Characterising curricular goals for colligations in students’ causal arguments

Journal article

In the ‘historical thinking’ tradition of curriculum design, the philosopher of history W.H. Walsh’s concept of colligation has mostly been adopted to enable students to construct coherent, powerful and usable big pictures of the past. Less attention has been paid to the potential of colligation in enabling students to construct causal arguments at meso- and micro-levels, despite Walsh’s arguments emerging from twentieth-century debates regarding the status of historical explanation. A theory-building case study was conducted with a class of 17- and 18-year-olds at a sixth-form college in England to identify possible curricular goals for colligation in students’ causal arguments at higher resolutions. To characterise the status of disciplinary colligation, analytic philosophies by Walsh and others, as well as authentic historical explanations from one historiography – the Salem witch trials – were analysed by reference to one another. The students’ work suggested that some were capable not only of constructing their own causal colligations, but also of appreciating the disciplinary framework that underpinned those constructions. Curricular goals for historical causal colligation are identified: individuation and historical contextualisation; reification of underlying explanatory models; and clarity regarding colligation’s status in relation to disciplinary and substantive concepts. Finally, recommendations are made to those operating in the historical thinking tradition on how they may achieve more empirical warrant for their claims regarding the essential nature of historical explanation.

Authors: Carroll, JE

• Publication status: Published
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: UCL Press
• Journal: History Education Research Journal
• Volume: 22
• Issue: 1
• Article number: 20
• Publication date: 2025-08-06
• Acceptance date: 2025-06-05
• DOI: 10.14324/herj.22.1.20
• EISSN: 1472-9474
• Language: English
• Keywords: historical thinking; colligation; causation; explanation; history-teacher research