![]() ![]() The five C's do not encompass the universe of historical thinking, yet they do provide a remarkably useful tool for helping students at practically any level learn how to formulate and support arguments based on primary sources, as well as to understand and challenge historical interpretations related in secondary sources. But that is precisely their value: They make our implicit ways of thought explicit to the students and teachers whom we train. These ideas are hardly new to professional historians. They stand at the heart of the questions historians seek to answer, the arguments we make, and the debates in which we engage. In response, we developed an approach we call the "five C's of historical thinking." The concepts of change over time, causality, context, complexity, and contingency, we believe, together describe the shared foundations of our discipline. ![]() 1 If our understandings of the past constituted a sort of craft knowledge, how could we distill and communicate habits of mind we and our colleagues had developed through years of apprenticeship, guild membership, and daily practice to university students so that they, in turn, could impart these habits in K–12 classrooms? As we began reading such works as Sam Wineburg's Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts, however, we encountered an unexpected challenge. ![]() When we started working on Teachers for a New Era, a Carnegie-sponsored initiative designed to strengthen teacher training, we thought we knew a thing or two about our discipline. ![]()
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