became a way of explaining their place in society. When students talkedabout the importance of history, they often pointed to the need to know about theirindividual pasts and those of their families; as they studied topics more remote in time andplace, they referred to the foundation of the USA as a political unit, the creation of moderntechnology and the origins of contemporary social relations. Moreover, students linked theirindividual identities to the broader society of which they were part: in describing signi� canthistorical events and patterns, students located themselves within a larger narrative—explain-ing not only where they � tted into history but also how knowing about history helped themunderstand how to live in the present. These students consistently used pronouns such as‘our’ and ‘we’ in talking about history; for them, history was important because it helpedthem understand how their country began and how they should treat each other. Re� ectingthe family contexts in which they had learned about the past, students thought they wouldone day hand this information down to their own children [5].

But these were not the reasons students in Northern Ireland gave for studying history.Very few suggested that lessons could be learned from the past, and those who did so tendedto be vague about what those lessons might be; as P7 Timothy noted, ‘In case something wasdone wrong, it wouldn’t happen again’. Nor did students in Northern Ireland point to historyas a way of establishing individual or collective identity. Some thought topics like the Vikings

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were important because ‘they had a lot to do with the English, with � ghting’ or because‘they’re part of Ireland’, or even because ‘some people’s ancestors might be Vikings’, butthese students did not suggest that historical events provided themselves or anyone else witha sense of identity in the present. Most notably, when talking about such topics they almostnever used � rst-person pronouns—the we and our that are an indispensable part of USstudents’ discussions of history.

If the rationales of US students were relatively unimportant to students in NorthernIreland, what did they think was the purpose of history? When asked directly, students gavea variety of answers; some suggested that history demonstrates how lucky they are to be livingin the present (‘with good warm clothes and friendly schools and all’) or that it might beuseful if someone got a job to do with history (like working in a museum) or took an examin history. (The US students sometimes gave similarly pragmatic answers, although they weremore likely to suggest the possibility of appearing on a quiz show than taking an exam; seealso VanSledright (1997) for similar responses.) But the most frequent reason students gavefor learning history was nearly the opposite of US students’ rationale: history is important inorder to learn about people who are different. Year 8 student Hamish put it succinctly—hesaid that history is important ‘to understand the way other people lived and went about theirdaily life’. This theme ran throughout students’ explanations of the rationale for studyingboth particular topics in history and the subject in general; they consistently pointed todifferences between past and present—the more differences the better—as the reason for theirinterest in history. Explanations of this kind were so numerous that it would be dif� cult toreport them all, but the following quotations provide some representative examples:

It’s lovely, it’s wonderful to see what you haven’t, what you’ve missed before youwere born. (P3 Morna)

We get to know what happened a long time ago, and that’s very interesting, ’causeit’s very kind of different than we do it now, so it is. (P4 Alexander)

It’s very interesting because you learn what other people used to live like, not whatwe used to live like, and what they used to wear and how they used to act and all… because now we know how people act, but we didn’t know how they act, and it’svery interesting � nding out about other people. (P6 Nuala)

It just gives you a different point of view than ourselves to look at, it gives you whatlife was like then, not now. (P7 Patricia)

Several students suggested that this kind of curiosity about others is a basic human attribute.P7 Carla, for example, said, ‘It’s just interesting to know what it was like if we had been there,and people 50 years from now will be keen to know what it’s like for us’. Students frequentlylinked this desire to know about others to their belief that they would one day be expectedto pass on the information. P5 Liam gave the following justi� cation for learning abouthistory:

You’d be wanting to know about the past, and if you grow up and then somebodyasks you about history and you didn’t learn, you’d be all, ‘What’s that?’—askingquestions—and if you learn it you’ll just know it like that, and then you’ll tell peopleabout it, and you’ll grow up and you’ll want to be like what you are [the inter-viewer], telling people.

Thus while students in both Northern Ireland and the USA believed that they would one daybe responsible for telling others about history, they differed fundamentally in their under-

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standing of the purpose of such an intergenerational transmission of knowledge. For USstudents, telling others about history meant giving them a sense of identity—establishingwhere they � t into their family, their community and their nation. For students in NorthernIreland, telling others about history meant providing information that would allow them tomove beyond themselves and see what life was like for other people in other times and places.

Representations of History and Conceptions of Purpose

Students in Northern Ireland and the USA learn about history in many of the same kinds ofsettings—not only at school but from relatives, the media and historic sites. Beneath thesesimilarities, though, lie fundamental differences in children’s ideas about the purpose oflearning history. As already noted, in neither location was there much evidence that studentswere explicitly told the purpose of history, and as a result they had to infer it from the natureof their encounter with the subject. So how could students who experienced history insubstantially similar settings reach such drastically different conclusions about its purpose? Inparticular, how could an area of knowledge so closely linked to interactions with relatives leadUS students—but not those in Northern Ireland—to see history as a means of establishingidentity? The answer lies in the particular historical content which children encountered inthe two settings, especially the congruence—or lack of congruence—between family storiesand public history.

In the USA, the history that students encounter in public forums (whether schools,museums or cartoons) is almost always a story of national development: students learn aboutthe original inhabitants of the Americas, their conquest by European explorers, the colonis-ation of the Eastern seaboard, the � ght for independence from Britain and the developmentof the new nation—increasing prosperity, industrialisation, geographic expansion and theextension of rights and opportunities to new sections of the population. The historical � gureschildren encounter from a young age are people who play a role (albeit sometimes mythical)in this story of progress and national development—Christopher Columbus, George Wash-ington, Betsy Ross, Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King. Sometimes the nation’s pastis presented in a positive light, and sometimes it is portrayed more critically—but whetherpositive or negative, history in the USA is invariably the history of us, the history of ournation. Learning about others—about medieval Europe or ancient China or the Malianempire or even the Aztecs—is rarely a part of young children’s encounter with history; suchpeoples are not often represented in school, in historic sites or in the media. (In many states,students � nally study world history at school in grade 6 or 7.) The classrooms in the USportion of this study did not differ substantially from this pattern: although the teachers usedinstructional methods which were considerably more open-ended and activity-oriented thantypically found in the USA (and although they introduced history through personal andfamily history projects—also a deviation from common US patterns), the curricular contentto which students were exposed largely still revolved around a narrative of national develop-ment.

It’s little surprise, then, that US students see history as a way of forming identity, for notonly their own families but also impersonal public forums tell them stories of origins. Thepersonal transmission of historical knowledge, combined with the story of national develop-ment that children encounter all around them, encourages them to see all history as their ownstory: their relatives tell them about their own past and that of their family, and schools andthe rest of society tell them about the past of their country. These two stories may becomeconnected as students hear about their relatives’ participation in the Vietnam War, or the USCivil Rights movement or the expanded opportunities for women during World War II. All

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history is about us, and children make the logical connection between the we of familyhistories and the we of the national past; they rarely encounter historical content that is notrelated to either personal or national identity, and the connection between the two requireslittle imagination. As this study and others demonstrate, US students from a wide variety ofbackgrounds consciously and explicitly relate history to their sense of identity (VanSledright,1997; Barton & Levstik, 1998; Hahn & Hughes, 1998.

But the relationship between history and identity in Northern Ireland is more compli-cated, not least because it involves highly charged political issues. Although children inNorthern Ireland also learn about history from relatives, they experience a fundamentaldiscontinuity between their personal and family histories and much of the history they � ndpresented in the rest of society. Outside home, the public forums to which young children areexposed generally avoid suggesting that they identify personally with the history they seerepresented. In the media, for example, children rarely encounter topics related to the historyof the north of Ireland: television programmes, movies and books are produced in Englandor the USA, and few deal with topics children might identify with directly—the history theyencounter in the media is invariably about others [6]. The historic sites prevalent in NorthernIreland also distance history from present-day issues or a sense of identity. Many date fromprehistoric eras (burial mounds or stone circles, for example) and these are the work ofpeople so far removed in time that it is dif� cult to think of them as the forerunners of modernsociety—as an older version of ‘us’. But even more recent sites are presented to the public insuch a way that their connections to the present—particularly their role in English–Irishrelations—are obscured. Those that focus on the last 200 years, for example, typicallyemphasise social history—how people lived and worked—rather than political events or socialmovements. Even sites closely linked to political developments present those events as amatter of chronology—simply listing a series of confrontations—rather than tying themtogether into an overall story. As presented to the public, historic sites in Northern Irelanddo not represent components in a story of national development the way Colonial Williams-burg, Independence Hall or Civil War battle sites do in the USA.

Particularly notable is the content of the pre-secondary school curriculum in NorthernIreland. Unlike in the USA, students do not study a narrative of national development—theydo not learn about the people or events that led to the creation of modern-day NorthernIreland. Most of the topics they study (both those required by the National Curriculum andpopular supplementary units) focus on people far removed in time or space—Vikings,Mesolithic people or Ancient Egyptians. In addition, instruction emphasises using historicalskills such as the analysis and interpretation of evidence rather than retaining the details ofspeci� c historical narratives; indeed, throughout the United Kingdom, both historians andeducators often distrust narrative history as ‘an unacademic, slightly immature and unreliablemode of analysis’ (Husbands, 1996, p. 46). Even when students encounter topics whereconnections to the present are more immediate—in units focusing on the Irish Famine,Victorian Life or daily life during World War II—the emphasis remains on reaching conclu-sions about what life was like at the time, rather than on studying how the events of a givenperiod led to the structure of contemporary society.

School, the media and historic sites, then, all avoid making connections between historyand national identity. They focus instead on antiquity, on social history or on strictchronology. This lack of attention to the development of the current social and politicalstructure of the region is hardly surprising, for there are two con� icting historical narrativesin Northern Ireland—one Unionist and one Nationalist—and they are opposed at nearlyevery point. To tell a story of national development would mean making choices between thetwo, and doing so would have serious political consequences—denunciation, loss of funding

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and very possibly violence. Many educators in Northern Ireland argue that institutions suchas schools and museums should tackle controversial issues by holding the competing nationalnarratives up to rational and public scrutiny, so that children and adults could make moreinformed decisions in the region’s highly charged political atmosphere (e.g. Gallagher, 1998;McCully, 1999). But in most public institutions in Northern Ireland—particularly those towhich young children are most often exposed—the price for examining stories of the nation’srecent history is simply too high, and thus these institutions bypass the issue by focusing onthe distant past, on social history and on chronology.

The public settings in which children are likely to be encouraged to identify with storiesof the national past, on the other hand, are explicitly sectarian—marches, demonstrations,memorials or meetings of overtly or implicitly political organisations. The current politicalcon� ict is inextricably linked to issues of identity, and these issues often revolve aroundhistory. The 1641 rebellion, the Siege of Derry, Penal Laws and Bloody Sunday—for manypeople, these historical events and others provide crucial elements of their sense of self(Buckley & Kenney, 1995; Jarman, 1998). The students in this study, though, demonstratedno overt familiarity with Unionist or Nationalist stories of the national past: they almost nevermentioned such perspectives during interviews or classroom observations, even when askedif they could think of other important people or events from history. There are a number ofpossible explanations for this absence: students may not have felt comfortable expressingsuch perspectives to an outsider; they may not have associated sectarian � gures and eventswith the kinds of history they were asked about in a school setting; they may have been lesspoliticised than students from more overtly sectarian neighbourhoods in urban centres; orperhaps children’s identi� cation with sectarian perspectives on the past develops later inadolescence. But regardless of the reasons for the absence of Nationalist or Unionist historicalperspectives in these students’ responses, it is clear that the connection they made betweenhistory and identity was much weaker than among US students, who are practically incapableof discussing the past without using words like we, us and our.

In the USA, then, nearly all sources of historical information for children reinforce theidea that history is about ‘us’: schools, television, families, holidays, museums—all tell thestory of the national past and encourage students to locate themselves within that story.Personal and public history are one and the same, and even historical controversies in theUSA revolve around identity—they are debates about who we are and how we got to be here.And, as this research shows, children develop this sense of identity from a young age: byfourth and � fth grade, students have come to believe that history tells them who they are andwhere they � t into national life. But in Northern Ireland, personal and public history do notreinforce each other; the public history young children encounter at school, in museums orin the media is not usually connected to the experiences of their families or their communi-ties. This is the crucial variable that accounts for the differences in students’ understandingof the purpose for learning history in the USA and Northern Ireland. The discontinuitybetween personal and public history leads students in Northern Ireland to enter adolescencebelieving that the purpose of history is to learn about other people and how they lived. Butin the USA, the similarity of personal and national history leads students to think the subjectshould focus on the origins of themselves and the society of which they are a part.

Discussion and Implications

The practical implications of this study are especially important, for history provides fertileground for ongoing and contentious debate in both Northern Ireland and the USA—and notonly among academics, but in society at large. These debates are inextricably connected to

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conceptions of appropriate educational practice. Yet in neither country are such discussionsgrounded in a � rm base of evidence about how children’s ideas develop. In the USA, adultsare widely sceptical about the historical knowledge of children—they are more likely todismiss them as ignorant of history than to take their ideas seriously. In Northern Ireland, onthe other hand, adults often assume that children know too much about history—that theylearn sectarian stories of the national past ‘at their mother’s knee’ (Stewart, 1977, p. 16;Byrne, 1997), and that these perceptions last throughout their lives. Both these perspectiveslead to a certain pessimism about the potential for teaching history to children—in the USAbecause they don’t know enough to pursue the topic meaningfully, in Northern Irelandbecause their ideas are so deeply embedded that instruction is unlikely to have muchin� uence. Studies such as those reported here can provide a means of testing these assump-tions and evaluating the extent to which prior learning in� uences children’s encounter withhistory.

For educators in the USA, one of the most encouraging � ndings of this research—con-sistent with studies such as those by Brophy et al. (1993) and Levstik & Barton (1996)—isthat children from a young age are interested in and knowledgeable about history. By fourthgrade, children have learned about the past from a variety of sources outside school, theyhave actively begun to seek out historical information and they consciously think of them-selves as historically interested and aware individuals. Moreover, this study shows that historycan be more than an amusing diversion: it can become a critical source of children’sidentity—a means of de� ning who they are and of their place in a larger community. Whenclassroom experiences build on children’s backgrounds—by engaging them in the study ofpersonal and family histories, for example, and by linking those stories to larger issues andpatterns in the nation’s past—history becomes a highly relevant and personally meaningful� eld of study. Indeed, as re� ected in the comments of several students in this study, theinsights gained from historical study can provide a guide to action in the present. This is notto suggest that simple exposure to historical content will magically achieve such lofty goals:crafting a relevant and meaningful approach to history requires that educators engage in anongoing and re� ective attempt to link instruction to students’ lives, and to do so in a way thatallows students to see the connections between their own identities and those they share withothers. Guidelines for such an attempt lie beyond the purpose of this paper, although anumber of authors have begun to suggest ways educators might initiate this process (Seixas,1993b; Kobrin, 1996; Levstik & Barton, 1997). But in a country where disparate groupsstruggle to � nd common ground, and where public discourse and participatory citizenshipappear to be in a state of crisis, educators should be encouraged by the fact that history canhelp students think through critical issues of identity and social relations.

At the same time, US educators must consider the limitations of history that focuses tooexclusively on identity. Stories of who we are typically also become stories of who we aren’t:establishing loyalty to a community usually means de� ning others as lying outside that group.Such exclusiveness may be useful when trying to establish pride in the unique experiences ofa particular community, but when the past of an entire nation is under consideration,narratives which focus only on limited sections of the population will exclude many whoseexperiences deserve to be recognised. In the USA, the story of the nation’s past has for toolong ignored or minimised the role of women, minorities and working people, and as a resultnational history—and national identity—have been equated with the limited interests of asmall segment of its citizens. In this study, students’ explanations that studying immigrationand the Civil Rights movement teaches us how to treat them suggests the limited horizon oftheir sense of American identity.

History educators in the USA, then, must consider not only how to link history to

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students’ identities, but also how to expand their ideas about the relationship between historyand identity. That would mean, � rst, overcoming the exclusiveness which accompaniesstories of the nation’s past: instruction should systematically portray the diversity in UShistory—not simply by including a more varied set of characters into the traditional story ofsettlement, expansion and technological progress, but by emphasising how diverse peoplehave interacted—workers and owners, women and men, and people of diverse geographicorigins. By studying how complex the varieties of American identity have been (and continueto be), students may be less likely to equate that identity with a single story or a particularsegment of the population. In addition, students would bene� t from learning how theconcept of American identity itself has been contested over time; that is, they should learn notonly about the role of women or ethnic and religious minorities in history, but also howpeople have sought to be included as part of the nation’s story—and how others have foughtto have them excluded.

A different set of challenges faces educators in Northern Ireland. There, too, studentsencounter history from an early age, but perhaps the most encouraging conclusion of thisstudy is that such history does not revolve exclusively around sectarian stories of the nation’spast—indeed, those stories are avoided in most of the public forums in which young childrenlearn about history. Primary students’ belief that the purpose of history is to learn not abouttheir own past, but about people who are different, should be a highly signi� cant � nding, fordeveloping students’ understanding of and respect for cultural differences has been astatutory objective of both primary and secondary schooling in Northern Ireland throughoutthe past decade. (Northern Ireland Curriculum Council, 1990; Smith & Robinson, 1996). Ina country beset by con� ict between members of differing religious communities, this effortconstitutes a critical educational objective: students are unlikely to overcome the long-stand-ing intercommunity tensions in Northern Ireland unless they grow up recognising that peopledifferent from themselves also deserve to be treated with dignity and respect—the ‘parity ofesteem’ that has become a ubiquitous but elusive watchword in the region. Primary students’developing historical interest in the lives of people different from themselves might providea solid foundation for a lifelong commitment to a diverse society.

But ironically, secondary educators in Northern Ireland do not always perceive thechildren who come to them as being either knowledgeable about or receptive to studyinghistory at school, and only a minority of students continue to enrol in it once the subject isno longer required. What accounts for the pessimistic viewpoint of some educators, and forthe apparent diminution of students’ interest in history as they proceed through the second-ary history curriculum? In Northern Ireland, the potential for the subject to lapse intoirrelevance is perhaps the greatest obstacle to sustaining students’ interest. Although continu-ing to learn about distant societies would match their initial interests and expectations, oncethe creative and hands-on activities of the primary years—making Viking ships and WorldWar II ration cards, and visiting burial mounds and round towers—give way to more formalstudy, students may not be able to sustain their interest without an expanded rationale forpursuing the subject. The need for a deepened appreciation of history’s purpose is particu-larly crucial during the years of secondary schooling, for those years are a time of strongpressure to identify with sectarian viewpoints, including the politicised and divisive perspec-tives on the national past which provide much of the substance and justi� cation of suchviews. Under those circumstances, ‘school history’ stands in danger of being eclipsed by moreimmediate, more personally relevant, presentations of the past: the glori� ed story of theoppression or triumph of one’s own community may have a more powerful appeal to youngadolescents than the academic study of distant times and places—unless such study also hasa compelling rationale. The challenge for secondary educators, if they are to sustain students’

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interest while also improving community relations, is to capitalise on children’s prior interestwhile engaging them in a consideration of why history might provide enduring interest andrelevance for contemporary society. If history in the secondary curriculum remains a purely‘academic’ topic, it seems unlikely to ful� l this goal.

The � ndings of this research should be of particular interest to history educators in theUSA and Northern Ireland, but its comparative aspects also point to broader internationalimplications. As Hahn’s (1998) work on political understanding demonstrates, cross-nationalcomparisons can help illustrate the underlying premises which guide teaching and learning—premises held so completely yet unconsciously that they may blind us to alternative ways ofconceptualising the process by which students develop understanding either within or outsideformal educational institutions. By exploring similar questions in different national settings,we can gain a more complete picture of the range of variation in children’s thinking, as wellas a better understanding of the process by which that thinking is related to social andcultural contexts. The two studies reported here are particularly useful for promotingre� ection on the history curriculum, for the perspectives of children in the USA andNorthern Ireland are to some extent mirror images of each other: Although they have learnedabout history in similar settings, they have drawn nearly opposite conclusions about thenature and purpose of historical study. The contrasting features of these conclusions throwinto sharp relief the underlying premises of historical representation in each location andprovide the opportunity to rethink prevailing assumptions about the aims of history instruc-tion.

For educators outside these two countries, this research might prompt more carefulconsideration of the reasons for teaching history to children. It is tempting to regard history’spurpose in largely unproblematic terms. Scholars sometimes write as though the question of‘what history is for’ is a settled issue, or they may distinguish between popular and academicuses of the past—the proper goal of schooling being the latter. As this research shows,though, ideas about the ‘proper’ goals of history can differ dramatically in different nationalsettings, and these ideas are bound up with a range of social, cultural and political factors.Moreover, even when teachers and other educators do not explicitly address the purpose ofhistory, children develop a set of logical and consistent ideas around the topic—and these toodiffer cross-nationally. If not only historical representations but also children’s perceptions ofhistory are socially constructed, educators would do well to re� ect on whether thoseconstructions are consistent with the broader purposes they hope to achieve through thesubject. Instead of taking the purpose of history for granted (or simply ignoring the issue)educators might consider what implicit messages they send and whether those represent themost meaningful uses of history in their own contexts. The research reported here mightinspire educators in a variety of roles—classroom teachers, curriculum developers andmuseum personnel, etc.—to take responsibility for crafting an approach to history that isconsistent with the needs of their societies, rather than abdicating that responsibility throughdeference to academic historians, politicians or publishers of texts.

Conclusions

The research reported here illustrates, in part, how children in Northern Ireland and the USAconstruct their understanding of the nature and purpose of history, and it suggests that thoseconstructions are related to differing historical representations in the two countries. In both,children are surrounded by history—not only at school, but in the media, at museums andhistorical sites, and through the stories their families tell. And long before they beginsecondary school, children think of themselves as historically conscious individuals: they

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know about history, they’re interested in it and they want to learn more. The differingrepresentations of the past in the two societies, however, lead students to nearly oppositeconclusions about its purpose. In� uenced by the stories that connect themselves, theirfamilies and their country, students in the USA conclude that history is important so thatthey will know who they are—both individually and in the context of the broader society. InNorthern Ireland, on the other hand, stories of the origin and development of contemporarypolitical and social relations are too controversial to present in primary schools and mostother public institutions, and few children’s books or television programmes focus on theregion; as a result, students conclude that the purpose of history is to learn about others andhow they lived.

In both countries, history is the subject of ongoing discussion and disagreement; in both,the past forms the basis for fundamental con� icts about where society has been and, byimplication, where it is going (or should go, or can go). Children’s interest in history provideseducators with the opportunity to prepare them to enter intelligently into these debates—inNorthern Ireland, by building on their interest in the lives of people who are different, andin the USA, by helping them understand the origins of the society of which they are a part.At the same time, educators should carefully consider how their curriculum can avoid theobstacles to such re� nement in children’s thinking. In the USA, this might be accomplishedby acquainting students with the relationship between diversity and identity in history and byhelping them understand how perceptions of identity have been negotiated throughout thenation’s past. In Northern Ireland, students might be given the opportunity to consider thecontemporary relevance of historical study in the face of potentially compelling sectarianviewpoints. In both countries—and elsewhere—educators’ understanding of the potential forhistorical study with children can be broadened by considering the range of ideas about thepurpose of historical study that exist in differing national contexts.

Acknowledgements

This research was funded in part by a fellowship from the German Marshall Fund of theUnited States. Additional assistance was provided by the Cincinnati Branch of the English-Speaking Union and by the University of Ulster, Coleraine. The author would like to thankHarry McMahon and Alan McCully of the University of Ulster, Coleraine, for their generousassistance, as well as Vivienne Pollock and Pat McLean of the Ulster Museum and theprincipals, headteachers, teaching staff and students of the participating schools. This paperhas bene� ted immensely from the insightful comments of Alan McCully, Linda Levstik,Bruce VanSledright, Margaret Crocco and Stephen Thornton.

NOTES

[1] Although the US portion of the study is more limited in scope—focusing on only two grade levels and twoclassrooms—its generalisations are supported by their congruence with several other studies of the source andnature of US children’s knowledge of history, as noted throughout the paper.

[2] All student’s names have been replaced with pseudonyms to protect their privacy and that of their families.[3] Children in Northern Ireland begin school a year earlier than kindergartners in the USA; thus a student in

primary grade 4 (P4) is equivalent in age to a US second-grader, and the fourth- and � fth-graders in the USportion of this study are equivalent to P6/P7 students in Northern Ireland. Grade designations in NorthernIreland also differ by 1 year from those in the rest of the UK: a primary grade 4 student in this study would beequivalent to a primary grade 3 student in England. The � rst year of secondary schooling in Northern Ireland isdesignated in this paper as year 8 (the equivalent of sixth grade in the USA).

[4] A number of North American studies have reported similar � ndings on the importance of families and the mediaboth as sources of children’s historical knowledge and as in� uences on their conceptualisation of the nature and

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meaning of the past (see, for example, Brophy et al., 1993; Seixas, 1993a; Levstik & Barton, 1996; Epstein, 1998).[5] Other US studies have yielded strikingly consistent portraits of the relationship between students’ understanding

of history and their sense of national identity (see, for example, VanSledright, 1997; Barton & Levstik, 1998;Hahn & Hughes, 1998).

[6] As citizens of the United Kingdom, many people in Northern Ireland (especially Protestants) think of themselvesas British, but the British media rarely reciprocate—that is, British media sources rarely integrate NorthernIreland into their stories of the British past, and thus children do not often see their ancestors portrayed as partof that past. Similarly, many works of historical � ction are published in the Republic of Ireland, and these mightform a means of identi� cation for Catholic children in particular, but such books rarely focus on NorthernIreland, and their distribution there pales in comparison to those by British or US authors. Irish television alsoreceives only limited reception in Northern Ireland, and much of its programming originates in Britain or theUSA.

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