{"id":160,"date":"2026-06-01T00:25:20","date_gmt":"2026-06-01T00:25:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/chancejimenez.net\/?p=160"},"modified":"2026-08-06T12:31:13","modified_gmt":"2026-08-06T12:31:13","slug":"thinking-about-historical-thinking-portfolio-post","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/chancejimenez.net\/index.php\/thinking-about-historical-thinking-portfolio-post\/","title":{"rendered":"Thinking about Historical Thinking Portfolio Post"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The readings and videos exploring historical thinking across classrooms have reinforced lessons from my academic career while also introducing new ideas that clearly articulate my experiences as both a teacher and a student.<\/p>\n<p>The &#8220;What is Historical Thinking&#8221; video and the &#8220;What is Learned in College History Classes?&#8221; both demonstrated that the K-12 curriculum aims to teach students some level of historical thinking; however, the DBQs and other methods yield varied results and fall short of helping students develop their critical thinking skills. This confirmed my prior belief that it wasn&#8217;t the high school curriculum that fostered my curiosity and skill in asking questions about history or developing my abilities in historical analysis. I struggled in the introductory history classes throughout my freshman year. In fact, I often had the same takeaways and questions as the students in the experiment. I was more disturbed by and fixated on the horrors of enslavement than I was able to consider the sources themselves. I was able to grasp the historical context and consider multiple perspectives, but I wasn&#8217;t yet well-rounded in my historical thinking, since I hadn&#8217;t begun to consider the sources themselves or to attempt to connect them to each other.<\/p>\n<p>I was deeply inspired, and perhaps called out, by &#8220;<span class=\" CGqCRe\">Finding Out vs. Figuring Out&#8221; and <\/span>St\u00e9phane L\u00e9vesque&#8217;s interview. The content across the website and the video challenged how I&#8217;ve navigated teaching through leading discussions in the past. I&#8217;ve always been aware that the discussion questions I&#8217;d come up with were lacking; I&#8217;d feel like I was leading the class toward a particular answer or perspective instead of inspiring collaboration or discussion. Though I&#8217;ve been aware of this, I&#8217;ve been clueless on how to work through it. The way &#8220;Finding Out vs. Figuring Out&#8221; describes how some questions and lessons invite the learner to connect the materials to one another <em>and <\/em>to their own knowledge. While this idea may be elementary for some, it was eye-opening for me. I realized that I&#8217;ve been using my own knowledge as the waypoint for my questions, with the destination also being predetermined. However, challenging this way of thinking by centering the sources and allowing them to be analyzed as well is a game-changer.<\/p>\n<p>Throughout this module, I encountered the most problems when trying to reconcile with offering empathy when analyzing historical figures. These issues have brought up the following questions:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Where is the line between sympathy and empathy as it concerns unpacking the actions of historical figures?<\/li>\n<li>How can we demonstrate historical empathy when teaching about sensitive subject matter?<\/li>\n<li>Is there a need to condemn historical figures and\/or hold them to contemporary notions of morality?<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>I find it challenging to discuss topics like slavery without imposing my own moral standards. I haven&#8217;t yet discovered a way to approach these conversations without doing so, which I largely attribute to the fact that histories of marginalized groups are highly debated. Additionally, the justifications once used to defend decisions by figures like Abraham Lincoln are now being repurposed to excuse the actions of more malicious individuals.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The readings and videos exploring historical thinking across classrooms have reinforced lessons from my academic career while also introducing new ideas that clearly articulate my experiences as both a teacher and a student. The &#8220;What is Historical Thinking&#8221; video and the &#8220;What is Learned in College History Classes?&#8221; both demonstrated that the K-12 curriculum aims&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":258,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_themeisle_gutenberg_block_has_review":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-160","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/chancejimenez.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/160","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/chancejimenez.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/chancejimenez.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chancejimenez.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chancejimenez.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=160"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/chancejimenez.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/160\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":161,"href":"https:\/\/chancejimenez.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/160\/revisions\/161"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chancejimenez.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/258"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/chancejimenez.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=160"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chancejimenez.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=160"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chancejimenez.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=160"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}