Can’t Hold the Past from Both Ends?: Exploring Students’ Learning of Conflicting Historical Accounts on a Charged Intergroup Issue

Tsafrir Goldberg

The proposed research aims to explore the relation of group identity and collective memory with narrative construction and argumentation in the learning of charged historical issues and to assess the effects of educational interventions on learning and bias in such a context. Cognitive studies and Social cognition perspectives hint to a strong biasing influence of collective memory and group identity on perception of the past. However, argumentative disciplinary practices and narrative-empathetic approaches are assumed to help students overcome such biases and foster historical and mutual understanding. The proposed research design will compare the historical learning processes of Israeli Jewish Arab students within narrative-empathetic, disciplinary-argumentative and regular historical learning designs. Students’ stands, preconceptions and attitudes to knowledge and to ingroup will be assessed before and after intervention to note change through learning. Narrative change and evidence evaluation will be analyzed in relation with group identity to assess social and cognitive biases. The project aims at developing instructional methods to promote students’ historical understanding of charged issues and help educators overcome their reluctance to deal with them. In the theoretical realm it seeks to enhance and conceptualize the notions of social cognition and collective memory in relation to historical understanding.

About Tsafrir Goldberg

Tsafrir Goldberg was born in Beit Zayit, a village on the western outskirts of Jerusalem, Israel, where he and his wife raise their four daughters. Having received his B.A. degree in history from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem on 1996, he went on to study for a teaching certificate in the Kerem Institute for Humanistic Jewish Education. 12 years of teaching in one of Jerusalem's underprivileged neighborhoods led him to field oriented theoretical approaches such as situated learning and communities of practice. These transformed his work and along with students' feedback and participation, facilitated the argumentative learning interventions which served as a context for his doctoral research. The dissertation was an inquiry into adolescents' learning of historical controversies, which soon expanded to the realms of identity and collective memory. The deepening professional, empirical and theoretical involvement in learning research evolved not only into academic writing but also into Goldberg’s work in teacher education, textbook writing and curricular reform. In 2009 those combined fields of interest brought him to the University of Haifa where he’s currently researching issues of identity in learning and participating in an initiative for a community of practice approach Masters in Teaching program.