Tackling Causality

Ben Tomlisson, BHP Teacher
Washington, USA

Note: Over the next few months we'll be gradually bringing over some of your favorite articles from the old BHP Teacher Blog. Enjoy this throwback piece, originally posted June 29, 2017.

The Big History Project (BHP) and the World History Project (WHP) are courses that look and feel different from any traditional history course currently out there. Many of us who teach multiple social studies subjects are looking for ways to embed and develop critical historical thinking skills in our students. We want our students to be able to think critically and “outside the box”; they should get better at reading and writing skills; and they should also be able to “think like a historian”. One of the main skills that historians use is that of causation. And as we all know, causation isn’t as easy as it might first appear to be. For example, how do we challenge students to consider multiple causes of an event or process and reach substantive conclusions on the significance of each cause? How do we frame causation questions in BHP and WHP that engage students in the work of a historian: questioning the validity of a cause, considering the role of individuals in causation, and looking at the relationship between causes?

Both BHP and WHP include causation as a historical practice progression. That means that each course has activities that introduce students to causation and as they progress throughout each course, there are activities that help to build upon their causal reasoning skills. The Alphonse the Camel activity (BHP and WHP) is a great way to engage students in “thinking like a historian.” They’re challenged to produce a multicausal explanation that creates a hierarchy of thinking: Which cause was most important? Which was the trigger? What if we scale up and look at long-term factors, like the formation of mountain ranges and trade routes? My students used this approach to build causal diagrams of Alphonse’s death. They also made claims based on the importance of one cause over another: If not for the mountains, Frank, or trade, would Alphonse have survived?

 A one-humped camel, By Jjron, CC BY-SA 3.0.

At the end of this activity, students are keen to know the correct answer, and here is where the counterintuitive nature of our discipline comes in: there isn’t one! There are multiple valuable causal explanations. Although this can be frustrating for students, we can enlist the help of the OER Project’s claim testers to test the validity of their explanations.

The causation practice progression offers explicit opportunities to teach causation, but there are other opportunities for students to learn these skills. For example, in Big History, which uses a sweeping narrative, it’s critical that students understand the thresholds with their ingredients and Goldilocks Conditions. That’s where we have a great vehicle for developing their causation skills. Once they understand the threshold for a particular event, students can begin to analyze these and make their own claims. They can discriminate between the importance of ingredients or look for the most important Goldilocks Condition as the trigger. I encourage students to add new ingredients and Goldilocks Conditions to each threshold and to question the validity of a Goldilocks Condition. Students then begin to see that understanding causation is based on critical and creative thinking, rather than rote learning.

“Do you have an idea regarding causation in BHP or WHP? Do you have a particular technique that you use to help students understand this skill? Feel free to share them in the OER Project Community.


About the author: Ben Tomlisson teaches BHP to high school freshmen in Snoqualmie, WA. He also teaches the pilot WHP course to tenth graders, most of whom have taken the BHP course as well. His class sizes range from the high twenties to the low thirties.

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