#457: Understanding History through Data: Inviting and Supporting Student Personal Negotiation of Historical Data

Negotiation is a key practice when engaging with both history and data. Drawing on views of history as interpretative and on critical data literacy frameworks that position data as inherently subjective and personal, we argue that through constructing network visualizations in history class, students may begin to experience these views. To explore this argument, we draw on data from two eighth-grade history classes who created network visualizations representing relationships between social roles across ancient civilizations and their modern-day home state. We conducted qualitative coding of students’ negotiation processes and Interaction Analysis of a case episode to understand students’ negotiation. We found that students engaged in a range of negotiation moves about the validity of data in the network, with implications for helping students to make sense of multiple perspectives in history.