This article focuses on the controversies surrounding a statue in the Dutch city of Tilburg: the public representation of a nineteenth-century missionary and a kneeling African Surinamese person with leprosy. To understand the current tensions over the statue, the concept of historical consciousness as part of the Dutch changing historical culture…

National canons of history sparked intense debate among historians over the last years, history educators have regularly shown concerns regarding these canons. The main arguments are that history is instrumentalized for political purposes, and that canons are incompatible with multiculturality. In this study, the cases of the Netherlands and…

Amsterdam's National Holocaust Museum is due to open in March 2024. It is the first and only museum to tell the story of the attempt by the Nazis to eradicate Jews from the Netherlands, a history of segregation, persecution, and murder. Yet the story is also one of rescue, survival, and solidarity. One of the museum's main goals is to engage…

PCK is seen as the transformation of content knowledge and pedagogical knowledge into a different type of knowledge that is used to develop and carry out teaching strategies. To gain more insight into the extent to which PCK is content specific, the PCK about more topics or concepts should be compared. However, researchers have rarely compared…

The Dutch perpetrated in both the Holocaust and chattel slavery. However, Dutch cultural memory does not significantly recognize Dutch perpetration in these sensitive histories. This article explores the interplay between cultural memory and history education as a potential explanation for this oversight, by specifically focusing on the…

The heightened resonance of identity-driven politics in many states across twenty first century Europe emphasizes the critical role of history in shaping public contestation of the idea of the nation, and accordant manifestations of nationalism and national identity. How the past is interpreted or what and how is remembered has proven increasingly…

Historians often present their interpretation of the past in written accounts. In order to gain deeper knowledge of the discipline of history, students must learn how to read and write historical accounts. In this experimental pretest--posttest study, we investigated the impact of a domain-specific reading instruction followed by domain-specific…

Source-based writing is a common but difficult task in history and philosophy. Students are usually taught how to write a good text in language classes. However, it is also important to address discipline-specificity in writing, a topic likely to be taught by content teachers. In order to design discipline-specific writing instruction, research…

Bilingual education has become popular in many countries in the last two decades. It is generally acknowledged that learning a second language (L2) through subject content has a positive impact on students' L2 learning, but there is less agreement on whether this also applies to learning subject content knowledge in and through L2. This…

The ability to apply various reading skills is an important prerequisite to comprehend expository texts commonly found in history textbooks, but it is unclear which specific skills contribute to students' historical content knowledge and historical reasoning abilities. This study used a digital learning environment (DLE) to measure and support…

A course on ethics and history of technology, taught to 1886 first-year engineering students of 14 engineering departments was redesigned using Self-Determination Theory (SDT) by adapting many course elements at the same time. We applied the situational level of Vallerand's hierarchical model, analysing how the elements of this ethics and history…

This case study reports on a history teacher in a multicultural classroom in the Netherlands who is confronted with students' conflicting perspectives on a sensitive topic, namely the Holocaust. We have used Dialogical Self Theory in combination with the historical multiperspectivity framework to make sense of the teacher's considerations and…

Purpose: The key purpose of this paper is to explore how teachers' historical constructions of race and racism may reify whiteness in Dutch classrooms. How has whiteness contributed to how teachers understand and teach race and (historical) racism in white educational spaces in the years 1968-2017? Design/methodology/approach: Interview data are…

Imagining what it was like to live in the past may help secondary school students to understand historical developments and situations. In this case study, the opportunities of a drama task are explored by using a mixed-method approach. In small groups, Dutch 14-15-year-old students examined historical sources and produced a short film clip on…