Facing History and Ourselves

Aims, Principles, and Methods of the Program

In Facing History and Ourselves classrooms, middle- and high-school students learn to think about individual and group decision making and to make moral judgments. Drawing on the seminal work of developmental theorists, including John Dewey, Jean Piaget, Erik Erikson, and Lawrence Kohlberg, the pedagogy of Facing History and Ourselves speaks to the adolescent's newly discovered ideas of subjectivity, competing truths, and differing perspectives, along with the growing capacity to think hypothetically and the inclination to find personal meaning in newly introduced phenomena. Facing History recognizes that adolescents are budding moral philosophers who come to their schooling already struggling with matters of obedience, loyalty, fairness, difference, and acceptance, rooted in their own identities and experience. They need to build the habits, skills, and knowledge to help them find the connections to the past that will inspire their moral imaginations about their roles in the future. By exploring a question in a historical case—such as why some people willingly conform to the norms of a group even when those norms encourage wrongdoing, but others speak out and resist—Facing History and Ourselves offers students a framework and a vocabulary for thinking about how they can make a difference in the world they will inhabit as adults.

The intellectual and pedagogic framework of Facing History and Ourselves is built on a synthesis of history and ethics for effective history education. Its core learning principles embrace intellectual rigor, ethical reflection, emotional engagement, and civic agency. Its teaching parameters engage the methods of the humanities: inquiry, critical analysis, interpretation, empathic connections, and judgment. Facing History and Ourselves teachers [Page 866]employ a carefully structured methodology to provoke thinking about complex questions of citizenship and human behavior. Building on the increasing ability to think hypothetically and imagine options, these teachers stretch the historical imagination by urging delineation of what might have been done, choices that could have been made, and alternative scenarios that could have come about.

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