Teaching critical thinking and voice in history essays: A spiderweb tool

South African Journal of Childhood Education

 
 
Field Value
 
Title Teaching critical thinking and voice in history essays: A spiderweb tool
 
Creator Godsell, Sarah
 
Subject History Education, Tertiary Education, Secondary Education, Primary Education, History Methodology Critical thinking; history education; teacher education; assessment; history methodology; Bloom’s taxonomy; classroom tools
Description Background: The history essay, and historical writing, are crucial forms of assessment in History throughout primary and high school education. This article draws from an autoethnography of teachings in a pre-service history teachers’ school classroom. This article discusses obstacles students experience in conceptualising and writing the history essay. A tool is introduced to overcome these obstacles.Aim: This article presents a possible intervention in the form of a classroom tool.Setting: This classroom tool is presented in a pre-service history teachers classroom (tertiary). It is presented as a method to teach history in classrooms of senior phase (SP), intermediate phase (IP), and further education and training (FET) phase.Methods: This article uses a qualitative methodology that draws on autoethnography and reflective teaching methodology, allowing me to understand and analyse the processes taking place in my own classroom. This was authorised with an ethics protocol number (H18/10/10).Results: The observations from the case study class showed that the tool provided possibilities for understanding the mediation of knowledge used in an essay, in a way that facilitates critical thinking and voice.Conclusion: This tool provides a possible class intervention that can range from primary to high school. It allows teachers to understand what levels their students’ thought need to operate on to teach essay and paragraph writing.Contribution: This spiderweb tool can be used directly in class to demonstrate how the different points of knowledge relate to each other in making an argument. This supports critical thinking and the development of voice.
 
Publisher AOSIS
 
Contributor Wits School of Education
Date 2022-11-25
 
Type info:eu-repo/semantics/article info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion — —
Format text/html application/epub+zip text/xml application/pdf
Identifier 10.4102/sajce.v12i1.1255
 
Source South African Journal of Childhood Education; Vol 12, No 1 (2022); 9 pages 2223-7682 2223-7674
 
Language eng
 
Relation
The following web links (URLs) may trigger a file download or direct you to an alternative webpage to gain access to a publication file format of the published article:

https://sajce.co.za/index.php/sajce/article/view/1255/2315 https://sajce.co.za/index.php/sajce/article/view/1255/2316 https://sajce.co.za/index.php/sajce/article/view/1255/2317 https://sajce.co.za/index.php/sajce/article/view/1255/2318
 
Coverage South Africa — —
Rights Copyright (c) 2022 Sarah Godsell https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
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