We believe historical empathy is best cultivated through historical thinking skills like contextualization, recognizing multiple historical perspectives and causation. Mission US fosters the development of these skills by providing students the opportunity to engage with historical figures to better understand and contextualize their lived experiences, decisions, and actions. The specific historical and social context of each place and time is revealed through the consequences of the choices students make while playing the mission.
Contextualization is the process of understanding and interpreting historical events, ideas, or people within the context of their time and place. Contextualization helps us understand the complexity of the past and how events, ideas, and people are shaped by a variety of factors such as social, economic, political, and cultural forces.
Causation refers to the cause and effect relationship between multiple events, conditions, or decisions in history. When students practice analyzing causation, they begin to recognize the inherent complexity of the past, because historical events are almost always the result of multiple causes. When students practice weighing the relative influence of multiple causes on historical events and people, they develop a deeper understanding of the complexity of their world today as well as their own agency in impacting the events in their lives.
When we remind students that in the past (just as today) people filtered their experiences through different motives, biases, beliefs, aspirations, and fears, we can help them understand the necessity of analyzing multiple perspectives on a particular historical event in order to understand what happened and why. Seeking multiple perspectives, crucially, gives voice to marginalized people whose perspectives are not reflected in “official” accounts. By asking students to look beyond single sources, especially history textbooks, we can help them find relevance to their lives in history and better equip them to understand and act in today’s complex world.
Now, watch this video walkthrough of Mission US: “Prisoner in My Homeland” which explores the choices and challenges faced by more than 120,000 Japanese Americans as they coped with their unjust incarceration during World War II.
| Keyboard Shortcut | Action |
|---|---|
| Space | Pause/Play video playback |
| Enter | Pause/Play video playback |
| m | Mute/Unmute video volume |
| Up and Down arrows | Increase and decrease volume by 10% |
| Right and Left arrows | Seek forward or backward by 5 seconds |
| 0-9 | Fast seek to x% of the video. |
| f | Enter or exit fullscreen. (Note: To exit fullscreen in flash press the Esc key. |
| c | Press c to toggle captions on or off |