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Defining Moments
All of history begins with moments in time and the impact those moments has upon people. History is really nothing more than a series of cause and effect relationships that exist between human beings and their environments. History is a continuous creation most often gone unnoticed until an event takes place that significantly impacts a large number of people in a short span of time. Those events become fixed as defining moments.
It is not so much the events that happen, but the response to those events by people that causes the event to become a defining moment. It is the human response to all events that gives history life. Without the human element, history is meaningless.
Too often, the history taught in our schools lacks the pulse of human involvement. Too often, our young people are presented information about past events that centers only on dates and names of events, places, and people long dead with no effort made to help the student experience the human emotion and reaction brought about by those events. Without that living, breathing element, history is nothing but dry bones.
The heart of history is the "story." The challenge for educators is to help the students find the story behind the historical event, and to find the reason why some events have become defining moments and others have not.
What stories have not been preserved? How does the lack of those perspectives change what is considered a defining moment? What events do your students consider to be significant and why?
To help our students realize that there have been events in the world’s past and our nation’s past that are recognized as important to our development as a society, we must first help our students understand the concept of a defining moment in their own lives, the lives of those who influence them daily, and the lives of those in their communities and regions.
Learning Concepts
* Students must understand that history is simply the collection of human stories.
* The stories of many people about a particular time or place or event, when viewed as a whole, create an understanding of how events impact human lives significantly enough to be generalized as defining moments.
* Students will desire to learn when they begin to make cognitive connections between their own stories (experiences) and those of society, small and large.
* Exploring history thematically helps students understand the dynamics involved.
*The deliberate study of local events and the people involved help students create a knowledge base upon which broader understanding is processed.
* Discovery as to the how and why a relationship exists between the student and his or her environment (physical or social) begins with stories of here and now.
* The amount of history a student learns will increase through personal discovery.
Performance and Content Standards Addressed:
SS2: continuity and change in the history of Missouri, the United States, and the world
CA4: writing formally and informally
CA6: participating in formal and informal presentations and discussions of issues and ideas
G1.3: design and conduct field investigations to study society
G1.6: discover and evaluate patterns and relationships in information, ideas, and structures
G1.8: organize data, information, and ideas into useful forms for analysis and presentation
G3.5: reason inductively from a set of facts and deductively from general premises
G4.1: explain reasoning and identify information used to support decisions