Organic historical reasoning: an exploration of how non-specialist students can connect, through historical and archaeological artefacts, with the people who made and used them

This chapter draws on a study (Moore, 2019) which explored valid ways in which non-specialist trainee primary school teachers used material culture artefacts to make connections with people who lived in the past. It considered the problems caused by the concept of historical empathy and constructed a new concept, Organic Historical Reasoning, as the natural process by which students make such connections. The study first constructed a model of this concept based on recent literature, then undertook a process of research into student responses to material culture artefacts and finally related the model based on the literature review to the model derived from empirical research to posit the new concept. This chapter discusses the literature related to understanding people in the past through material culture artefacts, supported by some examples of how it is reflected in the empirical research.