| Summary: | If history and social studies instruction helps to create "imagined communities," then
presumably it also creates images of the ways in which communities have formed, now
function, and will continue to evolve. Questions about the ways that people imagine their
capacities and contribute (agency) to how communities change through time (social
change), thus, lie at the very heart of history and social studies instruction. Yet, to what
degree or in what ways teachers engage students in such questions is insufficiently
addressed in the history and social studies education research literature.
This study begins with a review of this literature. I conclude that students cite an
"American middle-class conception" of agency, casting celebrated individuals as the
cause of social change in a light that fails to illuminate the complexities of human
subjectivity and the multiple sources of social change. I continue with a theoretical
investigation of historical agency as a more distributed and fractious capacity. I create a
"sensitizing framework" from recent work in historiography and sociology offering a
range of interpretations of the ways that social conditions and individual and group
intentions and actions intersect to affect social change. In the empirical portion of this
study, I use the "sensitizing framework," observations, and individual interviews to
explore four high school history teachers' interpretations of historical agency and change
in their teaching and thought. The framework serves as an effective heuristic device
aiding participants' reflection on their practice and clarifying the disjunctures and
complexities of their interpretations. I conclude that a similar exploration by teachers
with students will enhance both the complexity of their historical explanations of social
change and reflection on their variegated capacities as agents of social life. === Education, Faculty of === Curriculum and Pedagogy (EDCP), Department of === Graduate
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