Empathetic Reconstruction in History and History Teaching

Wesleyan University

Empathetic Reconstruction in History and History TeachingAuthor(s): David StockleyReviewed work(s):Source: History and Theory, Vol. 22, No. 4, Beiheft 22: The Philosophy of History Teaching(Dec., 1983), pp. 50-65Published by: Wiley for Wesleyan UniversityStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2505215 .

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EMPATHETIC RECONSTRUCTION IN HISTORY AND HISTORY TEACHING*

DAVID STOCKLEY

THE HISTORY LESSON THAT WENT WRONG ...

Outside, it is cold and wet; a typical winter's day in Melbourne. Inside, I am watching a teacher taking a class of fourteen- and fifteen-year-old girls for a lesson on the Black Death in medieval Europe. The teacher has photocopied two documents and distributed them to the class, who are taking turns reading the documents aloud around the class. One document describes in chilling detail the symptoms of the plague and the sufferings of the victims, while the other graphically describes the effects of the plague on one English village: the dreadful waiting for the first news of the plague in the nearby areas, the horror felt by the other villagers when the first victim falls ill, the desperate remedies sought by the villagers to avoid contracting the plague and the colossal relief enjoyed by the survivors when it is clear that the mysterious killer has passed- at least for the time being.

The effect on the class is shattering-shatteringly boring. The girls drone through their passages of reading aloud, then resume half-listening to the material. The teacher realizes what is happening and makes even more determined efforts to strike a response through questioning the students about their attitudes toward the grim descriptions in the documents; but to no avail. The girls remain listless, though not disturbingly restless; there is certainly no overt "classroom management" problem; and the teacher puzzles about the failure of what she clearly believes to be intrinsically interesting material.

Suddenly, there are groans of revulsion from the girls. The girls call out to each other and try to attract the teacher's attention. They want to discuss something that has dramatically seized their attention in one of the documents. They are responding excitedly at last, in the few remaining moments of the lesson, and the teacher understandably is both delighted and relieved. She han- dles the discussion well and the lesson ends in an atmosphere of involvement and interest. All is well. But to what have the students reacted? Have they finally latched onto the teacher's proddings and pleadings to "imagine how ter- rible it must have been. . ."; "how would you have felt if you had been one of

* This is a revised version of an article which first appeared in The Australian History Teacher 7 (1981), 7-17.



EMPATHETIC RECONSTRUCTION 51

the victims . . .?" (rather dreadful, presumably); "what would it have been like to be waiting and wondering when the plague would appear in the village?" and "how would you feel after the plague had gone?"

No, the girls had not responded in that way. Instead, one of the documents briefly mentioned a particular incident that took place when a number of the villagers became convinced in their terror that an old woman in the village had caused the plague by the use of black magic. They duly killed the old woman. The girls were quite unmoved by this, but they were horrified when they read that the villagers then grabbed the woman's cat and smashed its brains out by hitting the cat against a stone wall. It was this which finally caught the girls' imagination and aroused them to exclamations of anger and pity, feelings of be- wilderment and feelings of "being there" which the teacher previously had struggled so unsuccessfully to induce.

A PRELIMINARY DISCUSSION OF THE LESSON

After the lesson, the teacher and I sat down to discuss what had happened in the class. The teacher was quite despondent and wanted to know what had "gone wrong" and why. There were some particular reasons why things had not proceeded as expected, but there were other more general and more important morals to be drawn from the lesson. These points have to do with what we can call a failure by the students to achieve an empathetic reconstruction of villagers' lives and feelings during the plague: more bluntly and accurately, it was a failure by the teacher to provide those conditions under which she could le- gitimately expect some sort of empathetic and imaginative response from the children.

The teacher, a sensible and caring person, had moved beyond any notion of teaching history as an aggregation of facts. She taught history as a concept- based subject and knew that it was important for students to gain practice in and understanding of historical skills. Less certainly, she had an apprehension that "empathy" was an important part of historical knowing and learning: indeed, there was even a whisper in her head that hinted that perhaps empathy was the critical skill at a certain level of construal in history. And was it not a marvelous thing if, however rarely, at least some of these adolescents could grasp and demonstrate a sense of historical period, another's world-view, an understanding of "what it must have been like," of "why people in a certain time and place believed X and not Y?"

It is to the meaning of the term "empathetic reconstruction" and the possible conditions and actions which could stimulate it in our history teaching that I wish to devote the rest of this article. This will then enable us to see why things went wrong in the particular lesson described above and how such sad occur- rences might be avoided in the future by all history teachers.

The difficulty for this teacher (and for many others) is that these feelings of empathy, of empathetic reconstruction, seem to be such an intuitive flash, al- most unpredictable, that one may teach in the same intuitive manner, hoping



52 DAVID STOCKLEY

for "a sense of period" but not really knowing what processes are involved in attaining that, either at a pedagogical or a philosophical level.1

In one very real and straightforward sense, we could call my description of the lesson an "empathetic reconstruction." More critically, one could call it an exercise in imaginative writing, even a flight of fancy, a story or analogy to make a particular point. Indeed, there would be some truth in these assertions. My description is a very self-conscious attempt to describe a lesson and to lay the ground for an analytical discussion of the role of empathy in history and the difficulties associated with translating the desire into classroom practice. Furthermore, my description is deliberately dramatic and replete with literary devices. The critical point, however, is that the lesson "actually happened" and the description, albeit inevitably interpretative, is true to life. In that respect, it conforms to the central criterion of any attempt at historical empathetic reconstruction, since it conforms to the facts of the situation and conforms to the publicly available evidence and does not lapse into mere flights of fancy ("fancy" not to be confused in any literal sense with "imaginative response"). That is, we have a narrative reconstruction and a personal interpretation, but one the veracity and utility of which can be checked by reference to the evidence.

Where does the empathetic element enter this narrative account of the actions which took place in one classroom on a cold winter morning in Mel- bourne? It would seem to me that it is constituted by a number of factors. First, the writer/observer had available to him the historical context within which to set the specific lesson. Sufficient background information was available in terms of teaching experience, school knowledge, learning theory, and - perhaps the critical factor here -knowledge of the processes involved in historical understanding and explanation, to enable the observer to make sense of the situation as it developed. This "making sense" was partly a function of being a detached and informed observer. It was also a function of being close enough, both in a pedagogically aware and in an emotional sense, to the teacher and students- to have some considerable understanding of their respec- tive actions and the motives for their actions. In other words, the observer was able to empathize to a considerable degree with the actors (teacher and students) in the (historical) situation of the classroom.

THE MEANING OF "EMPATHETIC RECONSTRUCTION"

This discursive account of the major elements involved in empathetic reconstruction in history can be tightened by reference to other attempts to define

1. It is only very recently that a number of scholars have systematically set about the task of re- lating questions of historical explanation and understanding to the practicalities of school history teaching. See, for example: History Teaching and Historical Understanding, ed. A. K. Dickinson and P. J. Lee (London, 1978); Denis Shemilt, "The Devil's Locomotive," in this Beiheft, 1-18; David Stockley, History and the Integrated Curriculum, La Trobe University, Centre for the Study of Curriculum and Teacher Education, Occasional Paper 3, 1981.




"empathy" as such. Tony Boddington, Former Director of the British Schools Council "History 13-16 Project," introduces his discussion of "empathy" by claiming that it is "usually taken to be synonymous with identification, or the ability 'to enter into the minds and feelings of all the persons involved in an event.' s2 Its value is seen to lie in the fact that it "presents a potential contribu- tion to individual personal development through vicarious experience of humanity."3 The British Schools Council "History 13-16 Project" itself perceives empathy as one of the most important elements in its work:

The ability to understand other people's problems or attitudes from the inside (historians call it empathy) is one of the main aims of the whole course but particularly the Enquiry in Depth. (For example, "The American West 1840-1895.") A short "special period" of about 50 years is chosen so that it can be studied in some detail and from many angles-social, political, religious and so on.

The depth study is designed to increase pupils' self-knowledge and awareness of what it means to be human by concentrating attention upon the ideas and beliefs, values and attitudes of people of a different time and place -by standing, as it were, for a moment in the boots of General Custer or the footsteps of Sitting Bull.4

Later, the Project elaborates upon this just a little:

[The Project] also aims to reinforce a student's understanding of the nature of historical enquiry by requiring him to empathise with the problems and motives of his predecessors, and to reconstruct frames of reference within which those problems and motives could seem both rational and justifiable.5

Finally: "Insofar as 'empathetic reconstruction' complements 'experimental re- enactment' in Natural Science, it is integral to the philosophy of each and every course segment 996

Several things can be gleaned from this series of statements. First, empathy is equated with the desire to enter into the minds, to step into the shoes, of another person in another time and place. Second, empathy is to be encouraged as a valuable form of gaining "vicarious experience of humanity." Third, empathy is all about understanding people's motives and actions so that they appear to the student or historian as both rational and justifiable. Finally, an empathetic reconstruction can only take place successfully when the student is able to construct a "frame of reference" within which to view the historical agent's actions: that is, the student must be able to acquire a substantial amount of contextual knowledge of the situation before any empathetic understanding of the situation can be gained.

A couple of other important points need to be made about the meaning of the terms "empathy" and "empathetic reconstruction." "Empathy" must not be confused with "sympathy." Feelings of empathy and understanding do not ne-

2. Tony Boddington, "Empathy and the Teaching of History," British Journal of Educational Studies 28 (1980), 13.

3. J. B. Coltham and J. Fines, Educational Objectivesfor the Study of History (London, 1971), 8. 4. Schools Council, Explorations in Teaching SCP: History 13-16 (Leeds, 1980), 6. 5. Ibid., 7. 6. Denis Shemilt, History 13-16 Evaluation Study (Edinburgh, 1980), 5.



54 DAVID STOCKLEY

cessitate feelings of sympathy for the historical actors and their actions. In- deed, sympathy could well obstruct empathy. For example, an underdog feeling of emotional commitment for the Australian aborigines, especially in the climate of growing white sympathy for the aboriginal position from the 1960s onwards, could greatly confuse a teacher's efforts to help students develop empathetic understandings and insights into the motives and actions involved in the first European settler-aborigine contacts and conflicts. To say this is not to argue that empathy somehow is to be equated with an Olympian understanding of all and forgiving of all. It is not to contend that because we understand the context within which Hitler operated, we pass no moral judgment upon him. Both extremes are to be avoided, and neither are to be confused with feelings of empathetic understanding.

We can approach this problem of empathy from yet another angle, perhaps one more immediately associated with the everyday classroom situation. Both Rogers7 and Booth8 recently have argued that history has as its distinctive mode of thinking an addictive rather than a deductive characteristic. That is: "historical understanding requires a drawing of evidence together to a common centre; or to paraphrase R. G. Collingwood's definition, it calls for the construction of an imaginative web around the fixed points established from the sources of information used."9 Clearly this notion of adductive thought is very close to the idea of an empathetic reconstruction built around a solid and fixed framework of contextual knowledge. On the other hand, the mention of "imagination" complicates any discussion of empathy, partly because the two terms frequently are used as though they are synonymous and refer to the same activity and partly because mention of "imagination" can lead people into the old delusion of seeing empathy as some sort of spontaneous imaginative and intuitive response.

Both these points about empathy can be properly grasped only within the context of a broader and deeper discussion of the nature of historical explanation and understanding.

EMPATHY IN HISTORICAL EXPLANATION AND UNDERSTANDING

An important and enduring theme within discussion of the nature of historical explanation and understanding has been the distinctive interpretative and empathetic nature of history as a discipline and as a particular mode of thought. The crux of this latter mode is an emphasis on understanding in "historical understanding" and a concomitant emphasis on the importance of the subject/ the historian. To defend the significance of this position (a peculiar form of historical understanding) is not to deny that the method of verstehen requires

7. P. J. Rogers, The New History: Theory into Practice (London, 1978). 8. M. B. Booth, "Children's Inductive Historical Thought: An Interim Report from a Current

Research Project," Teaching History 21 (1978), 3-8. 9. Martin Booth, "History Teaching in the United Kingdom: Past, Present and Future," The

Australian History Teacher 7 (1980), 10.




systematic knowledge for its completion. That is, one needs to know "the facts of the situation" and not to rely on some sort of transcendental intuitionism between historian and historical agent. Put thus, the method becomes, in Weber's terms "a way of generating causal hypotheses about human behavior; those hypotheses can then be tested."10 This is a far cry from the earlier claims in the verstehen tradition, in which "the sociologist's or historian's understanding of the people he studies was variously conceived as following unproblemat- ically from what they had in common as human beings, or as involving some imaginative act such as the 'reliving' of their experiences. ' The Weberian stress on the necessity for intersubjective understanding and on the fact that understanding of a single personality requires systematic knowledge for its completion moves very close to Popper's notion of "situational analysis," even though the two positions may seem to commence from virtual polar opposites. Popper puts it thus:

The historian's task is, therefore, so to reconstruct the problem situation as it appeared to the agent, that the actions of the agent become adequate to the situation. This is very similar to Collingwood's method, but it eliminates from the theory of understanding and from the historical method precisely the subjective . . element which for Colling- wood and most other theorists of understanding (hermeneuticists) is its salient point.12

To take a particular case: that "history typically involves human action."13 Historical explanation frequently is about an agent's motives or intentions, but explication of this will rely upon public evidence -Popper's "situational analysis," the "facts of the situation," or Collingwood's "absolute presuppositions of a period" -and not on intuition or subjective notions of empathy.

Collingwood's dictum that "all history is the history of thought" and his related claim that once we know what happened we know why it happened, seems on the face of it to be based on the untenable assumption that imaginative understanding is to be used to penetrate the mind of the historical agent, thereby acquiring direct knowledge of his or her intentions and of the acts which are a consequence of those intentions. Certainly in practice historians sometimes claim (or at least silently believe) that they have "re-lived" a period. But this is poetic license, not idealism. Nor does the historian's unavoidable use of "hunches," "insights," or "extrapolation from personal experience" (the historian's invaluable "second record"), crucial though these are, match the force of Collingwood's position. His point is that the external manifestations of past thought are beyond recall, since history has no recourse to laboratory experimentation and replication, but that one can penetrate the internal past because thought is a universal phenomenon which makes others intelligible to the self. Rejecting crude empiricism, Collingwood makes no attempt to deny the role of the individual historian, the subjective element, in writing history:

10. William Outhwaite, Understanding Social Life: The Method Called Verstehen (London, 1975), 28.

11. Ibid., 12. 12. Karl Popper, Objective Knowledge (Oxford, 1972), 189. 13. Dickinson and Lee, eds., History Teaching, 74.



56 DAVID STOCKLEY

"Each historian sees history from his own centre, at an angle of his own: and therefore sees some problems which no other sees, and sees every problem from a point of view, and therefore under an aspect peculiar to himself."114 In one sense, there is nothing profound in this statement. It is simply stating that every historian has a personal perspective -both a bias and a "second record"'-5 of experience. Equally, however, there is the critical point that this interpretation is tempered by having to operate within a public tradition of criteria of truth and acceptability. Furthermore this "second record," the background of knowledge, experience, emotions, and so on that the historian brings to the historical task, may necessarily be more truncated for an adolescent than for a mature historian. This is not to argue for the extreme position that the adolescent response to history can only be a thin and attenuated one. Not at all. Rather, it is to contend that the "second record" must be kept in mind by the teacher; for example, in the lesson cited earlier, the death of a pet may be in the "second record" of many adolescents, whereas the experience of plague will not. I shall return to this point later when talking of the implications of this for the teacher.

Collingwood frequently has been dismissed as an idealist and intuitionist who claimed quite an unwarranted mystical role for the historian and for the superiority of historical knowledge, largely because of his claim that historians could have direct access to other people's minds and hence re-live those people's motives, thoughts, and actions. Collingwood's claims for empathy may well be inflated, but he does make a number of particularly important points about the role of the historian and the nature of historical explanation and understanding. For example, Collingwood's arguments do assume a "com- monness of humanity" in the historian's interpretation of past actions and events. This is crucial for any concept of empathetic reconstruction, whether for the historian or for the history teacher, and is reflected in the Schools Council "History 13-16 Project" 's belief in the need to "increase pupils' self- knowledge and awareness of what it means to be human."

The rather poetic metaphors which Collingwood uses to describe the historian's work are put in their true perspective by the statement that "there seems no reason to suppose that historical or sociological understanding is essentially different from everyday understanding."16 Good historians may well be more imaginative or have a greater feeling or ability to empathize, but that is not to agree with Collingwood's apparent claim for the historian's direct access to other minds. The latter notion is both an empirical and a logical impossibility. Moreover, there is no real need to postulate such a mystifying process - a process, indeed, which is in grave danger of ignoring the material factors in the world completely. An acceptance of human commonality allows us access to

14. R. G. Collingwood, Essays in the Philosophy of History, ed. W. Debbins (New York, 1966), 54.

15. The phrase comes from J. H. Hexter, The History Primer (London, 1972). 16. Outhwaite, Verstehen, 13.




other minds, motives, and actions. Necessarily, operations at that level will remain highly subjective. The dilemma partly is overcome by the insistence on a referral to publicly acceptable criteria of evidence and so forth. Outhwaite sug- gests that we can strengthen this verstehen position even further and make more rigorous our attempts at empathetic reconstruction by the use of Weber's concept of an "ideal type." Weber's "ideal type"

must mediate this transition from the subjective to the objective if anything can. When we construct an ideal type, whether purely of a person's character or of a course of action, we are not thinking of the particular experience or characteristics of the individual in question, but rather of giving an interpretation in terms of typical patterns of events which could occur "again and again" in the lives of different individuals.17

Analysis along these lines builds a bridge between the historian's need to gener- alize and the indisputable point that the historian usually is dealing with the ir- regular, non-repeatable, and apparently isolated and unconnected phenomena of the past. There must be regularity-at least, there must be an assumption of it, for how is the historian to explain the completely unique? So we have a solid entry into this debate. Finally, it gives us a point of entry into the similar problem of how the historian is to explain a particular action or a particular situation. In turn, we then can link the advantages of the Weberian "ideal type" with the Popperian concept of "situational analysis" or "situational logic"918 and pull that closer to a peculiarly historical mode of explanation by salvaging from the verstehen perspective those elements referred to above. "History typically involves human action" and therefore historical explanation frequently is about an agent's motives or intentions. It is here that one is particularly con- cerned with notions of empathetic reconstruction, but with the qualification that it will rely upon public evidence -the facts of the situation or the "absolute presuppositions" of a period.

This brief discussion of a large and complex area can be summarized by reference to von Wright's notion of "practical inference." He says: "It is only when action is already there and a practical argument is constructed to explain or justify it that we have a logically conclusive argument. The necessity of the practical inference schema is, one could say, a necessity conceived ex post actu."19 This meets Hempel's "covering-law theory" criteria. It also meets the "soft" verstehen requirements for rational explanation of the actions of an historical actor, since we have a form of explanation "proceeding by means of the construction of a practical inference for the agent."20 This is not a full-blown claim for rational explanation. Rather "The point is that it is possible to construct a practical inference (or 'rationale') for an action, and to construct it on the basis of public evidence. . . . so practical inference schemas provide the

17. Ibid., 91-92. 18. The term preferred to "situational analysis" in K. Popper, The Poverty of Historicism

(Boston, 1957), 147-152. 19. G. H. von Wright, Explanation and Understanding (London, 1972), 117. 20. Dickinson and Lee, eds., History Teaching, 74.



58 DAVID STOCKLEY

logical basis for explaining human actions, even though any particular reconstruction may prove to be false.921

To conclude this section, we can say that the concepts of "ideal type" and "situational logic" are at the heart of historical explanation, with the notions of "practical inference" and a "rationale" explanation bringing out most clearly that which is distinctive in the nature of historical explanation and understanding. There is a related strong verstehen element in historical explanation, but this is not some mystical or spontaneous process which takes place in the historian's mind. Empathetic reconstruction may well be an imaginative act, but it is also an analytical one and one that must be prepared for. To argue that empathetic reconstruction is solely an imaginative act would, in any event, be an extremely crude and naive way of viewing the imaginative process. This view of empathetic reconstruction lays more stress on "understanding" than on vague notions of "feeling like other people."

HOW TO IMPROVE THE ORIGINAL HISTORY LESSON

I may seem at first sight to have strayed from the original intention of helping our history teacher to avoid repeating her debacle on "The Black Death." First, let me assure any reader with such worries that I did not attempt to assist the teacher after the lesson by presenting her with a theoretical exposition of this form! Rather, I attempted in the short term to provide a series of more immediately obvious practical suggestions on how she could proceed in the future. It was only later that I strove to make a deeper and more generalizable response, the necessary first step of which was to build a solid theoretical foundation to understand just what we are striving to do when we talk of empathetic reconstruction in history and history teaching.

Close examination of the theoretical analysis of empathetic reconstruction can now be combined with some recent work by the Schools Council "History 13-16 Project" team to suggest a number of positive things which must be done when empathetic reconstruction by children is to be undertaken in the classroom.

My first point must be that empathetic reconstruction is a difficult task, requiring considerable structuring, forethought, and contextual knowledge. As was noted earlier, it is an analytical act, not merely some sort of emotional or intuitive response. The point can be rendered more precise by referring to the "His- tory 13-16 Project" 's work in this area on the setting of a "structured dilemma" as an aid for children undertaking empathetic reconstruction exercises.

The structured dilemma exercise is designed to move beyond earlier naive efforts to encourage empathy and, by implication, imaginativeness, on the part of the children. The advance in thinking behind the notion of a structured dilemma can best be demonstrated initially by listing earlier efforts in formal ex- aminations in Australia to elicit imaginative and empathetic responses (note

21. Ibid., 76.




how the two phrases unfortunately are used so interchangeably).22 These examples come from the Victorian High School Certificate (HSC) examination, renamed from 1981 the Victorian Institute of Secondary Education (VISE) examination for Year 12, which is the examination taken at the end of secondary schooling prior to entry to tertiary education. Students, on average, would be seventeen or eighteen years old.

Example (1) 1974 HSC: Victoria "Discuss the point of view that the Maritime Strike of 1880 was a conflict between the organised forces of labour and capital."

Example (2) 1976 HSC: Victoria "Imagine that you are a newspaper reporter sent to the goldfields in 1854. Your task is to write reports on TWO of the following: (a) the various nationalities represented on the fields; (b) administration of the fields; (c) social life on the fields (living conditions and recreation)."

Example (3) Sample question VISE 1981: Victoria "Imagine that you are ONE of the following at the time of the Depression of the 1930s: (a) a wheat farmer; (b) a child in primary school; (c) a barmaid; (d) a bank manager; (e) a charity worker for the Salvation Army; (f) an unskilled factory worker. Give brief details about your age, previous background and place of resi- dence. Then, writing as the person you have selected, give an account of the Depression years in Australia, how these years affect you and how you man- aged in these times of widespread unemployment."

These examples indicate that there has been a decided move toward the use of "imagine that" exercises which are intended to encourage more imaginativeness and empathy and more of a "feel" for the people being studied. This imaginative play must remain faithful to the historical evidence and be supported by the skills of historical method, yet it does seem to allow greater flexibility and creativity by the student and perhaps brings the student a little closer still to the approach of the professional historian. One worry must be that ques-

22. For example, see David A. Kent, "Imagination: An 'Historical Skill,'"Agora 11 (1977), 1-3. Kent argues that "it is the imaginative response to the past which distinguishes the activity of historians from other modes of enquiry" (2). This is undoubtedly true and undoubtedly also is a skill, but no guidance is given as to how this skill is to be structured and taught and in what ways it both resembles and differs from the historian's pivotal function of empathetic reconstruction. Much of the confusion remains in David Kent, "Imagination and Historical Thought," Teaching History 14 (1981), 39-48, largely because Kent apparently sees imagination as being either an intel- lectual or an emotional response. My point is that it is indubitably both.



60 DAVID STOCKLEY

tions of this kind may no longer be peculiarly historical questions.23 A more germane worry for us is that these "imagine that" exercises, even in their most recent, more structured format, provide little guidance and direction for the student. John Fines describes well the flawed nature of these questions:

Can you imagine what it was like to be a Russian peasant . . .? Of course not, and no more can children who are treated to this kind of pseudo-imaginative question. To exercise the imagination we must ask children to try to turn the materials of history into meaning, . . . to try to get a new view - to re-see in an active, rather than in a visual way ... one way of doing that training is to show the children the historian's imagination at work-they can't do it all by themselves.24

Fines's original criticism is cogent and will be returned to later. Equally cogent is his argument that the full weight of demands to be "imaginative," "creative," or "empathetic" cannot be laid upon the students, but at least partly must come from exposure to the great works of historical imagination. It should never be forgotten that history is a narrative, a story that cries out for the tell- ing by the history teacher. However, the weakness in Fines's position lies in his failure to differentiate between types of "imagine that" questions and to realize that empathy and empathetic reconstruction are quite different things from general pleas for children to "be imaginative." (It is most uncertain what we usually mean by this common demand that we make of our students.)

The earliest "imagine that" exercises and exam questions were unstructured and frequently were the resort of desperate students who had little historical knowledge, but who either had a fluent pen or no alternatives and could only hope that flights of fancy would rescue them. Nowadays, these questions lay more stress on the need for the student to be historically accurate, whether in terms of background knowledge (information about the 1930s Depression), likely actions, motives and feelings (a wheat farmer in the 1930s), or reactions to specific historical events (the dismissal of New South Wales' Premier Jack Lang). This specificity provides a series of "signposts," thereby ensuring that the student will not slip into flights of fancy but will actually produce an empathetic reconstruction which is both historically sound and also seems to strike a chord of responsiveness in an imaginative sense - such as displaying a "feel" for an historical period.

If empathetic reconstruction combines analytical and emotional skills and requires substantial contextual knowledge, the question becomes "Are children capable of achieving empathetic reconstruction in history?" The best evidence that we have for a strongly affirmative answer comes from the research of the Schools Council "History 13-16 Project" team. The Project conclusions are put thus:

The evaluation studies in the trials phase showed that empathetic reconstruction of the past is well within the capabilities of CSE/GCE pupils [many sixteen-year old Austra-

23. This is elaborated upon in David Stockley, "New Wine, New Bottles: Some Recent Develop- ments in History Teaching and Assessment in Victoria and England," Australian Journal of Teacher Education 6 (1981), 14-28.

24. John Fines, "Imagination and the Historian," Teaching History 18 (1977), 26.




lian pupils would be comparable, most particularly those who would continue their study of history through to year twelve, the final year of secondary schooling in Aus- tralia] if teaching is specifically directed towards this end. Hence while only 9 per cent of control school pupils thought it important to reconstruct the motives and perspectives of our predecessors, no less than 32 per cent of Project children spontaneously argued for such a practice. Later evidence . . . has suggested that it is necessary to distinguish conceptual understanding from practical historical skill. It is sometimes easier for a child to realise the importance of seeing an event from the point of view of a participant than for him/her to do so in practice. . . . It seems that, in some cases, preparatory work to explore the nature and origins of certain current values and prejudices may be necessary before pupils can begin to empathise with people in the past.25

Exactly how we are to encourage this brings us back to our history teacher who, by now, should be convinced that empathetic reconstruction is conceptu- ally and practically possible for her students, but only with a considerable amount of structured preparatory work and direction for them. What other firm assistance can we offer to the teacher?

Let us look back more closely to the course of the original lesson on "The Black Death" and see how we can help the teacher to bring about the desired empathetic reconstruction.

The first major weakness in the teacher's approach was a failure to work out exactly what she meant by "empathy" and how she would be able to know whether or not it had even occurred in the class. Discussion later indicated that the teacher was not interested in "empathy as a rather mysterious way of knowing that goes beyond any normal modes of cognition," nor "empathy as evoking the other within myself," but would have settled happily for "empathy as imagining oneself in the place of others."26 One suspects that this preference would be supported by the great majority of history teachers. Certainly it fits what the teacher was trying to do in the lesson, even though she was unable to articulate it in a precise way. Perhaps she would have said that she wanted her students to "stand in the shoes of another person" and hence attempt to see the world from that person's world-view and position.

This initial clarification of meaning explains why the girls reacted to the kill- ing of the cat, but apparently not to the rest of the story. "Standing in the shoes" of a medieval villager is a difficult task. Reacting to the death of a cat or, more generally, feeling disgust at an example of unthinking cruelty to ani- mals, would be easier for the girls. It is much more a straight imaginative leap.

But are our acts of empathetic reconstruction limited to more or less personal experiences? Fortunately, the answer is "no." Empathetic reconstruction in history is a vicarious experience, an imaginative and analytical interplay between the evidence and the child/historian. That is, evidence properly presented can "take the place" of personal experience, at the same time greatly ex- panding the range of those experiences and fostering an ability to understand people in other times and places. Our particular history teacher did provide

25. Schools Council, Explorations, 45. Emphasis added. See also Shemilt, History 13-16 Eval- uation Study.

26. Boddington, "Empathy," 14.



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historical evidence, in the form of the two documents read aloud in class, but the evidence was not presented in an appropriate manner. More useful would have been the "structured dilemma" approach suggested by the "History 13-16 Project" team. The evidence needed to be presented in a more manageable form; for example, by editing the sources so that the material was more obvi- ously directed toward those passages which described the villagers' feelings and actions. More background knowledge also was required by the students; for example, on the role of religion in English culture and society at that time. Moreover, simple pedagogical points like introducing a variety of evidence (visual and so on) could have helped to build a picture of the effects of the plague in the village.

This structuring of evidence and provision of further background information means that the children then will have much more chance of being able to grasp the world-view of the villagers and hence to see the villagers' responses as rational and justifiable at that time. This can help to minimize the students'initial reaction of seeing the villagers as being ignorant and stupid, behaving irra- tionally and without justification, and to be condemned by the standards of current morality and knowledge. The teacher can help by perhaps posing as an initial question, as an apparent paradox, "Why did many people at that time believe in witchcraft?" Alternatively, one could ask "Why did people keep kill- ing old women as witches, even when it is obvious that it had no effect on the course of the plague or other catastrophes?" A third choice could be "Why did a number of people at the time see the plague as 'God's will,' as a punishment meted out on a sinful world?" At its most structured, the dilemma can be presented starkly as two competing and apparently contradictory statements. "People in medieval times had certain beliefs about the causes for and cures of the plague [give a specific example]. These cures did not work. Why, then, did people continue to believe in them?"

One great advantage of this approach is that it allows for different levels of response.27 At the lowest level of response, the student may scornfully anwer that people believed such things in those days because they were "stupid" or "didn't know any better." This sneering dismissal is part and parcel of the mind set which sees history as a story of linear progress, culminating in the present day. A somewhat higher level of response may be able to repeat the factual information given by the teacher and rather patronizingly suggest that the answer lies in the medieval people's unfortunate lack of further knowledge and experience. Next, the students may see that it was necessary for people to believe in something, and that apparent failures in curing could be traced instead

27. For other examples of this approach see the "Enquiry in Depth" section of the History 13-16 Project. The terminology and approach has been taken from that Project and applied here in a somewhat different way and with more emphasis on the theoretical underpinnings of empathetic reconstruction. For further excellent discussion of these matters, particularly as they relate to new forms of assessment in history, see Henry Macintosh's contributions in "Proceedings of the History Teachers' Association of Australia's National Conference: Assessing History," History Forum 3 (1981).




to a failure to perform the cure/ritual correctly. Thus, it was not the belief that was false, but simply an incorrect practice or expression of the belief. At the most sophisticated level of empathetic response or reconstruction, the student will have all of the above and also realize the importance of religion at the time. That is, the student will have grasped the world-view of the medieval villagers. In that sense, the student will have "gained access" to the medieval villagers' minds and will understand their actions (but not necessarily condone them, of course). This will be done with varying degrees of insight and power and partly will be an imaginative response. But it will also be an analytical response founded on taught historical skills and on relevant contextual knowledge.

These structured dilemmas/paradoxes provide a focus for the children and mean that they are more likely to examine the evidence for reasons for and against such beliefs and resultant actions. Contemporary prejudices then are less likely to interfere (though overcoming these is a long-term process, not an instant solution), and the villagers' actions are more likely to be seen as rational responses when viewed within the context of that time. The students will be involved without the need for empty exhortations to "feel" and "imagine" their way through a mass of unfamiliar material concerning seemingly irra- tional beings. Disciplined by the evidence, though without necessarily approv- ing of the villagers' motives and actions, the children will have more chance of being able to understand why the villagers acted as they did.

This approach does not set out to stress empathy in a very explicit sense; that is, the children are not explicitly exhorted to "imagine that." Instead, they are provided with evidence and a dilemma. Empathetic reconstruction then can take place more as a process of eliminating misconceptions as the students wrestle with the problem. A critical historical skill will be learned in a structured and systematic way, with a minimum of fuss and with no complex and unsupportable suggestions that the children somehow are "taking the part" of the historical characters.

Of course, empathetic reconstruction will remain difficult even with this general approach. Students still will find it hard to move beyond sympathy (or revulsion) to empathy and still will find it hard to identify with many problema- tic situations. Empathetic reconstruction is a difficult skill and not all adolescents will attain it before they leave school. Perhaps many often will remain at the level of "seeing both sides" in a dilemma in a very straightforward and non- committal fashion. Finally, then, I shall suggest a few practical ways in which material can be structured and presented, within the conceptual framework outlined above, to overcome these difficulties. These suggestions need not be restricted to exercises in empathetic reconstruction, but they do have particular force and merit in that area of history teaching.

1. A "structured interview" of the survivors of the plague. The children ask "a villager" questions to do with age, occupation, and so on to establish the context, all of this being historically accurate, then may ask such questions as: "Did any of your family



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catch the plague?"; "Were strangers allowed to enter the village?"; "What do you think caused the plague?" and so on.

It is most unlikely that the children will be able to use actual memoirs of the villagers, but they could "invent" a typical family, keeping once again to the canons of historical accuracy, and describe how the plague could have affected that family.

2. Another possibility is a variation of the "structured dilemma" and has to do with the notion of "supposing" as an important element in empathetic reconstruction. For example, the teacher could ask the children a "supposing" question which forces them to try to see things "from the inside" -perhaps in an unexpected and dramatic way. One example might be: "Supposing all of the villagers were killed in the plague, how might we know whether they ever even lived and what sorts of lives they led?"

This type of question demands the imaginative analysis and interpretation of evidence which we are seeking in empathetic reconstruction. At the most basic level, it presupposes that the students will have been introduced to the concept of "evidence" as a necessary precondition to empathetic reconstruction. Nor will adolescents require only a concept of "evidence." As Shemilt states:

Adolescents lacking concepts of change and development have difficulty in realizing that the story presented to them is selective, or that selection reflects anything other than the intrinsic importance of the events recorded. . For example, when the student fails to impute a background of everyday action and concern to the story line, the mass of humanity also pales into significance. History [then] is not about Everyman.28

Shemilt's remarks are directed toward the question of adolescent constructions of historical narrative, but I think that it is quite clear that they are just as apt for empathy and reinforce the argument that these skills and concepts must be taught consciously and systematically.

If this is done effectively, then students will be able to proceed beyond the level-one construal of historical narrative referred to above by Shemilt and some at least will be able to attain a level-four construal of historical narrative, which has obvious links with what we have been saying about empathetic reconstruction. As Shemilt declares:

At level 4, adolescents begin to see the historical story as being say, an Elizabethan story, and not just as a story which "comes in the middle" or just happened to fall in Elizabethan times. That is, they begin to develop an inkling of period as something more than a chronological connection. In principle this means that the inner logic of history develops as the narrative unfolds, and an explanation which makes sense in one period might not do so in another. This is what historians mean when they say that facts are being considered "out of context," that "Elizabethans didn't think like that . .. wouldn't have found such-and-such strange or unacceptable."29

Children need to be able to talk and interact with one another when they are tackling empathy questions. This may well be a general truth. However, it has particular force here because it assists them in clarifying misconceptions and

28. Denis Shemilt, "The Devil's Locomotive," 7. 29. Ibid., 11.




anachronisms in a non-threatening way and in "re-creating" the situation as it faced the people at the time.

A natural extension of the above is the use of simulation games and role- playing as more concrete and immediate representations of "supposing that" questions and structured dilemmas. It would be an easy matter to construct a board and dice game about the Black Death and its effects on one village -a game of interest to the children, yet historically accurate. For example, what is the probability of survival? Were there "miracle cures"? How long did the plague last in the village? I do not claim that this suggestion is shatteringly original, but it continues to amaze me that the use of these aids is still so limited in the classroom, or that they are used purely as an end-in-themselves, un- informed by broader conceptual considerations.

One final suggestion will have to suffice. The children could be asked to focus on a problem or decision to be faced by the villagers; for example, "Could the villagers simply have fled to somewhere more isolated when the plague appeared? Would this have helped? What might be the disadvantages of this decision?" Answers will have to accord with the historical evidence, yet should reflect understanding of the period and situation (as perceived by the villagers) that constitutes the heart of empathetic reconstruction.

CONCLUDING REMARKS

It is clear that we have been able to offer our history teacher a considerable body of theoretical and practical advice on how to bring about empathetic reconstruction in the history classroom. The process will take a long time, will need to be structured and systematic, and so will require conscious striving on the part of the teacher. Students will not be required to fulfill vague objectives of "feeling like," but will be required to develop those skills of historical explanation and understanding (including imagination) discussed in this article. The essential point is that the children must be encouraged to grasp the world-view and frame of reference of the historical agents and to overcome their own contemporary prejudices and misconceptions. This will be achieved best through such devices as the structured dilemma.

Given these difficulties and complexities, a history teacher will not always be successful in bringing it about in the history lesson. Nonetheless, she will have much more chance of success once the vagueness and mysticism have been cleared away and there is no lingering belief in the spontaneous and unstructured nature of empathetic reconstruction.

La Trobe University



Empathetic Reconstruction in History and History Teaching

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