Week Three
Unique Contribution Regarding Levstik & Barton
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Using Ghana as an example of a national curriculum and culture that connects history with democratic and humanistic goals certainly has a good deal of merit, but....
It was a major oversight by the authors' to overlook the high-level of Protestant Christian missionary zeal that underpins and drives much of the national curriculum emphasis on understanding tribal cultures in Ghana. In other words, much like Spanish priests who made up much of the Dominican, Franciscan and Jesuit forces that came to the New World seeking to convert millions of souls from "cannibalistic" paganism in the 16th and early 17th centuries; (natives were often fairly, in the case of the Aztecs and Mayan and unfairly, in the case of the Muiscas or the Inca, depicted as cannibals in order to justify the complete eradication of their spiritual universe in Spanish cortes law) natives were forced against their will into "praying towns" to ensure the maximum amount of conversion numbers and thus a stronger argument for the priest(s) who converted them to make it to "heaven". The Spanish soon realized their most effective and most rapid approach to mass conversion was SYNCRETISM, which allowed for certain tribal traditions to continue, but the Catholic church simply built their churches on formerly native holy sites and adopted their mother goddesses by emphasizing the cult of Mary.
In Ghana, Christian missionary zeal plays a major role in their unified national culture since the 1960's. Studying the intricacies of tribal cultures and languages which make up the history of Ghana up until the early 20th century, gives contemporary Ghanese a major inroad to converting the remaining non-believers (see other churches like the Latter Day Saints that encourage their brethren to study other languages and histories in remarkable detail in order to infiltrate and convert more effectively) and growing Muslim populations along the northern and north-western borders with Burkina Faso. In other words, history in Ghana still has a national purpose and mission beyond secular ideals like economic equity, enlightened self-rule and curbing nepotism and legal injustice. In order to use an example like Ghana for their research, they should have prefaced it by making the reader aware of the dynamic and unique cultural and historic preconditions that give Ghana its unique disposition to history and civics.
Unique Contribution regarding Barin
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Wineburg and Seixas's "cognitive psychology" approach to history and evidence based learning methodology has unwittingly led to a remarkable shift towards critical thinking induction based instruction that could have remarkably positive long-term effects in rescuing the social sciences from the obsolete abyss of curriculum determination that theater arts, music, language arts and the creative arts have met since the 1990's. Instead of the typical rote memorization method of determining what children should learn and how things happened based on standard narratives that involve little more than sequencing and understanding cause and effect in a rather episodic, fairy-tale like way, utilizing the methods here would trigger a much stronger contextualization for children and a more rapid and extensive firing of their schemata that would ensure a much more comprehensive and involving methodology of learning history that could better adapt to the technology era by bringing in a more personal, customizable and interactive experience to the student that allows them to be more than just a passive audience member, but instead a real active participant reading and interacting with history like a game of "Clue" in which they become one of a myriad of detectives in the classroom and not only learn to deductively think and develop critical assessment skills regarding sources and testimony, but also work as collaborators with fellow students in determining the most likely story. The research here opens to the door to remarkable possibility and I look forward to reading more, as the three conditional conclusions the authors' make at the end point the way to historical thinking as a very effective pedagogical approach.
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Using Ghana as an example of a national curriculum and culture that connects history with democratic and humanistic goals certainly has a good deal of merit, but....
It was a major oversight by the authors' to overlook the high-level of Protestant Christian missionary zeal that underpins and drives much of the national curriculum emphasis on understanding tribal cultures in Ghana. In other words, much like Spanish priests who made up much of the Dominican, Franciscan and Jesuit forces that came to the New World seeking to convert millions of souls from "cannibalistic" paganism in the 16th and early 17th centuries; (natives were often fairly, in the case of the Aztecs and Mayan and unfairly, in the case of the Muiscas or the Inca, depicted as cannibals in order to justify the complete eradication of their spiritual universe in Spanish cortes law) natives were forced against their will into "praying towns" to ensure the maximum amount of conversion numbers and thus a stronger argument for the priest(s) who converted them to make it to "heaven". The Spanish soon realized their most effective and most rapid approach to mass conversion was SYNCRETISM, which allowed for certain tribal traditions to continue, but the Catholic church simply built their churches on formerly native holy sites and adopted their mother goddesses by emphasizing the cult of Mary.
In Ghana, Christian missionary zeal plays a major role in their unified national culture since the 1960's. Studying the intricacies of tribal cultures and languages which make up the history of Ghana up until the early 20th century, gives contemporary Ghanese a major inroad to converting the remaining non-believers (see other churches like the Latter Day Saints that encourage their brethren to study other languages and histories in remarkable detail in order to infiltrate and convert more effectively) and growing Muslim populations along the northern and north-western borders with Burkina Faso. In other words, history in Ghana still has a national purpose and mission beyond secular ideals like economic equity, enlightened self-rule and curbing nepotism and legal injustice. In order to use an example like Ghana for their research, they should have prefaced it by making the reader aware of the dynamic and unique cultural and historic preconditions that give Ghana its unique disposition to history and civics.
Unique Contribution regarding Barin
---------------------------------------
Wineburg and Seixas's "cognitive psychology" approach to history and evidence based learning methodology has unwittingly led to a remarkable shift towards critical thinking induction based instruction that could have remarkably positive long-term effects in rescuing the social sciences from the obsolete abyss of curriculum determination that theater arts, music, language arts and the creative arts have met since the 1990's. Instead of the typical rote memorization method of determining what children should learn and how things happened based on standard narratives that involve little more than sequencing and understanding cause and effect in a rather episodic, fairy-tale like way, utilizing the methods here would trigger a much stronger contextualization for children and a more rapid and extensive firing of their schemata that would ensure a much more comprehensive and involving methodology of learning history that could better adapt to the technology era by bringing in a more personal, customizable and interactive experience to the student that allows them to be more than just a passive audience member, but instead a real active participant reading and interacting with history like a game of "Clue" in which they become one of a myriad of detectives in the classroom and not only learn to deductively think and develop critical assessment skills regarding sources and testimony, but also work as collaborators with fellow students in determining the most likely story. The research here opens to the door to remarkable possibility and I look forward to reading more, as the three conditional conclusions the authors' make at the end point the way to historical thinking as a very effective pedagogical approach.
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