I think many of us have heard this statement before, “History repeats itself”,  used as a causal explanation, as a set up for some form of comparison, or to legitimize futurists’ predictions.  This tidbit of conventional wisdom is excusable when uttered by non-history educators. When promoted in a history classroom, however, claims of historical repetition establishes a paradigm defined by inevitability, oversimplification, cycloptic perspectives, and limited agency.  Granted, we all use

mental frameworks and imaginings to categorize the world and engage the past. I am reminded of the ill-fated patient with Korsakoff Syndrome  in   Oliver  Sacks’ The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat  forced to constantly recreate an understandable past in order to exist in the present.  But reliance on a schema of historical re-occurrence limits analytical, nuanced, and contextual understanding of the past.

At its core, history is the narration of change over time.  I recall a professor of mine demystifying the work of Michel Foucault with a metacognitive strategy usable with almost any historical work. To paraphrase professor Tim Brownat Northeastern University, understanding the genealogy of an idea involves identifying its manifestation in the past, defining its existence at a latter date and then explaining how those changes happened.  This approach helps understand and explore historical explanation. Moreover being able to recognize, describe, and analyze “change over time” is an ability promoted by multiple organizations devoted to History Thinking Skills in history education.  Three of those organizations are highlighted below:

• Historical Thinking Project : “Students sometimes misunderstand history as a list of events. Once they start to understand history as a complex mix of continuity and change, they reach a fundamentally different sense of the past.”
• The College Board: “Historical thinking involves the ability to recognize, analyze and evaluate the dynamics of historical continuity and change over periods of time of varying lengths, as well as relating these patterns to larger historical processes or themes.”
• American Historical Association: “Students readily acknowledge that we employ and struggle with technologies unavailable to our forebears, that we live by different laws, and that we enjoy different cultural pursuits. Moreover, students also note that some aspects of life remain the same across time… Continuity thus comprises an integral part of the idea of change over time.

In his book Thinking Historically: Educating Students for the 21st Century,  professor Stephane Levesque argues “If history is, by definition, concerned with the study of historical change, it is reasonable to assume that continuity and change should be concepts of crucial consideration in school history.”  There are a multitude of ways to teach this historical thinking skill.  I prefer using primary source visuals.  To this end, I consider the “Digital Vaults”online tool, created by the National Archives in Washington D.C., to be a fantastic, effective way to engage students with change over time (and use technology,  literacy skills, and student generated knowledge). With minimal practice, students and teachers can become proficient with the Digital Vaults application.     Among its features, students can create posters and films to present their “change over time” content and material. I created one of each as instructional models and samples of learning tools. Check them out!

• Change in History Poster

• Change in History Short Film

Combined with the Historical Thinking Project’s Continuity and Change worksheet (found under ‘resources’), these tools are great additions to a teacher’s repertoire and should become an integral part of students’ learning about the past. Building off of what Mark Twain may have said, “History does not repeat itself, but it does rhyme”, students can better provide the “reasons” for continuity and change. This fosters critical thinking skills and a paradigm of history that is a complex, nuanced, and interpretive process about unique events in the past.