Public History:A New Attempt Of Participatory History Teaching In Middle Schools

The history curriculum in senior middle schools is a basic course of explaining the developing processes and rules of human history with historical materialism,further cultivating students' historical consciousness,cultural quality and humanistic quality,and then promoting students' all-round development.In the process of its being designed and implemented,it hopefully enables students to play subjective roles in an open teaching environment,changing from passive learning to active learning so as to improve their learning enthusiasm.Thus,students can grasp the abilities to explore historical problems,establish a scientific attitude to seek the truth,and enhance their own creative consciousness and practical competence.Therefore,participatory teaching is an effective way of teaching history in middle schools.At the same time,the development of public history has achieved more attention in recent years.It is not only possible but also promising to introduce public history into history participatory teaching in middle schools.In order to fully discuss the application of public history teaching in history participatory teaching in middle schools,the thesis is divided into five parts.The introduction shows that this selected subject is based on the renewal of current history textbooks and the promotion of the new curriculum reform.Such research methods as literature collection,observation and interview have been employed in this study.The first chapter mainly introduces five historical concepts related to public history,such as public oral history,public image history,public cultural heritage,public historical archives,etc.In addition,it also explains the trend to construct public history discipline in China and the theoretical foundation to apply public history to middle school history teaching.The second chapter mainly arranges interview contents and provides teachers' and students' understanding about current history teaching.Based on this,student's needs are classified into two aspects.One aspect is that students hope to improve their academic performance,broaden their horizons and widely participate in the teaching activities from their own points of view.The other is that teachers are required to improve their teaching levels and enrich teaching contents.The third chapter initially explores how to apply public history to participatory teaching in middle schools,taking the two lessons of "war of resistance against Japan" and "changes in material life and customs as examples.Combined with teaching books and two examples mentioned in chapter three,the fourth chapter illustrates the effectiveness of applying public history to theparticipatory teaching.First,public history can be used as a supplementary material in history teaching.Second,it is beneficial to improve students' enthusiasm and curiosities.Third,it can cultivate students' abilities to explore history.However,there are limitations in the application of public history,such as the neglect of history subjects,the change of teachers' ideas,the excessive socialization of parents' values and the heavy academic tasks of students.All these problems impede the application of public history.In response to the above problems,some proposals have been put forward.One is that schools should create a relaxed teaching environment for teachers and teachers should change traditional teaching methods and ideas.The other is that supplementary materials should be reliable,typical and pertinent.The application of public history in the history teaching of middle school has an immeasurable prospect,so we should study and explore it actively.Also,its limitations should be attached importance,which needs our continuous exploration and improvement in history teaching in the future.