From the Desk of Deb Cunningham: Cultivating Historical Empathy Abroad

Deborah Cunningham is Primary Source's Senior Program Director. She recently traveled abroad to give a series of presentations to educators related to her own research on cultivating historical empathy in secondary students. Here, she summarizes her findings and shares her reflections on the experience.

During the first week of May I was invited to the University of Leuven in Belgium to give three presentations in their Department of Education. The university, founded in 1425, was the alma mater of thinkers like Erasmus, Mercator, and Vesalius, so it was a great honor for me to speak there! I met with groups of preservice and experienced history teachers from all over Flanders, and my topic was the relationship between past and present in the history classroom. This is a subject closely related to my PhD research on what secondary school teachers do to cultivate historical empathy in their students.

In that study, what I learned from watching lots of classes and interviewing teachers multiple times is that teachers have dozens of strategies for helping students grasp the mindsets of people in the past. Some of them are activities used to organize a lesson (like analyzing an artifact or a facsimile of a historical document, for example) and some are small-scale strategies involving how teachers use language (to speak as a historical figure, set up a paradox, or use analogies, for example). The teachers I observed were sophisticated in how they chose and sequenced different strategies to build their students' understanding that the past was different – that people interpreted events through lenses that we no longer share. They knew that looking backward to see as others saw is an act of reconstruction that requires us to put our modern assumptions and judgments to the side as best we can.

At the same time, no history teacher in practice ever focused exclusively on the past or past-mindedness in their classrooms. They believed that it was issues in the present that gave the past relevance to students, and that studying the past just for its own sake was antiquarianism. It was fundamental to show students why they should care in the first place, and at some point to also allow students to evaluate past views from a present-day perspective. Bringing in the present to motivate students, engage their curiosity and sense of concern, and ultimately make some value judgments about things that once happened are not ideas that the academic discipline of history particularly endorses. But in my view it's a problem to treat the discipline of history as the main model for school history, as is so often done in the educational literature. The constraints on historians and history or social studies teachers are quite different, and I think the purposes are different too – the creation and professing of new historical knowledge is not the same as the cultivation of historically knowledgeable citizens.

As I understand it, history teachers manage a number of dilemmas in the classroom. How can they engage students' interest but get them beyond everyday empathy to more historically accurate perspectives? How can they harness students' imaginations but keep them tied to evidence? How can they balance historical empathy and moral judgment? Does encouraging identification and emotional connection with historical figures aid students' understanding of a particular topic, or hinder it? And how can teachers develop students' empathetic skills that will transfer to life today when students' identities become involved and complicate things? These are nuanced issues for which there is no simple answer; they are at the heart of teachers' professional judgment.

In essence, these are some of the questions I shared and discussed with the Belgian teachers, and they in turn raised fascinating points regarding how to appropriately use empathy in explaining the rise of Nazism, how to encourage empathy when one's own knowledge of a topic is incomplete, when anachronisms might be useful and when not, and how experiences in real historical places (like WWI battlegrounds) enhanced students' empathy. It was a rich discussion, and a heartening experience to connect with teachers who work in a different context than U.S. teachers but think about so many of the same challenges.

During my visit, I also learned of a Belgian-U.S. connection that I hadn't known much about. Herbert Hoover is a hero in Belgium due to his leadership of the Commission for Belgian Relief during WWI that saved millions of Belgians from starvation, and there is a square and park in Leuven named after him. He also led the effort to reconstruct the University of Leuven library when it was destroyed in the war, and raised donations from American schools and colleges to this end. In fact, Americans rebuilt the library twice, since it was destroyed again in World War II. The names of all the donor schools are inscribed on the outside walls of the library, and it was amazing to see how many Massachusetts public school systems and colleges gave money to the effort. It was a remarkable humanitarian gesture, and the Belgians remember it fondly.