I Don’t Know, I just Don’t Like History: Historical Understanding of Students With Intellectual Disability
- DOI
- 10.2991/978-2-38476-307-8_3How to use a DOI?
- Keywords
- disabilities; history subject; historical understanding
- Abstract
In 1976, Franz Henkemeier researched the historical understanding of students with disabilities in the setting of German Special School. Henkemeier asked the students questions about why they should learn history. Most informants, aged nine, said history could prevent them from being conspicuous after leaving school. This subject impacts their social and political attributes as they want to be a part of and participate in society. Today, the same question may be revisited in a different or more critical setting: To what extent have the voices of students with disabilities in history learning been heard? In answering the questions, a thorough analysis of the historical understanding of students with disabilities is required. Unfortunately, there is a gap in the study since Henkmeier’s study. Many remarkable studies have been conducted in this area, resulting in the methods and approaches for specific learner characteristics such as learning disabilities, intellectual disability, or deaf people. However, regarding disabilities, the complexities of students’ dis/ability may affect the generalization of those teaching methods. This article reports a study on the historical understanding of students with disabilities in the setting of Indonesian special education. The main question is to what extent the students understand history. A qualitative study was conducted in Secondary Special School Surakarta (SMALB) using a case study approach. Four students with intellectual disabilities were interviewed. The interview started with a fundamental question regarding their knowledge of history. The data were then analyzed to build a holistic data of students’ historical understanding. The findings of the research show that mentally disabled students struggle to understand history as a subject in school, even at the elementary level of understanding. The first impression is that history is unattractive and difficult to learn. They tend to understand in a very personal way and associate history with significant events in their past that are easy to remember. The findings lead to a further question: Should intellectually disabled students learn history?
- Copyright
- © 2024 The Author(s)
- Open Access
- Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.
Cite this article
TY - CONF AU - Nur Fatah Abidin PY - 2024 DA - 2024/11/18 TI - I Don’t Know, I just Don’t Like History: Historical Understanding of Students With Intellectual Disability BT - Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on History, Social Sciences, and Education (ICHSE 2024) PB - Atlantis Press SP - 17 EP - 23 SN - 2352-5398 UR - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-2-38476-307-8_3 DO - 10.2991/978-2-38476-307-8_3 ID - Abidin2024 ER -