| This study explores the historical knowledge of elementary students by documenting the process involved when students construct sociocultural and critical historical perspectives of United States history. The participants were 26 fifth grade students from an urban area in Northern California. Divided into groups of 4 or 5, students discussed historical fiction books using a literature circle format. Each discussion group met 2 or 3 times a week outside of class during five weeks in May and June. Discourse analysis was used to determine how these students constructed sociocultural and critical perspectives of history. The results indicate that the dialectical interplay between cognitive acknowledgment and affective understanding of sociocultural and critical components, mediated by social discourse, facilitated the development of sociocultural and critical historical perspectives for these fifth grade students. |
