Teaching history as an interpretation, by using textbooks in a diachronic perspective
Bibliographic record
Abstract
History textbooks play an important role in the social representations of the past circulating within a society. Research shows, however, that textbooks often present their account of the past as 'the truth’: as a representation of what really, actually happened, leaving no room for different interpretations. This is at odds with the essence of history as being a matter of substantiated interpretation and construction, based on historical source analysis and considering multiple perspectives. If we want young people to deal critically with historical representations, it is necessary that they learn to use history textbooks in a critical manner. This article first reports on a diachronic narrative analysis of 20 secondary school history textbook series in Belgium since 1945, specifically focusing on the representation of the Belgian-Congolese colonial past. Afterwards a concrete didactical model is presented about how to transfer the results of this research into educational activities in the secondary school history classroom. It shows how history can be taught as an interpretation, and students can gain a deeper understanding of the constructive and interpretive nature of historical knowledge and interpretations.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.012 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".