Appropriation d’une ressource didactique permettant le développement de la pensée historienne par un enseignant au secondaire
This thesis is a case study that examines the use by a secondary school teacher of the didactic resource entitled, Reading Like a Historian (RLH). This resource offers activities that encourage the development of historical thinking skills among secondary school students, which is a goal that has become central in recent years in the teaching of history and in history programmes’ curricula. To analyze this resource’s use, we selected an instructor who adapted one of the activities suggested in RLH, and observed the classroom periods that stemmed from this application (n=3), as well as conducted an interview with the participating instructor in order to have a deeper understanding of the process of appropriation and transformation of the didactic activity. Our primary results indicate that the unfolding of the activity was strongly controlled by the teacher’s discourse, and that the time left for the students’ activity was limited. Our study also revealed that the participating instructor demonstrated difficulty in identifying the prerequisite knowledge for this sequence, and had doubts with respect to his students’ capacity to mobilize the heuristic skills related to the use of historical thinking. While the resource, the position and the objectives of our participant where clearly oriented toward fostering the development of historical thinking skills of his students, the activity observed was weakly problematized and left little room for students to practice their historical thinking skills. Thus we concluded that the lack of coaching, time, and training seem to be the avenues to explore in order to remedy this situation.
ressources historical thinking teaching practice resource heuristic secondary school history