History education is a study practice to enhance personality, cultivate humanities ability and foster civic competence that serves life development and promotes social health in the process of studying, producing and spreading history knowledge by connecting individuals with society, history with reality. Historical consciousness is a relation set concerning subject and past, reality and future, and its significance judgment and method identification. The basic task of history education is to help students construct their own historical consciousness. The nature of history learning is to construct scientific historical consciousness. Over the past four decades, the international history teaching field has regarded historical consciousness study as the core subject of modern history education and teaching.Historical consciousness and history education complement each other. However, it has been so concealed that it has been ignored while we were solving difficult teaching problems. History classes without education have not been changed because of durable dispute. Therefore, history learning should be centered on historical consciousness construction and evoke the occurrence of middle school students’ historical consciousness, lead the construct of their historical consciousness and promote the realization of their historical consciousness by specific teaching practice, which is the nature of history education and history teaching.This paper is divided into seven chapters composed of "introduction", "conclusion" and five chapters of main body.Introduction consists of four sections. "The reason of topic selection" focuses on three dispute points—history textbook, history teaching and history class—to introduce the topic and its theoretical and practical significance. "’Literature review" section discusses why historical consciousness research is reasonable from theoretical and practical aspects and the research’s foothold. "Related concepts" section discusses the concepts of "history cognition", "history understanding", "history significance" and their relations to promote the understanding of "historical consciousness". "Research structure and methodology" section briefly introduces the approach, methods and important points of this study.Chapter One "Historical consciousness and its learning significance" draws a preliminary conclusion that historical consciousness is the cognition to the relation of history and reality on the basis of reviewing the related research results about historical consciousness and gives a preliminary explanation of the content and structure of historical consciousness and further makes clear the educational function and learning significance of historical consciousness.Chapter Two "History learning centered on historical consciousness construct" discusses the basic factors influencing history learning and their functions on the basis of educational psychology and learning scientific theory, and analyzes values and stimulation of students’ history learning motivation. The paper holds that history learning with high quality is the way to construct students’ historical consciousness. In turn, construct of students’ historical consciousness is the purpose and pursuit of history learning with high quality.Chapter Three "Occurrence of historical consciousness of middle school students" discusses the occurrence of students’ historical consciousness from the perspectives of teaching design, teaching method and teaching text. The study discusses how history teaching motivates, stimulates and instructs development of students’ historical consciousness on the basis of the basic knowledge of psychology and important sections of history teaching practice. The study also emphasizes that students’ historical consciousness construct requires positive teaching design and practice to promote and enhance the quality and level of its activities. Based on the "students-centered" teaching philosophy, the chapter focuses on the theoretical basis, scientific process, methods and strategies and major errors of history teaching design on the basis of historical consciousness construct.Chapter Four "Historical consciousness construct of middle school students" discusses historical consciousness construct of middle school students from curriculum, epistemology, methodology in the discipline of history. "Construct of historical knowledge and historical consciousness" adopts a method of knowledge clarification to explain the construct possibilities between different knowledge types and historical consciousness. "History understanding and historical consciousness construct" maintains that communications and understandings are the general method of historical consciousness construct, and emotions and attitudes are the significant approach and value reflection of historical consciousness construct on the basis of understanding-centered teaching philosophy.Chapter Five "Realization of middle school students’ historical consciousness" aims to analyze the explicit and implicit problems in history teaching by the cases from the teaching progress. The explicit problems refer to the routine, habitual or typical, universal questions in teaching. This study analyzes the present situation of historical consciousness cultivation through analyzing cases from teaching process in interaction, problem solution, and interpretation of historical materials and discriminates their relations to identify the factual basis of whether students could construct historical consciousness. The implicit problems refer to problems that are ignored and concealed or not made clear or found, such as emotions, attitudes and beliefs. These problems not only are directly linked to the occurrence and construct of historical consciousness, but also tend to be more real and durable. The settlements of these problems and their teaching practice need to be responded by researchers, implementers and managers together and unified in the process of the cultivation and construct of historical consciousness."Conclusion" is a summary of this paper. Focusing on the understanding of the history teaching with wisdom, the author regards historical consciousness construct as the core motivation of history teaching and emphasizes historical consciousness construct is a process of independent and positive learning, a process of the generation of historical wisdom and a process of positive self-construct. The nature of effective history teaching is a learning process that benefits the construct of students’ historical consciousness.This study seeks to integrate theory with practice, identify problems from practice, and then put the theory into practice to solve problems. The author hopes this is a beneficial attempt. |