미국사의 렌즈로 바라보는 세계사

Seeing World History through the Lens of National History: U.S.Students’ Understanding of World History

In this study, I examined how U.S. middle school students made sense of a variety of topics from world history. For this study, I conducted qualitative, task-based, small group interviews with 66 sixth and seventh grade students. Findings are as follows. First, students often mixed content knowledge from U.S. history into their understanding of world history. Second, students appropriated a narrative theme of ‘progress’—a sociocultural tool for understanding U.S. history—to structure world history knowledge. Finally, strong beliefs in the greatest United States were embedded in students’ world history narratives. Overall, it is found that narratives that served as sociocultural tools in students’ reasoning about U.S. history were found to wield significant influence over their understanding of world history topics. These findings suggest that students’ understandings of world history are contradictory to the purposes of world history education. Therefore, it is important that students are provided a variety of tools, such as historical inquiry, in order to develop more complete and nuanced historical understanding.