A feeling for the past: Adolescents' personal responses to studying history

The main objective of the present study was to examine whether or not adolescent history students make connections between their reading of different genres of history (narrative and expository) and their own personal experience. The study also examined what it is in the body of a history text itself that draws students' attention. In addition, the study analyzed the relationship between students' engagement and their final mark in Canadian history, as well as other factors that might correlate with the tendency to make a personal connection with a history text. Also considered was which sources of historical information are most engaging for adolescent learners. Fifty-four Grade 12 students participated in the study by reporting the emotions and memories they experienced while reading short historical texts. They also responded to a reader-response survey and a questionnaire. Results demonstrated that adolescent readers make personal connections between history texts and their own experience. Two ways of making such a connection were experiencing emotions and recalling memories in response to reading an historical text. No significant effects were uncovered for text genre. However, there were notable trends in the predicted direction: narrative elicited more memories and fewer distractions than the expository text. Participants identified specific "engagement spots" in the texts. Content analysis found these locations described emotional events that were personally relevant to them. Results support Dilthey's method of imaginative understanding (Verstehen) as well as Oatley's communicative theory of emotions. That is, young people use their subjectively experienced understanding of the world to take meaning from history texts. Students' final grades in Grade 10 History were negatively correlated with their most intense emotion and memory ratings. Surprisingly, students who engaged least with the assigned readings earned the highest grades in Canadian history. Finally, historical knowledge that came by way of family or the media was considered to be less informative and less reliable, yet far more engaging than classroom learning. These results clarify adolescents' intentions and beliefs about learning: teen-ager are not passive recipients of curriculum, but have their own agenda. Implications for the history classroom were also discussed.