Teaching history in ways C21st students learn – A design-based research perspective

Abstract

One of the challenges of teaching current students’ history is how to transform a generally boring subject to appeal to 21st century students. The continued use of traditional methods in teaching history by lecturers emphasizes recitation and narration. This makes student inactive. In this paper, we propose a model for teaching history using emerging technologies in ways that stimulate learners’ interest and draw on historical contexts. Following the four stages of design-based research methodology, two iterations were designed and examined where pre-service teachers (C21st students) used multimodal affordances of emerging technologies (modern tool) to interrogate historical facts (history) in creative and engaging manner. The findings suggest that design principles and guidelines have potential to help students and teachers to restore interest in history teaching and learning while simultaneously guiding and interpreting the human past. A major outcome of this research was the development of five major design principles and guidelines for teaching history in ways that C21st students learn - connecting with the present, appreciating heritage, dialogue in history, doing history and validating history.