Qui bene distinguit, bene docet...

I don't know whether, as the saying goes, 'things which are repeated are pleasing', my belief is that they are significant. Roland Barthes

Despite the assumption of the French philosopher Roland Barthes, it appears that our largely traditional and often inadequate practice and repetition lacks teaching methods or forms of work with regard to the internal structure of the curriculum. This structure, literally translated as a building, a construction, consists of a set of elements that are linked together by logical relationships of identity, similarity, superiority, inferiority or difference. One of the key elements of this construction are historical concepts such as the Treaty, the Triple Alliance, colonialism, nationalism, militarization, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Sarajevo. They all represent categories or classes of things or ideas that share the most important characteristics. Concepts require a series of thought operations on our part because they do not refer to something particular but to what is common to many particulars, as Immanuel Kant once so eloquently put it. Thinking is actually understanding by means of concepts. Metaphorically, they remind us of the nodes of the net we cast over the world (the thematic whole) in order to understand it and to be able to do something active with it, for example, to look for relations between concepts and thus to make generalisations, which are considered to be another important element, along with historical facts, which also constitute a connection. Generalisations, concepts and facts then help us penetrate into the internal structure of the learning content, into the structure of the knowledge to be acquired.

What does it mean in the case of (history) teaching to emphasize the structure of the learning content? According to Jerome Bruner, first of all, to enable pupils to understand the basic concepts - the fundamental ideas - of a thematic unit or subject, because understanding the basic concepts makes the thematic unit, the subject, more comprehensible. Moreover, understanding the fundamental concepts ensures that forgetting is not total. This is aided by procedures that illustrate the learning through mental images. For example, when we select two essential concepts, the Triple Alliance and Treaty, from a set of concepts, facts, events, and personalities of World War I, and represent them with a Venn diagram as a concept and a counter-concept to make them easier to remember. Such a construction then allows us to actively work with the other elements of the two sets in the intersection, which pupils actively distinguish, sort and write into the different sets in the diagram in the writing exercise. At the same time, the visualised intersection of the two sets helps them express the common features (relations) between the concepts the Triple Alliance and Treaty. Similarly, it helps them express the relations of the set of superiority and inferiority between historical-geographical concepts, for example, Bosnia and Herzegovina (1908), Sarajevo (Black Hand, Gavrilo Princip, assassination – pretext for war). Or to use the intersection of multiple sets as a representation of the chronology of World War I.

In addition to these, other mental images can be used to express a description of a phenomenon, event, process, cause, problem, solution, and generalization. These images can appropriately be supplemented with a thesaurus - a 'word treasure' - a teaching method by which the teacher helps pupils to make theoretical points, key concepts, words and especially the main ideas for an oral or written speech or presentation procedure. The above-mentioned methodological means help pupils to actively distinguish, categorise, organise, figuratively speaking tidy up the internal structure of the learning content in question. At the same time, provided that the mental images are preserved, for example in a history portfolio (archive), they become the main means for pupils to help themselves when revising after a longer time. Simultaneously, they also become a material expression of a solution to the serious problem of learning how to learn history, which is closely related to the ability to learn how one learns, or what one uses to help oneself learn. According to Robert Fischer, the creation of mental images helps pupils to better broaden, deepen and refine their understanding of the problem under study. When pupils have a representation of the total set of relationships and elements in front of them, it makes it easier for them to remember and recall the learning. Memory depends heavily on key concepts, words or symbols. If they remember them correctly, they go from short-term to long-term memory. By linking information to pre-existing knowledge networks, they can reach new forms of understanding. If they cannot recognise key concepts and have not established structures of understanding, then pupils' understanding and memory are fragmentary - they have not grasped things, they have not built up a useful mental picture.

In this context, I think it is important to recall the old Latin saying, "He who discerns well, teaches well." This saying, which J. A. Comenius attributed to Socrates, is based on a logical rule and a long-forgotten didactic principle: What you want to explain clearly, you must have well distinguished, sorted, arranged, tidied up. That is to say, to acquire well-ordered knowledge structured and classified into a system (portfolio), because a disconnected series of facts lives woefully short in the memory, as Jerome Bruner aptly stated.

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Author: Viliam Kratochvíl

Sources:

BRUNER, Jerome. 1965. Vzdělávací proces. Praha : Státní pedagogické nakladatelství. 89 p.

BARTHES, Roland. 2001. Mythologies. New York : Farar, Straus and Giroux. 160 p. ISBN 978-0-3745-2150-9

FISCHER, Robert. 1997. Učíme děti myslet a učit se. Praktický průvodce strategiemi vyučování. Praha : Portál. 176 p. ISBN 978-80-262-0043-7

KOMENSKÝ, Jan Amos. 1992. Vševýchova (Pampédia) Bratislava : Obzor. 272 p. ISBN 80-215-0216-9