Understanding historical empathy in the classroom

Historical empathy is a topic that is decades old in history education research, but has been stunted in it’s implementation due to a lack of conceptual clarity, and a lag in balanced research grounding the term. Also, classroom practices and pedagogy have had some implementation missteps that have encouraged over identification and unrestrained emotional engagement between students of history and historical agents. These missteps run counter to the practice of quality, unbiased historical inquiry. The goal of this research study is to contribute to the field and knowledge in area of historical empathy, and to provide knowledge that help practitioners avoid such missteps. This study intends to help stabilize the term, and to investigate the dual-process (affective and cognitive) nature of historical empathy engagement. Through investigates the different conceptualizations and frameworks, especially in digging deeper into students’ affective process in historical empathy engagement, this study intends to balance the field’s understanding of the affective process in a dual-process model. The findings highlight the areas where current knowledge was echoed, where research may be misunderstood or fall short, and where further research and study is needed.

Author dc:creator

• Dillenburg, Margery

• Education
• Empathy
• History
• History education
• Social studies

Language dc:language.iso

en_US

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/2144/23247

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:open.bu.edu:2144/23247