Contextualisation Skill Builder

Build students' capacity to place historical documents in their temporal and social context.

Context cost
7.6k tokensestimated from the bundle, loaded when it triggers
Bundle
1 file · 30.4 kBtext throughout, nothing executable
Licence
not declarednone named by its author
Last change
—v1.0
Servers it uses
Noneruns standalone

What it does

Build students' capacity to place historical documents in their temporal and social context. Use when students read sources without considering what was happening at the time, or know the context but don't deploy it.

What this skill changes about the agent has not been set out here as a list. Its SKILL.md, shown below, says it in the author’s own words.

chronological-reasoningcontextualisationdigdisciplinary-literacydocument-analysisdocumentationhistorical-thinking

The skill itself

A skill is instructions the model reads, so you can see what you are getting: below is the start of its SKILL.md. The front matter loads with every session, the body loads when the skill triggers, and the whole file comes with the install.

SKILL.md30.4 kB · preview
--- # AGENT SKILLS STANDARD FIELDS (v2) name: contextualisation-skill-builder disable-model-invocation: false user-invocable: true effort: medium # EXISTING FIELDS skill_id: "historical-thinking/contextualisation-skill-builder" skill_name: "Contextualisation Skill Builder" domain: "historical-thinking" version: "1.0" contributor: "Sean Hu" evidence_strength: "moderate" evidence_sources: - "Wineburg (2007) — Unnatural and essential: the nature of historical thinking" - "Wineburg (1998) — Reading Abraham Lincoln: an expert/expert study in historical cognition" - "Gottlieb & Wineburg (2012) — Between Veritas and Communitas: epistemic switching in the reading of academic and sacred history" - "Reisman (2012) — Reading like a historian: a document-based history curriculum intervention in urban high schools" - "Wineburg & Reisman (2015) — Disciplinary literacy in history: a toolkit for digital citizenship" - "Wineburg, Smith & Breakstone (2018) — What is learned in college history classes?" input_schema: required: - field: "historical_topic" type: "string" - field: "student_level" type: "string" - field: "current_challenge" type: "string" optional: - field: "source_type" type: "string" - field: "available_documents" type: "string" - field: "background_knowledge" type: "string" - field: "curriculum_framework" type: "string" - field: "prior_instruction" type: "string" output_schema: type: "object" fields: - field: "contextualisation_progression" type: "object" - field: "explicit_instruction_sequence" type: "object" - field: "contextualisation_prompts" type: "array" - field: "common_failure_patterns" type: "array" - field: "assessment_indicators" type: "object" chains_well_with: - "sourcing-skill-builder" - "close-reading-skill-builder" - "corroboration-skill-builder" - "historical-thinking-strategy-modelling-guide" - "document-based-lesson-designer" - "historical-thinking-assessment-designer" - "lesson-opening-designer" teacher_time: "4 minutes" tags: ["contextualisation", "historical-thinking", "disciplinary-literacy", "document-analysis", "chronological-reasoning", "DIG"] ---
80# Contextualisation Skill Builder
81
82## What This Skill Does
83
84Designs targeted instruction to develop students' contextualisation practice — reasoning about how the temporal, spatial, and social circumstances of a document's creation shape its content, meaning, and reliability. The output includes a developmental progression, an explicit instruction sequence adapted for contextualisation's greater complexity, prompts that guide students to connect documents to their historical moment, common failure patterns, and assessment indicators.
85
86Contextualisation is qualitatively different from sourcing and close reading, and harder to teach. Reisman (2012) found significant treatment effects for sourcing and close reading but not for contextualisation (or corroboration) in her six-month intervention. She attributed this to contextualisation's abstractness: while sourcing involves a discrete action (look at the source note) and close reading involves attention to concrete textual features (word choice), contextualisation requires an inferential leap — connecting a document to circumstances that are NOT in the document itself. The reader must bring external knowledge to the text and use it to transform the text's meaning. This means contextualisation depends on two things that the other skills do not: possession of relevant background knowledge AND the disposition to activate it during reading.
87
88Wineburg (2007) demonstrated this double requirement through the Harrison Proclamation example. A student and primary school teachers all possessed knowledge about 1890s immigration trends — immigration is taught repeatedly in the US curriculum. But when they read Harrison's 1892 Columbus Day proclamation, that knowledge was not activated. The Columbus node overwhelmed it. Doctoral students in history, by contrast, connected the document to its 1892 context within seconds — not because they knew more about Columbus but because they had the disciplinary disposition to ask "what was happening in 1892 that would make this document necessary?" This is what Wineburg called the difference between knowledge possessed and knowledge deployed.
89
90This skill is rated "moderate" rather than "strong" for evidence strength because, while the research clearly demonstrates that contextualisation is a core component of expert historical reading, the evidence for how to teach it effectively is thinner than for sourcing. Reisman (2012) suggested that contextualisation may require more whole-class discussion and more explicit modelling of the inferential connection between context and document — but this was a post-hoc explanation for null findings, not a tested instructional design.
91
92## Evidence Foundation
93
94Wineburg (2007) provided the clearest demonstration of what contextualisation looks like in practice. Confronted with Harrison's 1892 proclamation about Columbus, doctoral student Matt's response was: "Okay it's 1892... Benjamin Harrison. The 1890s, the beginning of the Progressive Era, end of the century, closing of the frontier, Frederick Jackson Turner, you've got the Columbian Exposition coming up the following year. Biggest wave of immigration in US history. That's it." In under a minute, Matt had connected the document to five distinct contextual reference points and arrived at a hypothesis: the proclamation was about immigration politics, not about Columbus. A 17-year-old student reading the same document spent his time evaluating Columbus's character. Both readers engaged seriously with the document; only one contextualised it.
95
96Gottlieb and Wineburg (2012) found that historians used contextualisation significantly more than non-historians (Z = 2.84, p = .005), and that the qualitative character of their contextualisation was different. Non-historians could sense something was wrong with a document (Reverend I noticed everyone in a Thanksgiving picture "looks clean and well fed") but lacked the specific knowledge to articulate why. Historians deployed factual corrections and disciplinary concepts like anachronism. Six of eight historians read Washington's Thanksgiving Proclamation as evidence of Enlightenment deism, while all eight clergy and scientists read the same language as proof of religious piety. This demonstrates that contextualisation does not merely add background information — it transforms meaning.
97
98Wineburg and Reisman (2015) argued that contextualisation is constitutive of comprehension, not supplementary to it: "For the novice reader, the available information begins and ends with the text. For historical readers, the text becomes a portal to another time." They criticised Common Core implementations that reduced historical documents to "informational texts" and instructed teachers to avoid contextual questions as "non text-dependent." Separating Lincoln's Gettysburg Address from the Civil War, they argued, renders the words meaningless.
This is a preview of SKILL.md. Download or install the skill to get the whole thing.
In the file
SKILL.md4,248 words
Files1
Licencenot declared
Why you can read it

Nothing in a skill executes. The client loads the text and the model follows it, so a skill can be audited the way a runbook is — by reading it.

What it costs in context

Skills are not billed by the call. They are paid for in context: every token the instructions occupy is a token your code, your diff and your conversation cannot use. Here is what this one takes and when it takes it.

≈1,110
always loaded
The name and description, so the model knows the skill exists and when to reach for it.
6,490
on trigger
The instruction body, read only when the skill fires.
3.8%
of a 200k window
Ten skills this size would take about 38% of the window before you open a file.
050k100k150k200k context window

7.6k tokens, estimated from the bundle at four bytes to the token, held for the rest of the session once it triggers. Heavy. Teams tend to install this one per project rather than globally, and load it only when the job comes up.

Servers bill, skills cost

A server charges by the month. A skill charges once per session, in context, and then keeps charging it for as long as the session lives.

Before and after

The same question, put to the same model twice: once as it comes, and once with these instructions loaded.

No worked example has been published for this skill yet.

The procedure it runs

The procedure has not been set out here step by step. It is in the body of its SKILL.md: the start of it is shown above, and the whole file comes with the install.

Prose, not code

These steps are written for a model to follow, not executed by a runtime. It can still be told to skip one, and it will say so when it does.

Servers it uses

None. This skill calls no MCP servers at all.

Everything it needs is in the instructions, so it works in a project with nothing connected — the model reads the file and changes how it works with what it can already reach.

Its SKILL.md does not declare which tools it asks the agent for, so what it touches is whatever the instructions themselves ask for — read them before you install it.

What it asks for
Writes filesnot declared
Network accessnot declared

This SKILL.md carries no allowed-tools line, so neither is declared. A skill grants no permissions of its own — it can only ask for tools your client already has.

What it will not do

Every skill is narrow, and the useful ones say where they stop. These are the jobs this one is the wrong tool for.

What this skill is not for has not been published here. Nothing is implied by that: it is a section the author has not filled in.

What is in the bundle

1 file, 30.4 kB on disk. A bundle is text throughout: the instructions the model reads, plus the templates it fills in.

  • SKILL.md30.4 kB
What is not in it

No dependencies and nothing executable: a skill is text the agent reads, so the bundle is 1 file you can review in full before installing.

Install

Installing copies the bundle into your project. Nothing runs at install time — the files sit on disk until the model reads them.

# Contextualisation Skill Builder · 7.6k tokens when loaded · macOS, Linux mkdir -p .claude/skills && t=$(mktemp -d) && curl -fsSL -o "$t/bundle.tar.gz" https://mcprush.com/api/skills/contextualisation-skill-builder/bundle.tar.gz && tar -xzf "$t/bundle.tar.gz" -C "$t" && [ -d "$t/contextualisation-skill-builder" ] && { [ ! -e .claude/skills/contextualisation-skill-builder ] || { mv .claude/skills/contextualisation-skill-builder "$t/.previous" && echo "Previous copy moved to $t/.previous"; }; } && mv "$t/contextualisation-skill-builder" .claude/skills/ && echo "Installed .claude/skills/contextualisation-skill-builder"
On Windows, or any OS with Node 20+
npx mcprush@latest skill add garethmanning/contextualisation-skill-builder

Windows PowerShell says 'running scripts is disabled on this system'? Run Set-ExecutionPolicy -Scope CurrentUser RemoteSigned once, or type npx.cmd instead of npx (codex.cmd, gemini.cmd, grok.cmd likewise). PowerShell 7 needs neither. Writes to .claude/skills/contextualisation-skill-builder/ in the current project. For every project instead, run mkdir -p ~/.claude/skills && t=$(mktemp -d) && curl -fsSL -o "$t/bundle.tar.gz" https://mcprush.com/api/skills/contextualisation-skill-builder/bundle.tar.gz && tar -xzf "$t/bundle.tar.gz" -C "$t" && [ -d "$t/contextualisation-skill-builder" ] && { [ ! -e ~/.claude/skills/contextualisation-skill-builder ] || { mv ~/.claude/skills/contextualisation-skill-builder "$t/.previous" && echo "Previous copy moved to $t/.previous"; }; } && mv "$t/contextualisation-skill-builder" ~/.claude/skills/ && echo "Installed ~/.claude/skills/contextualisation-skill-builder" (macOS, Linux) — or add --global to the npx line. The curl line replaces .claude/skills/contextualisation-skill-builder/ only after the download succeeds, so files left there by another skill of the same name, or by an older release, do not mix in. A copy already there is moved aside, not deleted, and the line prints where.

Which clients pick it up on their own

A skill is a folder of text. Most of these read a skills folder and pick it up without being told; the rest take the same folder another way — an upload in the app, a parameter on an API call — and then choose it by its description just the same.

Claude Code.claude/skills/
Claude DesktopCustomize › Skills
ChatGPTSkills › Create › Upload
Cursor.cursor/skills/
VS Code.github/skills/
Codex CLI.agents/skills/
Gemini CLI.gemini/skills/
Grok Build.grok/skills/
Microsoft CopilotSkills › Upload a skill
PerplexityComputer › Skills › Upload a skill
DeepSeek Harness.dsh/skills/
Zed.agents/skills/
Devin Desktop.devin/skills/
Windsurf (legacy).windsurf/skills/
OpenAI Agents SDKInstructions or sandbox Skills
HTTP / APIa request parameter
This release
Version1.0
Publishedno release date on file
PriceFree
Referencegarethmanning/contextualisation-skill-builder

Versions

v1.0 is what is on the shelf; no release here carries a date. Instructions change more often than APIs do — a skill can be rewritten entirely without anything it depends on moving.

v1.0
  • No earlier releases have been published to the marketplace.
Pinning

The install command always fetches the release that is current the day you run it — v1.0 today — and cannot ask for an earlier one. The copy on your disk does not change until you run it again.

Reviews

—no reviews yet

Nobody has reviewed this skill yet. The rating is the mean of the reviews written here, so there is none until somebody writes the first.

Sign in to review it

A review is tied to an account so it can be answered, edited and taken down by the person who wrote it.

Sign in
Who can post

Anybody with an account, one review each. It carries the version that was current when you wrote it, and the publisher may reply once.

Publisher
Servers0
Claim this skill