{"id":167,"date":"2025-06-06T03:22:11","date_gmt":"2025-06-06T03:22:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/maximiliansmith.com\/?p=167"},"modified":"2025-06-06T03:22:11","modified_gmt":"2025-06-06T03:22:11","slug":"portfolio-post-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/maximiliansmith.com\/?p=167","title":{"rendered":"Portfolio Post 2"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>What elements of historical thinking have remained at the heart of history teaching over the decades?<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">There are many elements of historical thinking which have been taught in our school&#8217;s curriculum throughout the past century and remain there to this day, however, not all of these are actually beneficial when it comes to students understanding of, or their ability to learn about the past. For instance, a far greater emphasis has typically always been placed on the importance of facts over historical analysis of how those facts came to be. Many non-historians perceive history as a static field in which methods are unchanging, and the primary role of history class is to teach students a list of events which are not to be questioned or scrutinized. Additionally the facts included within these lists are considered universal and not to be challenged either, although the debate between &#8220;our&#8221; facts and &#8220;your&#8221; facts has opened up new discourses surrounding the legitimacy of these claims in recent years. One element of teaching historical thinking which sticks out in particular is the idea that not all facts are to be treated as equally important. Historians such as J. Carleton Bell knew this as early as 1917, although his understanding differs slightly from how it is taught today. He recognized that some students showed a proficiency in historical literacy because they were able to differentiate the significance of certain events from one another and create a layered narrative in their minds in which some facts took primacy over others. Meanwhile, students who were less likely to organize these facts in such a manner were more prone to treating all information as equally relevant and therefore becoming overwhelmed by the quantity of the subject matter. While this idea remains true in the ways in which history continues to be taught today, the criteria for determining which facts are deemed more important than other has shifted, sometimes in dramatic and unexpected ways, since 1917. The rise of social history in the 1970&#8217;s in particular has drastically influenced the ways in which historical facts are organized for students, and while many of the events being taught to them are identical to those of the previous century, there is far greater attention given to the human elements, circumstances, and biases which surround them. The idea that certain events or facts are more important than others still has a steady foothold in modern classrooms, however those facts have moved away from moments which simply disrupted geopolitics and more towards personal accounts which had a social impact. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>There are many elements of historical thinking which have been taught in our school&#8217;s curriculum throughout the past century and remain there to this day, however, not all of these are actually beneficial when it comes to students understanding of, or their ability to learn about the past. For instance, a far greater emphasis has [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-167","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/maximiliansmith.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/167","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/maximiliansmith.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/maximiliansmith.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maximiliansmith.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maximiliansmith.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=167"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/maximiliansmith.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/167\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":168,"href":"https:\/\/maximiliansmith.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/167\/revisions\/168"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/maximiliansmith.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=167"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maximiliansmith.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=167"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maximiliansmith.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=167"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}