This thesis reports on a case study exploration of primary students’ and teachers’
ideas of historical empathy in terms of their explanations of the choice of practices
made by people in the past. More specifically the study aimed to explore the
explanations of choices of practices used by students’ and teachers’, differences to
these explanations according to the participants’ age and differences to explanations
according to the temporal and cultural distance between the participants and the
people who held the practices in question.
Sixty-three students aged 8 to 12 and five teachers, in a primary school in Nicosia,
Cyprus, participated this study. Each participant completed two pen and paper tasks
that asked them about the choice of a certain healing ceremonies (practices) that
were held by groups in the past and the present. Twenty-six students and four
teachers were also interviewed answering questions about the phenomenon of
differences between past and present behaviour.
Data were analysed primarily qualitatively using an inductive coding process from
which a typology of different types of explanation of the choice practices emerged.
Based on this typology, a progression model of ideas of historical empathy is
suggested. Data analysis also suggests that both the typology and the progression
model have a heuristic value. As it demonstrated in this study the suggested
progression model can also serve diagnostic and pedagogic purposes. Both the
typology and the progression model confirm previous findings about the kind of ideas
of historical empathy students’ and teachers’ use. The study also suggests that there
is a progress by age in terms of the sophistication of ideas used by students and that
teachers usually, but not always, express more sophisticated ideas than their
students. Finally, the study suggests that while temporal distance affects students’
explanations the same does not apply in the case of cultural distance when they
explain the choice of practices in the past.