ABSTRACT
American debates over the nature and content of national standards in American and world history demonstrate how volatile the cultural constructions can become. This chapter describes children’s time awareness in a sociocultural framework and linguistic symbol systems to incorporate visual data sources. It focuses on a cross-disciplinary framework, relating social semiotics, as well as film and media theory, to the small body of work on children’s historical/chronological thinking already extant. One of the most important advances in cognitive psychology is the recognition that people think differently about different topics. The recognition has led to a renewed emphasis on the content of thought, and several researchers have investigated the way children use their everyday experience to build their conceptions of the physical, biological and social worlds. The drawbacks of ignoring the socially situated nature of knowledge are particularly apparent in research on historical understanding.
