Teaching Historical Causality, Analyzing Similarities and Differences

-->As history teachers we are always trying to help students engage with history.  One of the basic ways we do this is by connecting the past to the present, either through analyzing causality – how past events shaped their own world – or through examining similarities between past worlds and their own experience.

These can grow into quite sophisticated forms of thinking.  Regarding historical causality, the main task is to help students gain more complex understandings of the causes of historical events.  Most high school students I’ve worked with have a tendency to say, “this caused that”: to look for a single causal factor for an event.  When I’ve worked with sixth graders, whenever we look at an important event I give them three causes to find, and then ask which are the most important.  (The major difficulty is that textbooks usually don't make the multiple causes of historical events clear enough to actually analyze, so I've often written my own material.) If sixth graders do a few rounds of looking for multiple causes, they stop assuming that historical events have one cause and they automatically look for multiple causes.  Additional layers of complexity can be added over time, such as increasing the level of abstraction, starting with the causes of events and moving to the causes of ideas, beliefs, and emotions; and incorporating the analysis of evidence: which causes can we be the most sure about?  By the time students get to high school, their ability to analyze historical causality should be fairly complex.

Recognizing similarity is also a very sophisticated task, because similarity is not sameness: rather, an analysis of similarity will entail understanding differences, and vice-versa.  I watch adults mistake cross-cultural similarities for sameness all the time: noticing a similarity, they often end up reading their own culture onto someone elses, failing to notice subtle but important differences.  Different cultures that students examine in history class will have similar notions, for example, of freedom or of justice and injustice, but they will never be quite the same.  Sometimes radical differences get misinterpreted as similarites.  For example, earlier today I was reading about how Zen became popular in the west partly because westerners understood the radical autonomy, anti-authoritarian behavior, and complete self-assuredness of Zen monks as the epitome of freedom.  However, the similarity was based on western notions of freedom that didn’t exist in Japan, where deference and freedom were linked in ways that alluded western perception.  Knowing nothing of Japanese notions of freedom, westerners unknowlingly read their own ideas onto another culture and created their own idea of Zen.  Ultimately, an analysis of what freedom would mean to a westerner versus a zen monk would entail a sophisticated ability to think about the forces that shape culture and about the ways that cultures interpret one another.  When we think of analyzing similarity and difference in this light, it becomes clear that at more sophisticated levels, there are many skills involved, and that these skills provide great cultural insight... including insight into ones own culture, and thus ones own self. 

As with similarity, when people see difference they often only see difference.  But a sophisticated way of perceiving difference entails understanding similarity.  These skills are enormously important, because if we see only one or the other, we become involved in stereotypic or even prejudicial thinking.  The analysis of similarity and difference is thus a form of critical thinking that reduces stereotypic thought and facilitates empathy.

Part of our task as history teachers involves creating lessons that help our students gain more sophisticated ways of analyzing historical causality and examining similarities and differences.  This requires understanding what these skills look like at higher and lower levels of sophistication.  If I begin the year with a group of sixth graders by teaching them to always look for multiple causes of historical events, and they quickly learn this basic habit, what next?  Where should they be by the end of the year?  By the end of the year after that?  

I was thinking about all this because last night I began writing a post on the foundations of the ancient Egyptian state and its accompanying mythology.  The post is actually my first step in writing a sixth grade unit on ancient Egypt.  Halfway through writing the post, I found myself thinking of the skills I wanted the unit to facilitate, and so ended up writing this instead :)