Linkage between Purpose, Content, and Method in History Education - An Integrated Perspective -

What to teach (content) and how to teach (method) have been at the main tasks of history curriculum and instruction research. However, the term “how” in curriculum and instruction includes not only the narrow sense of method, referring to students’ learning activities, but also the problem of selecting content, or “what to teach.”<br/> The purpose of history education is closely linked to both the method and the content. It is not a one-way relationship where one factor influences the other, but rather an interaction. The interaction of purpose, content, and method means that these three aspects of history education are not separate, but work together as an integrated whole. Research in history education is also moving toward an integrated understanding, as seen in the concepts of Weinburg’s “historical thinking” and Barton and Levstick’s “stance.”<br/> The need for an integrated view of the purpose, content, and methods of history education is evident in the way history teachers design history lessons. History teachers design lessons that integrate these three aspects based on their interpretations of historical facts. They use their interpretations of historical facts to determine the purpose of the lesson, to decide what learning activities to conduct, and to select contents to be taught from history subject matters and transform them into content of lessons. Historical cognition is combined with the teacher’s perspective of history education and applied to the history lesson to organize the lesson.