Davis, O. L. Jr, Yeager, E. A. and Foster, S. J. (Eds.). (2001). Historical Empathy and Perspective Taking in the Social Studies

	Davis, O. L. Jr, Yeager, E. A. and Foster, S. J. (Eds.). (2001). Historical Empathy and Perspective Taking in the Social Studies. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. 208 pp. $25.95 (Paper)       ISBN 0-8476-9813-0 $65 (Cloth)             ISBN 0-8476-9812-2 Reviewed by Kent den Heyer University of British Columbia May 6, 2002 It is often said in philosophy that between German and French thought the most enduring border exists between how they approach disciplinary knowledge. A German tradition holds knowledge to be the result of hard conceptual work. First, it is necessary to develop concepts; orderly, logical, and coherent. Only then, with conceptual schemes in place, can the world be read, or in the case of history, the past. In the French tradition, it is noted in contrast, knowledge is approached as a form of ignorance. For scholars such as Derrida, Foucault, Lacan, and North American scholars such Felman, Britzman, and Simon knowledge does not only emerge through the application of conceptual schemes, but more interestingly, derives from where or when such schemes fail. Roger Simon, for example, illustrates a French influenced approach with educators at the University of Toronto through a method they name as "historiographic poetics"(Simon, 2001). Through this method, historical traces (bits of narrative, photos, and artifacts of the Shoah for example) are arranged to indicate where the ability of the arranger to narrate meaningful explanations about the event falters. Simon and his colleagues seek to respond to the past outside institutionalized conditions- those found in schools and in research communities- with little time for the expression of ambiguities and uncertainties. These scholars reverse a German approach to knowledge. Rather than seeking to affirm the conceptual schema while acknowledging limitations, they seek to affirm a sort of existential encounter with the interpretive limits of concepts used to understand past lives and events. This German-French distinction assists in understanding the nature and limits of debates around the idea of historical empathy and its importance to history teaching and learning. In the German tradition, to empathize historically requires continued and improved application of the historical method. Ignorance is identified only to animate calls for a more successful application of the conceptual framework- better teaching methods, greater concentration on historical data, more courses, or what have you. A perhaps more interesting approach, left unexplored in this collection under review, might explore the kinds of experiences that lead students to appreciate both their imaginative limits and possibilities in relation to the past. The empathetic divide in history teaching and learning is between past and present time. How do people located in the latter understand those in the former? Empathy, in common use, connotes a sort of emotional connection, a sympathy with the lived situation of another. Empathy in historical research, in contrast, refers to an intellectual and imaginative capacity that accounts for the contextual conditions experienced by those studied in the past. In this literature, historical empathy is assumed to broaden both present appreciation and understanding of past lives and actions. One way to frame the question of empathy in research into historical understanding is to ask: How and to what degree do and can students of history come to know the motivations, thoughts, and conditions that led historical actors to do what we have evidence of them doing? The authors in this collection clearly address this question from a German perspective on knowledge and by and large conclude with calls for continued and improved application of the historical method. In this review, I examine the definitions of empathy offered by authors in this collection before highlighting a few particular findings from the articles. Much of this collection consists of attempts to define empathy as a concept. After a perfunctory nod to the difficulties of empathy's definition or achievement, a picture emerges from these articles of empathy as historical understanding itself, gained through the application of the historical method. This method according to Yeager and Doppen begins with: The introduction of an historical event necessitating the analysis of human action, the understanding of historical context and chronology, the analysis of a variety of historical evidence and interpretations, and the construction of a narrative framework through which reasonable historical conclusions are reached. (Yeager and Doppen, p. 97). Foster writes that empathy in its modern usage comes from the German "verstehen" (Foster, p.167). The word's use in the English language made its way into the common parlance of history and teaching research through the British, and most recently through the research of Dennis Shemilt, Peter Lee, and Rosalyn Ashby and others associated with British work on historical understanding. In their essay, Lee and Ashby define empathy as a synonym for the "achievement" of historical understanding that results from hard intellectual work: If it is to be given any sensible meaning in history, empathy is where you get when you have done the hard thinking.... It means entertaining complex ideas and seeing how they shape views of historical circumstances and goals, even when such ideas and goals may be very different from (and perhaps opposed to) our own (Lee and Ashby, p. 25) Yeager and Foster in their article and Riley in hers concur that empathy is "both the process of historical craftsmanship and its end result" (Riley, p. 145). Rather than empathy, Levstik prefers the phrase "perspective taking" in her contribution to the collection. "Perspective taking" is the "ability to recognize some of the socio-cultural and political forces that shape human behavior, now and in the past (Levstik, p. 72). VanSledright's contribution to the collection argues for the impossibility of full historical empathy. He prefers a notion of "contextualization" to describe what students require to do historical work: "the question is not of empathy per se, but, rather, it is one of the thought processes required to construct a sense of historical context" (VanSledright p. 65). The difficulty of historical empathy or contextual understanding aside, the authors collectively assert that, however put- empathy, perspective, or contextualization- historical understanding will improve through a progressively refined application of historical method by students. That is to say that teaching history must be done better. Who can argue? But it remains a question whether an understanding of empathy that is nothing more than the historical method, as argued by Yeager and Doppen and Riley, or its successful achievement as Lee and Ashby point out, will improve student appreciation for their imaginative and intellectual limitations in encounters with the past. I now move on to highlight other insights offered in this collection. VanSledright's contribution explores the impossibility of achieving historical empathy due to the "positionality" of readers, historical source, and historian. Yet, in building his arguments, VanSledright's positionality is somehow surpassed. VanSledright's argument for contextualization suffers from the "self-excepting fallacy" found in much of postmodern argumentation (Mandelbaum, 1984, p. 60). The inability to grasp another's intention seems to apply to all others except himself when he writes: "Collingwood senses the role our own awareness ... must play in the process ... of constructing historical understandings" (VanSledright, p. 66. Italics added). Surprising few, he adds, ... all we can point to is the extent to which we rely on the available evidence, the traces and residue from the past ... [that themselves] require interpretation from a present-day context ... that prescribe and direct the interpretive process" (VanSledright, p. 64). Exactly right. Surely by now laments about the communicative necessity and scholarly responsibility to engage our own illusions required of any "interpretive process" of another are more suited as starting points rather than conclusions. VanSledright's self-excepting fallacy continues with his address of contextualization as if it is somehow exempt from his critique of empathy. Contextualization requires, in VanSledright's words, echoing what all authors here state about empathy, "a recurring self-examination of one's own positionality" (VanSledright, p. 65). The thin distinction between empathy and contextualization he draws may account for why contextualization receives less than one full page out of the article's 14 text pages. The balance of the article argues for the impossibility of empathy and, by extension, I suggest, contextualization. Levstik's contribution is a wonderfully written report on an interesting question of national historical perception amongst New Zealand school children. Little effort beyond asserting the importance of perspective taking, however, is given to relate her findings to the topic for the collection. Her article examines how a national narrative in New Zealand prepares students to "‘think differently' and ‘understand a different point of view' in regard to distant rather than local ‘others'" (Levstik, p. 88). Most of her article is given to show how the children she studied expressed a sense of New Zealand's historical achievement and outsider status compared to the US and Britain. In doing so, Levstik argues these students retell a larger national historical narrative present in that country as she determines through interviews with leading New Zealand academics. Yeager & Doppen's article reports on their desire ... ... to find out whether the students who used only a single school history textbook in their empathy exercise yielded substantially different empathetic responses from the students who read from the large array of primary and secondary sources ... assembled in order to provide multiple perspectives and insights on the decision to bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki ...." (Yeager & Doppen, p. 99) The findings? Not surprisingly, students introduced to more diverse primary and secondary sources offered more substantive argumentation and appreciation for the difficulties of historical context than those offered by the students working solely with the textbook. Similar insights are found in Field's literature review of 12 volumes of the journal Social Studies & the Young Learner. Her findings indicate that elementary teachers ... seem intuitively to understand that these pupils need much experience in perspective taking of all varieties. Thus, they emphasize perspectives that are personal, cultural, chronological, civic/community, and historical (Field, p. 129-130). The article serves well as a compendium of themes addressed in that journal. Riley's contribution to the collection is at least helpful in pointing out in an endnote other sources for in-depth treatments for her topic of historical empathy and the Holocaust. Her article consists of a general discussion of the historical process, difficulties faced by students and teachers of history to make judgments about the past, and a review of some holocaust teaching resources. The article contains many curious statements and claims. Limited by space I include only a couple. For example, according to Riley, "historical understanding does not require, in fact rejects, endorsement or condemnation [of those in the past or their actions]" (Riley, p. 146). Riley doesn't seemed bothered by the still open question of whether anything can be, or should be, known without a value judgment. Likewise, she appears untroubled by her own claims about the difficulties of understanding historical others, appearing at times to support claims to the opposite: In her study of Frauen:German Women confront the Holocaust, Stern used empathy as a model for making sense of the experiences of non-Jewish women and they actions during the years of the Third Reich .... She found the model of empathy under discussion here guided her so that she clearly understood how and why these German women acted as they did, yet still retained her personal view of the Holocaust and its perpetrators. In the final analysis, she understood the motivations of these women to act as they did without endorsement or condemnation of their actions (Riley, p.147). It is hard to imagine that if "the challenge for teachers regarding context will be to disentangle it from the current cult of relativism or presentism" (Riley, p. 147), that will be met when endorsements or condemnations of the past are discouraged and one accepts claims someone can "clearly understood the actions of another and their motivations" so enthusiastically. The one exception to this rather uninspired collection is the article by Lee and Ashby. The article's verve emerges from their well rehearsed part in twenty years of participation in the British intellectual and curricular debates over history and historical instruction. The article provides a rich summary of these debates. Intellectually, they have opposed those, like VanSledright and Jenkins (1991), who take the "impossibility" and "dubious ideological function" of full historical empathy as a reason to avoid its engagement (Foster, p. 169). Lee and Ashby forcefully argue that "progress" in historical understanding "is not all or nothing"(Lee & Ashby, p. 25). Of course, a full union of present understanding and past actuality is impossible even if desirable. It is precisely because of the contentious nature of history and its power to inform present expectations for the future that students require interpretive practice with competing historical conclusions about the past. Historical (mis)understandings exist whether intellectuals and teachers engage students in the interpretive process or products of history or not. On another front, Lee and Ashby have argued against conservative commentators in Britain who rhetorically position historical "empathy" as a childish attempt to feel what Hitler, for example, felt when he did what he did. Reducing historical empathy to a "feeling" or sympathy misrepresents the issue in order to support these commentators preference for a concentration in schools on historical facts (Lee and Ashby, p. 22). Lee and Ashby argue that empathy, as the achievement of historical understanding, requires more than fact acquisition. Teaching for empathy also involves providing students with progressively more rigorous intellectual tools, strategies, and opportunities to interpret the past. The research in their article reports on the kinds of reasoning employed by children when encountering past practices, such as the Anglo-Saxon trial by oath. Their findings indicate that in their attempts to explain past institutions, practices, and motivations, students rely on a set of "‘default' assumptions employ[ed] to make sense of a historical world that does not always conform to their expectations" (Lee &Ashby, p. 43). The authors confirm that these findings are consistent with other empathy studies. In reference to research by Barton, Lee and Ashby sum up these default assumptions: [Historical] change as rectification of a deficit past state, rational understanding of change as action, and the ignorance and inferior ability of those in the past .... (Lee and Ashby, p. 26) We can expect further reports from their large data source for years to come. To conclude, little in this collection differs, in terms of assumptions, methodology, or findings, from years of productive research, conducted by many of the authors collected here themselves, in the history teaching and learning literature. It might be time for research into how to improve students' empathetic capacities for history to look beyond the field's own scholarship for inspiration. For example, closely associated, social studies researchers and teachers have mined cultural studies for conceptual schemes to guide classroom practices in developing "perspective" that complement the goals of many of the researchers reviewed above (Seixas, 2001; Segal, 1999; Werner, 2000). Researchers might also begin to direct their research endeavors away from assumptions that fruitful historical research lies in the cognitive processes of children. How and in what ways, for example, do school conditions (i.e., classroom sizes, standardized testing) delimit capacities for imaginative, in this case historical, thinking? How much of students' default thinking results from their training in schools in which expressions of ignorance are, to say the least, lacking in gold-star recognition? What do teachers, students, and researchers need to think about to set up, engage with, and report about the challenges of existential encounters? If the focus must remain on cognitive processes, how do findings in historical empathy compare with those in other domains? Finally, it would be refreshing for researchers to report what, if any, were the benefits for the subjects of the research. Was the default reasoning of students, for example, used in the research project to help increase their appreciation for how they imagine the past and present? After many years of strident reminders from feminist and other scholars, perhaps this field needs to drop the objective philosophical stance and get a little more proactive for those from whom we take our readings of the world. References Jenkins, K. (1991). Re-Thinking History. New York: London, Routledge. Mandelbaum, M. (1984). Philosophy, history, and the sciences : selected critical essays Baltimore : Johns Hopkins University Press. Segall, A. (1999). Critical History: Implications for history/social studies education. Theory and Research in Social Education 27(3): 358-374. Seixas, P. (2001). Review of Research on Social Studies. Handbook of Research on Teaching 4th Ed., V. Richardson (Ed.) American Educational Research Association. Simon, R. (2001). Public Memory and the Ethical and Pedagogical Implications of Remembrance as a Social Practice. Paper presented at Canadian Historical Consciousness in an International Context: Theoretical Frameworks, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC. Werner, W. (2000). Reading Authorship into Texts. Theory and Research in Social Education 28(2): 193-219. About the Reviewer Kent den Heyer Kent den Heyer is a PhD student in the department of Curriculum Studies at the University of British Columbia where he also teaches prospective history and social studies teachers in the pre-service teacher education program. He is a research assistant in the Centre for the Study of Historical Consciousness. His research interests also include student and teacher conceptions of historical agency and social change, psychoanalytic approaches to anti-racist education, and education philosophy.