EDCI658 History of Education
Sept. 4, 2006

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Sense of our own identity
Better understand the present
– “present-mindedness”
Corrective for misleading analogies and “lessons” of the past
Tendencies of humankind, of social institutions, and other aspects of human condition
Develop tolerance and open-mindedness
The basic background for many other disciplines
Entertainment
Critical thinking skills

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History as Fact
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History as Casual Sequence
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History as Complexity
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History as Interpretation
– Moral certain and ambiguity
– Absolute truth and relativism

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Disagreement among professional historians on passing moral judgment on past events and individuals using current standards
– Ranke
– Novick (1988): That Nobel Dream , Historicism
Originated in an effort to criticize naturalism, historicism says that knowledge and understanding are inevitably interpretive, particular, perspectival, and contextual, which is consistent with the underlying philosophy and theory of qualitative inquiry (Schwandt, p.
117)

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The founding of American Historical profession in the 1880s-First World War
– Establishment of objectivity as the central norm of the profession
World War I-World War II
– Historical relativism
World War II-The End of Cold War
– Chastened objectivist synthesis, trivializing the relativist critique by partially incorporating it
Mid-1960s-present
– Confusion, polarization, and uncertainty
(Novick, 1988)

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Ontology: is the study of being or existence or to study conceptions of reality
Epistemology: is the branch of philosophy that studies the nature and scope of knowledge
Methodology: a body of methods, rules, and postulates employed by a discipline, a particular procedure or set of procedures, or the analysis of the principles or procedures of inquiry in a particular field
Wikipedia

Reality
Knower/ the known
Possibility of generalization
Single, tangible, fragmentable independent, dualism
Time and contextfree
Casual links Real causes, distinguishable causes and effects
Values Inquiry is valuefree
Multiple, constructed, holistic
Interactive, inseparable
Time- and context-bound
Mutual simultaneous shaping
Inquiry is value-bound

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Phenomenology: rejects scientific realism and the accompanying view that the empirical sciences have a privileged position in identifying and explaining features of a mindindependent world
Hermeneutics: the notion refers to the nature and means of interpreting a test. Construing the meaning of the whole meant making sense of the parts, and grasping the meaning of the parts depended on having some sense of the whole

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The Beginning”
– Old Testament
– Herodotus: The Histories , personal observations, surviving records, interviews of witnesses
– Thucydides: The History of Peloponnesian Wars , verifiable, relevant facts only, explain events in a way that can be substantiated by evidence
– Roman Empire
– Renaissance
 Machiavelli: The Prince
 Guicciardini: History of Italy

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Leopold Von Ranke and the rise of Modern
History
– Establishing history as a respected discipline in the universities
– Firmly established the notion that all sound history must be based on primary courses and a rigorous methodology: footnotes and bibliography, scientific
– Historical-mindedness

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The nineteenth-century history
– Political, legal, or diplomatic
– Ethnocentric, nationalistic
Karl Marx
– Progressive Theory
– Economics interpretation of history, economic determinism
– Example.: Charles A. Beard
Sigmund Freud: Psychoanalysis
The twentieth-century history
– Social history: average men and women, marginalized groups
– Women history
– Psychohistory
– The Impact of IT, computers, statistical packages

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Furary, C., & Salevouris, M. (2000).
The Methods and Skills of History:
A Practical Guide. (2 nd ed.). Wheeling,IL: Harlan Davidson, Inc.
Lincoln, Y. S., & Guba, E. G. (1985).
CA: Sage Publications.
Naturalistic inquiry . Newbury Park,
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Novick, P. (1988). That Noble Dream: The “ objectivity question ” and the
American historical profession . New York: University of Cambridge Press.
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Schwandt, T. A. (2001). Dictionary of qualitative inquiry
Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.
(2 nd ed.).
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Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiki