Disciplinary Literacy & Numeracy in History.

Disciplinary literacy and numeracy are defined by Shanahan as “the knowledge and abilities possessed by those who create, communicate, and use knowledge within the disciplines” (2012, p.8). Both historical literacy and numeracy work together to help students create opinions and interpretations about certain historical events.

(As cited in Roberts, 2013), Curthoys states that students “don’t learn by knowledge ‘presented’, but rather by combining “knowledge” to understand the present day. Simply, the knowledge in a history class is taught to help understand the present day and should be used in present-day instances to make judgements and decisions. Instead of introducing a copious amount of useless and un-relatable content to students each history session, teachers should consider enriching their sessions with disciplinary knowledge.

(As cited in Roberts, 2013) Clark discovered that students were more engaged when class related to “investigating evidence, debating perspectives and interpretations, making their own arguments, engaging in genuine discussion and making a connection to their understanding of contemporary society, to name but a few features of disciplinary history” (p. 16). Additionally, Sexais agrees that the “accumulation of facts-to-be-remembered is not” the key to learning in history.

 (As cited in Sexias, 2006) Ashby claims there are “6 historical thinking concepts”, where “students should be able to establish historical significance, know how to use primary evidence, identify continuity and change, analyse cause and consequence, take historical perspectives, and understand moral dimensions of historical interpretations” (p.2). All of the “historical thinking concepts” combine “historical thinking” and “historical literacy” to assist student learning (Sexias, 2006, p.2)

Historical literacy “requires students to make meaning, develop interpretations based on a variety of perspectives, and use a range of evidence” (Roberts, 2013, p. 21). For example, students might look at the devastation of world war II. Students will look at the perspective from a Jewish or a German family. Students would use evidence, such as Auschwitz survivor’s memoirs to help them make a conclusion about how they feel individually. Individual interpretations are important; this creates relevance to the student. “Students must have the appropriate technical skills to read the text or image, as well as to recognise the social and cultural context of the production of the evidence and its interpretation” (Roberts, 2013, p.21). 

Reading text might seem straightforward. However, students need to decode texts and culturally understand the text. As an example, students might study Indigenous Australian history and explore the 2007 ‘sorry speech’ by Kevin Rudd. Students will need to understand the cultural perspective of Rudd as well as the indigenous perspective to gain an understanding of the speech. If social and cultural understanding is unknown, relevance to history is lost, and therefore students would be learning history for the sake of retaining information.

Teachers of today need to realise that using the textbook to learn out of, simply will not suffice. The internet and computers open up doors that students in the past had sealed shut. Students now have access to “newspapers, television footage, photographs and other documents, that students and teachers can use in disciplinary study” (Roberts, 2013, p.21). For a history session, this lets students “investigate” just as a real historian does. As figure 1  below shows, a student has the option of two excerpts that are actual sources that could not be learned from a textbook. This is what each session of a history lesson would look like in a ‘document- based lesson’ (Reisman, 2011, p. 242). A document based session is where students can pick what they look at out of the two choices given. Each student will use reading comprehension to answer an overarching question and discuss it with other students. Therefore, students are learning from each other and their teacher while making their own assumptions.

Figure 1. Document Based Lesson. (Reisman, 2011)

The New South Wales Department of Education states that in History “students require numeracy skills for construction and interpretation of timelines, graphs, maps and tables” (2013)— students will use numeracy in history to make meaning of situations. Students might be asked to make a timeline of the women’s rights movement in the United States. Making this timeline not only works with numbers but sequences the movement. Students have then used “disciplinary numeracy” to help understand the time of the women’s rights movement. Students will use tables, charts, timelines, graphs, maps and table to form an opinion, and also to help make informed decisions about why specific historical events happened.

Conclusively, disciplinary numeracy and literacy can help change the engagement in a history classroom, while preparing students to work in the Historical field.

References

Ashby, R. (2005). The nature of levels and issues of progression in history: Notes and extracts for reflection, PGCE Support Materials (p. 7). England: Institute of Education. These have been radically transformed in the new British National Curriculum.

Avishag Reisman. (2012) The ‘Document-Based Lesson’: Bringing disciplinary inquiry into high school history classrooms with adolescent struggling readers, Journal of Curriculum Studies, 44:2, 233-264, DOI: 10.1080/00220272.2011.591436

New South Wales Department of Education. (2013). Numeracy in the NSW Syllabuses for the Australian curriculum. NSW.

Roberts, P. (2013). Re-visiting historical literacy: Towards a disciplinary pedagogy. Literacy Learning: the Middle Years, 21(1), 15-24. Norwood, SA: Australian Literacy Educators’ Association.

Seixas, P. (2006). Benchmarks of historical thinking: A framework for assessment in Canada. The Center for the Study of Historical Consciousness.