Ask what else was happening that year

Contextualisation fails in a specific way: students can possess the background knowledge yet never activate it while reading. Wineburg (2007) argues that this kind of thinking is unnatural: reading a document as its first readers did goes against how we ordinarily think, so it has to be deliberately cultivated, and revising period facts alone will not do it. (Manning's contextualisation-skill-builder skill targets exactly this gap.) The fix is a routine question asked at the moment of reading, not before it: what else was happening when this was written, and how does that change what these words meant to writer and readers?

In practice

• Make 'what else was true at the time?' a standing question on every document task, answered in writing before interpretation begins.
• Give the date and place, then ask students to list three things the author would have known, feared or assumed, before reading a word.
• Catch anachronism out loud: when a student judges a 1900 writer by 2026 knowledge, name the move and ask what the writer could actually have known.
• Distinguish the two failures: missing knowledge needs teaching, unused knowledge needs prompting. Only the second is a contextualisation problem.