Teaching about the First World War today: Historical empathy and participatory citizenship

Abstract

This article explores the concept of historical empathy and how it can foster a greater understanding of a significant episode in New Zealand and Australian history, the 1915 Gallipoli Campaign. It also highlights the potential that the concept holds for encouraging students to participate in civic society. It does this by drawing upon the author’s experience of teaching historical empathy to young people in a way that aims to affectively tune in to shared human traits and cognitively comprehend why another person holds a different set of beliefs. In doing this, the author’s aim is to develop in young people an empathic understanding of the lives of others, past and present.

Introduction

In preparing to write this article, I attended a conference exploring, among other things, the challenges of teaching the First World War at the tertiary chalk face. A presenter wearily remarked, ‘Please don’t let me read one more student essay about Gallipoli that ends “Lest we forget”’. There was much nodding of heads and murmurs of agreement among the audience. The comment neatly summed up what had already been said in the presentation about the dangers of teaching the First World War as an act of remembrance that distracts students from taking a more critical approach to past events. At this point, I squirmed in my seat as I silently recalled that I had used an essay with just such an ending to exemplify to high school students what being good at historical empathy looks like (see Appendix 1).

This episode reveals to me a tension between teaching with the purpose of affectively tuning in to the tragedy and futility of the First World War and teaching with the intention of comprehending a less familiar and more nuanced history of the conflict. For anyone who has studied the First World War or indeed been to its battlefields, for instance, on the Western Front or on the Gallipoli peninsula, it is hard not to feel a deep sympathy for the first of these aims. After all, ‘Even mentioning that the coach will pass by Passchendaele can bring tears to the eyes of the most hardened history teacher’ (McManus, 2011: 28). And it is this empathetic feeling about loss that might appear to dominate popular sentiment about the First World War. A key question is whether this is at the expense of the second aim, historical comprehension.

Gary Sheffield, and many other professional historians, would likely say that it is. As Sheffield (2014) notes, the moving experience of visiting the battlefields and contemplating that loss helps to ‘obscure the true meaning of the war. That Britain and her allies won the First World War, and not Germany’ (p. 26). Engaging in historical thinking leads us to abandon the emotional and empathic notion of tragedy and/or futility and comprehend the First World War as a time that ‘Britain fought a defensive, just war’ (Sheffield, 2014: 26). This viewpoint reflects a wider belief within the history community, expressed by historian Simon Schama, when observing that his colleagues were ‘constitutionally allergic’ to empathy (Schama, 2002). And for a long time, history educators have also seen it as something that could give you a nasty reaction largely because it led to students over-identifying with historical characters and creating a fanciful ‘let’s pretend’ version of the past (Clements, 1996). Asking students who were studying the First World War to empathise with past lives tended to lead to activities that began with the following: ‘Imagine you are in the trenches …’ or ‘Write a letter home from the front …’. As Booth et al. (1987) have argued, such activities could work, but experience tended to show disappointing results because they provided students with minimal guidance as to what to do and led to the projecting of present-day feelings into past situations. However, like Schama, I do not accept the argument that empathic understanding is an obstacle to knowing something of the past.

In this article, I make the case that historical empathy can foster an affective feeling for, and an understanding of, the past. I do this by drawing upon my experience of teaching historical empathy to young people in a way that aims to affectively tune in to shared human traits and cognitively comprehend why another person holds a different set of beliefs (Davison, 2012, 2013). As such, I also highlight the potential that the concept holds for encouraging students to participate in civic society. Adopting the findings of Parker’s (1989) work on social studies teaching and participatory citizenship, I understand that students with strong civic values often have an in-depth knowledge of history so as to highlight what it is to live in democratic societies, that they are part of a public community with shared concerns and diverse opinions and that they take part in discussions about these concerns.

Historical empathy as an affective and cognitive concept

I undertook my study as a teacher-researcher, exploring the affective and cognitive dimensions of historical empathy and how they played out across eighteen 1-hour lessons in two social studies classrooms. The intervention took place at my workplace: a large co-educational secondary school in the suburbs of Auckland, New Zealand. It entailed teaching one Year 10 (14- to-15-year-olds) social studies class (Class A/C, n = 22) the affective dimension of historical empathy first (A), followed by the cognitive dimension (C), and teaching another Year 10 social studies class (Class C/A, n = 23) the reverse, that is, the cognitive dimension first (C), followed by the affective (A). The significance of the sequencing of these dimensions and the progress of students’ learning is beyond the scope of this article, but I have discussed this elsewhere (Davison et al., 2014).

Regarding a definition of historical empathy, my findings suggested that its affective and cognitive dimensions could be described using a series of equally weighted elements. This is significant because while it is commonly defined as vicariously walking in someone else’s shoes, there are within the literature two competing ways of interpreting historical empathy. One is mostly cognitive and the other is primarily affective. Some researchers view historical empathy through a predominantly cognitive lens (Foster, 2001; Lee and Ashby, 2001), arguing that it is about marshalling evidence and gathering contextual information. In contrast, other researchers focus more on the affective dimension of historical empathy (Bardige, 1988; Barton and Levstik, 2004), emphasising ideas such as students caring about what happened in the past and responding to past events with compassion. Adopting Gaddis’ (2002) metaphor of moving through an historical landscape, I set out to place my affective and cognitive elements along an empathic pathway. This pathway graphically represents students affectively entering into the past and then cognitively working with the historical record before finally making an exit and arriving at a series of judgements (see Figure 1). This reflects Gaddis’ argument that once a student has imaginatively entered into the past and taken in a series of impressions, they ‘bail out’ and begin to critically make sense of what they have empathically experienced. As such, it bestows equal importance on the affective and cognitive dimensions of historical empathy.

Figure 1.

Historical empathy pathway.

The elements of historical empathy and how they relate to participatory citizenship

There follows a description of the elements that characterise historical empathy and how they might encourage students to play their role as participatory citizens. The voices of students who participated in the study are included to provide examples of their developing grasp of historical empathy.

Open-mindedness allows students to be receptive to past experiences and makes it more likely that they will begin to take seriously, at least temporarily, values and beliefs that are different from their own (Barton and Levstik, 2004; Noddings, 2005). Receptivity may lead to identification with historical characters, as Foster (2001) warns, but evidence from psychotherapy shows that empathetic individuals can identify with others while not agreeing with them (McWilliams, 2004). This is because they can perceive the thoughts of another person while retaining their own viewpoint (Shea, 1998). Without an open-mind, as Rachel in Class A/C pointed out in the study, ‘You can’t really feel what the person was thinking’. It was also apparent in this study, however, that students did not begin by looking at a new historical topic with an open-mind and that, therefore, the uptake of this element is more likely if it is pre-taught. This could involve exploring with students their existing beliefs and knowledge of the First World War. For instance, the teacher could ask what they already know about conscientious objectors, nurses and soldiers and encourage them to carefully listen to and entertain the viewpoints of such historical characters. This is certainly not about empty-headedness, but rather students noticing their own beliefs and being receptive to considering the beliefs of others.

‘Feeling care’ fosters in students a sense that past lives matter and of wanting to find out more by entering into that past. In the study, the element of ‘feeling care’ was evoked when students felt close to historical characters. For instance, Alvin in Class A/C felt care when listening to interviews with veterans of the First World War and said that they could have been ‘Just from next door or something, they really weren’t that far away’. For Hailey, a feeling of care emerged as she watched the film Gallipoli (Weir, 1981): ‘Even for me in the movie … they were actual people’ (Class A/C). When, after watching Gallipoli, Helen asked, ‘What would I feel like if I went through that?’ (Class A/C), there was a clear sense that she had entered into the past and was now pondering what she would have done had she been there. In other words, students were beginning to want to make the strangeness of historical characters seem more familiar. This goal, as Barton and Levstik (2004) argue, may help students explore their own and others’ beliefs – a key attribute if young people are going to engage with the diversity of beliefs that they will find in public life. Because, as Noddings (2005) reminds us, people might agree that there is such a thing as citizenship, but it ‘usually looks suspiciously like their own way (of life)’ (p. 2). The significance of historical empathy may rest on the idea that it enables students to care about other, very different, lives. In my study, I deliberately used names from the local war memorial to foster a sense of care for past lives within the students’ community before broadening my approach to look at historical characters from more distant places. As such, it helped students care sufficiently to want to find out more about the types of experiences these characters witnessed and to go and explore the historical record.

Imagination is about being projected into the past to consider what the possibilities were. For Rick, in Class C/A, it meant the ability ‘to imagine ourselves to be there [in the past] as other people’. One way of doing this was for each class to watch the film Gallipoli (Weir, 1981). As Seixas and Peck (2004) have posited, film is designed to ‘sweep their audiences into an apparent past [so that they have] a direct window into what the past looked like, felt like, and what it meant’ (p. 109). They caution, however, that being ‘swept along’ into an imagined past is not what is wanted if learning history is about critical thinking. I agree with Seixas and Peck but only in guarding against imagination simply becoming an exercise in ‘let’s pretend’ – something that the teacher can avoid if they are operating within both the cognitive and affective dimensions of historical empathy. Put simply, imagination cannot be avoided when studying history. As Dewey (1933) stated, history is unavoidably replete with ‘matters that must be imaginatively realised if they are realised at all’ (p. 291). And used carefully, imagination can open up unexpected teaching opportunities. For instance, Carol Ann Duffy’s poem, The Last Post (Duffy, 2012), imagines the First World War not occurring and the war poet putting away their notebook. Using The Last Post in class could mean that the students begin to think about counterfactuals, or instead, they could be encouraged to think about what might be possible in the present.

Historical empathy’s cognitive elements of exploring evidence, building contextual knowledge, finding multiple perspectives and being aware that past and present are different become helpful once students have, so to speak, entered into the past and now begin to work with the record of that past. They are of equal importance in the goal of realising social studies and history’s potential to be taught to foster participatory citizenship.

Evidence was thought of by the students in my study as a checking device to test out hunches about the past, as a means of building historical knowledge and as a way of stimulating an emotional interest in the past. The first point reflects the almost universally held view that the claims of historians are only warranted if they are underpinned by evidence (Gosselin, 2011). The second is particularly relevant to empathising with a historical character because it implies sifting through the historical record to try and find relevant source material that may help to contextualise their life. The third, however, would be seen by Wineburg (2007) as a novice-like approach to evidence, far removed from the world of historians, who, he argues, handle evidence with cool detachment. Still, in terms of engaging with historical empathy, evidence that activates an emotional feeling for the past is useful in that it may foster student interest. In this study, both Helen (Class A/C) and Michelle (Class C/A) were clear that without such engagement, handling evidence could be demotivating.

Building contextual knowledge enabled the students in the study to develop a more rounded picture of historical characters. As they learnt about the context of soldiers’ and civilians’ lives in New Zealand and Australia in the first decade of the twentieth century, they were able to make better sense of what these historical characters might have thought about the Gallipoli campaign. ¹ Ashby et al. (2005) have described this acquisition of contextual knowledge as developing ‘a sense of period’ (p. 167). This helps students avoid the problem of presentism: where present-day values are inadvertently transposed onto the lives of historical characters who likely held a very different set of values. In essence, seeing historical characters in their own time and space is akin to grasping in the present ‘how social problems and events look from various perspectives’ (Parker, 2003: 98).

Finding multiple perspectives also enables students to broaden their outlook by realising that historical characters are likely to encompass more than one emotion or view. By identifying multiple perspectives, students are also ensuring that they empathise with not only a single-perspective account of the past but also the stories of others (Seixas and Peck, 2004). Hailey in Class A/C found that she ‘got better at … being empathetic when there was more to it, like when there was another point of view’. It is this attribute that, Parker (2003) has argued, is so central to the teaching of democracy. Using the term reversibility to describe changing places with somebody, he argues that the holding of multiple perspectives is more likely when students develop a genuine desire to listen to others, especially when their values and perspectives are different from our own. In my study, I used cartoons printed in newspapers of the time to explore popular perspectives and how these might be different to what the students had found when building their contextual knowledge. For instance, a cartoon called The Slacker provided a sharp critique of those New Zealanders who had not volunteered to fight. We discussed the questions this raised about society’s values in 1915 and what it might be like to take a position not supported by the majority, both in the past and in the present. In turn, this provided an opportunity to talk about the tension within democracy between unity (the war-effort) and diversity (the right to object).

Once this work on the historical record is complete, students exit the past (see the third part of Figure 1). From this point, they begin making judgements about their experience of studying the 1915 Gallipoli Campaign. The essay that Lucy completed (see Appendix 1) is an example of such a judgement and the elements, including care, imagination, contextual knowledge and evidence, that underpin it. This is also a time when I encourage reflection on the practical consequences of what has been studied. This can include exploring current debates that question the often-told story of heroic young men sacrificed by incompetent British generals (Wright, 2015), making sense of commemoration and Anzac Day (Pennell and Sheehan, 2016) and examining anti-war arguments, for instance, the Coalition to Stop War (www.noglory.org). With the experience of being in a classroom where time has been deliberately spent developing an empathetic grasp of the past, the students are well positioned to take part in these discussions on how we feel about, and understand, war in the past and present.

Conclusion

It is obvious to all but the most determined believer in time-travel that it is impossible to ever walk in the shoes of a historical character. But crucially, it is possible to imagine what that person’s life was like and the sorts of things that might have influenced their decision to take one road and not another. Imagining ourselves in another historical time is not very far from Parker’s participatory citizen who imagines being in another’s place, and in doing so takes the ‘moral opposite of egocentricity and ethnocentricity’ (Parker, 2003: 61). Imagination, it has been argued, is one of several elements that together not only characterise what it is to historically empathise but also encourage students to develop as citizens. As Ashby and Lee (1987) reasoned, 30 years ago, that while it may be too simplistic to say that historical empathy will lead us all towards participatory citizenship, it is true that ‘where the alien is seen as stupid and inferior, there is little chance of progress towards genuine understanding’ (p. 65) – words that remain relevant to our world today.

I am not saying that an empathic pathway is the only way to teach participatory citizenship. Data from the International Civic and Citizenship Education Study (Lang, 2010) found that New Zealand students in Year 9, who had not been taught social studies and history as discrete subjects, were generally well prepared to be future citizens. Their proficiency in citizenship was, however, ‘only average in comparison with other participating OECD countries’ (p. 6), and there was a wide distribution of civic knowledge scores. Furthermore, the New Zealand Electoral Commission has reported on a rapid decline in voter turnout for General Elections since 1981 and predicts that the country could have a turnout rate of around 50% by 2040 (Electoral Commission, 2015). This suggests that there is much potential and some urgency for social studies and history teachers to contribute to the teaching of participatory citizenship.