Problem-Based Historical Inquiry Page

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Historical Empathy and Recognition of Competing Perspectives

Observation and interview data provided evidence that students demonstrated empathy towards the multiple viewpoints of key organizations involved in the Civil Rights Movement. The degree of student empathy for the perspectives of historical figures was suggested by the fact that many of the student groups actively maintained the roles assigned to them for their presentations throughout post-presentation discussions, and used those perspectives as a means for explaining the course of action they promoted (Barton & Levstik, 2004). The following is an excerpt of a ten-minute dialogue among students that occurred after one group (students S2, S4, and S5) representing the Black Panthers/separatists’ view presented a rationale for African Americans to defend themselves from violence committed against them. Other students in the class took issue with the idea of “self defense” against violence:

S1: “I’m not sure I understand what you’re talking about self-defense for if your’re gonna say that, if you’re gonna go…

S2: “That’s self defense…”
S1 “No it’s not self defense, man! I mean, if they went and attacked a bunch of people…”
S2: “We’re saying if…someone’s attacking me I’m going to attack them back to get them away from me, we’re not just going to randomly go up to people and attack them. It’s self-defense in the aspect that that’s the only way to keep people away from them. If they’re attacked, they’re going to attack back. That’s the self-defense part and that’s…when the violence is incorporated…and also, separation, if we separate from the white people, if they try to use force to take our communities then we’re going to use force and violence against them.”
S3: “That’s retaliation.”
S1: “Everything you’re talking about is just only going to do more violence, we attack them, they’re, we’re going to attack them back, and it’s just going to turn into some kind of a shoving match until we separate, and then there’s still going to be all this conflict between these two people.”
S2: “When we attack back, we’re going to be strong enough so that the white people won’t come back.”
S1: “It’s always going to be strong enough, but they’re always going to come back.”
S4: “Nonviolent protestors have been protesting for hundreds of years, it didn’t work, the Black Panthers came along in the 60s and you see how much got done, look at us now. Exactly!” [laughter]
T: “You’re, you’re equating equality with what the Black Panthers did.”
S4: I’m not saying they [Black Panthers] were completely responsible, I’m saying it’s part of their movement and…the government and different law enforcement agencies realizing that, ‘Hey, these people are going to fight back’, you know, it’s going to make them think twice before they send dogs after them and shoot them with fire hoses.”
T: “[S5].”
S5: “I think what a lot of people don’t understand is that, what they did was give a lot of black people a will to fight…they gave them something to stand up for…that Black Power thing…that raised their motivation, gave them a reason to fight. Before then, they wanted to fight back but they didn’t get anything done and when the Black Panthers came along they gave them something to do, a way to get involved.”
In this example, it should be noted that the most vocal proponents of the Black Panthers’ perspective were middle-class white students who were accurately conveying a perspective that could be reasonably expected to be very different in both chronological and cultural perspective from their own personal views. In addition, at the end of the dialogue, two students discussed how the philosophy promoted by the Black Panthers would make people “think twice before they send dogs after them…” and how the Black Panther movement provided African-Americans with “a will to fight” and “something to stand up for.” In both of these cases, the students were explaining why the actions taken by the Black Panthers were understandable and perhaps even justified at that time in history. Discussions such as these may have been encouraged by more realistic encounters with events and actors available in the DP resources, and by providing students with opportunities to entertain a perspective (e.g., the views represented by the Black Panther Party) that they may not have considered prior to the DP unit.

A similar example of historical empathy can be found in the excerpt of the class discussion below. In this discussion, the teacher prompted the class to identify potential problems with the separatist strategy. However, students representing the separatist continued to defend their position:

T: “What kinds of problems do you see with this [the separatist view]…?”
S1: “They don’t want to be together. All of these [groups] suppressed blacks, and in the end they realized that there were a few that liked black people, but the rest of them [white people] are just ignorant and there’s no point in the black people being slowed down and they should just get away from them….”
S2: “At the time, [separation] seemed like a good idea, because segregation wasn’t working and they could see by the way they were treated when they tried nonviolent protest, how are they going to walk down the same halls and share the same bathrooms and eat in the same restaurants as these people, at the time it looked impossible so you can see why they moved towards separation….”
T: “That’s a great point. We’ve got the benefit of looking back 30 years…”
Here, students once again were justifying the strategies proposed by the separatists by placing themselves in the separatists’ situation at that point in time. By stating, “At the time, separation seemed like a good idea…” one could argue that the student was actively putting herself in the position of the separatists in the late 1960s, The student used the argument that nonviolent protest seemed to be ineffective in eliminating segregation as justification for a move towards separation of the races. While this seems like a radical idea today, the student makes a strong argument from the perspective of those engaged in the struggle at that moment in history that separation was a valid strategy in order for African Americans to gain equal rights in the 1960s.

Comments made by students during post-unit interviews provided additional evidence that the unit may have assisted with providing students with more empathetic views for diverse perspectives on the Civil Rights Movement. These data support the assertion that the DP unit may have had a positive impact on students’ abilities to demonstrate historical empathy when interpreting past events. For example, when if the DP unit activities helped her make sense of the time period, one student responded:

“It will in this case. You really get a taste for the, just the whole lifestyle and the whole, not just the actual fact, once again going back to fact, not just the fact of what happened in that time period, but the overriding, like, uh, historically how the society was set up and how, you see in these, in these things, you know, what life was like in that period, which has a lot to do with how you interpret the facts.”
The teachers also believed that the DP unit activities assisted students with acquiring more empathetic views of the events associated with the Civil Rights movement. As one teacher stated, “…they were hitting on all the key points in research they were doing. They weren’t seeing it as the textbook gives it. They were seeing it as from the eyes of those who lived it. They were making an argument for those that they were researching, what they would have done.” The teacher also discussed how the activities assisted students with understanding some of the controversial issues associated with the Civil Rights Movement: “They actually got into the heart of issues and groups of people and what they were really feeling and why they disagreed with this group who was fighting for the same cause. That’s something I had to think was totally new to them.”
Epistemic Assumptions About the History

Students participating in the DP unit tended to present distinct viewpoints regarding the nature of history and the usefulness of historical inquiry as it applied to their interpretations of Civil Rights events. Data indicated that some students maintained the belief that there was a particular “correct” view of various events. For example, one student described how examining the variety of data available in the database assisted with understanding what actually occurred:

“Well, even though they all have their own opinions, what actually went on that we, I think that we all understood that the event, or the chain of events that happened, even though there was people that saw it differently, but what actually happened, you know, we understood that. Like the boycotts and stuff, you know, that’s stuff that actually happened…”
While discussing the benefits of the multimedia available in the databases, another student stated, “…you just understand it better because you can see, uh, why there is, for example, controversy. You can understand where these people are coming from…So, I think, [the multimedia] just helps, helps you understand where these people are coming from and what exactly was going on.”

While both of these students discussed the benefits that the multimedia database provided in giving them access to more authentic information about the movement, history educators may not view this as a desirable outcome. Historians see history as an interpretation from evidence trails rather than a faithful reconstruction of an event (VanSledright, 2002). In this case, the students may have believed they understood “what exactly was going on.” This may represent a potential danger of providing access to more realistic primary and secondary sources (such as photographs and video footage of historical events). Students may view these sources as immune to the biases associated with textual information, and thus more readily accept these sources as “what actually happened.”

In contrast, data demonstrated that to many students, interpreting historical events was many times a series of “opinions,” and that there was no real way of knowing which viewpoint or interpretation was most plausible. As one student stated, “…if you try to figure it [an historical event] out, you’re probably going to be wrong.” When asked how she decided what the correct view of an historical event was given information that supported two distinct interpretations of that event, another student replied:

“…I really don’t know…You can’t really say if you have those primary sources for sure, this is exactly what happened and my opinion is right and it’s the only opinion. Because everyone had an opinion back then…I do believe that a large portion of it is opinion and um, we see that, I guess.”

During a post-unit interview, another student had a similar perception of the difficulties with truly understanding the causes of historical events:

S: “A lot for other different speculations would happen, you get different views from other people.”

R: “Um, hum. So how do we ever really know what happened?”
S: “We really don’t.”
R: “You don’t?”
S: “They say the Great Depression was caused by the fall of the stock market, but who knows whether it was the stock market or not. That’s what makes history so funny, you don’t know nothing til you break it down. So in the end, it’s gonna be somebody’s opinion.”

These data demonstrate some of the challenges students face as they struggle to conduct disciplined historical inquiry. In the examples above, students had moved away from the belief that there was a “correct” view of history – however, they concluded that because individual accounts of historical events were nothing more than opinion, there was no real way of knowing what “really” happened. These findings are consistent with other research detailing the difficulties students have drawing conclusions from multiple sources (Ashby & Lee, 1998; Barton & Levistik, 2004; VanSledright, 2002). As Barton and Levistik (2004, p. 196) state, “[Learners] conclude that historical sources are always biased and incomplete, so there is no way of deciding what happened – one idea is as good as another.”

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