Meaning Making in History
Comments(1) As a Social Studies teacher focusing on History, I believe firmly that History at its most rich and vibrant, is about meaning-making. There is a constructive and creative element involved. It is a discipline that aims to infer, interpret, and understand what happened in the past. Therefore to make meaning of what happened and to build an interpretation of the past, requires an adept mastery of language. History, at its most banal is about “one damn fact after another.” For students who are ELL, if history is taught in this boring way and simply as a transmission of facts, then they truly miss out on the richness of history and the power and art of words to help plunder that richness. However, the reality is that the discipline deals at times with abstract concepts, long textual passages, and a difficulty of demonstration. Therefore it is crucial to make history tangible and coherent for ELL and all learners.
Schleppegrell, Achugar, & Oteiza offer some practical but challenging avenues to do this. They emphasize encouraging students to make connections through different types of meaning. Experiential meaning is to identify the events and the themes involved. The interpersonal meaning will help clarify who and to whom action is happening to or coming from. The textual meaning is to take all this information and put it together in an organized manner. As a teacher, I can model and co-construct with the class the building of, the organization of, and the presentation of history. Instead of doing this in an essay format or by breaking down long passages, perhaps I could do a storyboard format ––allowing the students to more visually and graphically express and organize their thoughts. I think there is potential in using language through a more concrete and creative element of story rather than disconnected facts. History has the potential to be a discipline in which effective language learning can happen, and where fruitful content can be explored through the beautiful usage of words.
Michael Yang
I could not agree more with your assertion that History has the potential to be a subject wherein either “effective language learning” can take place and “fruitful content can be explored”. Not only both language and content can be learned through History, but they can be combined and explored simultaneously, which will make the learning process much more engaging and effective–in fact, content and language are intrinsically intertwined, but our dichotomous schooling system has historically presented them as disconnected elements. To that extent, when delving into content teachers enter very propitious situations to call attention to language features, which are then more easily understood for being situated within a context and so making sense to students. The other way around, when teachers focus on language they have great opportunities to make students think about the related content in a very meaningful manner. Language and content are not just desirable goals, but their association can be used as a powerful strategy to enhance learning. Using this strategy does not necessarily requires a quantitative increase in teachers’ efforts, but rather a qualitative shift in the traditional way of teaching that may not be easy, but can result in significant positive learning outcomes.
Vitor Giberti