In the third decade of the 21st century, the limitation of information has been replaced by the difficulty of selecting freely available information. Useful and irrelevant knowledge is available in enormous quantities on the online storage of increasingly growing server capacities. The world of education and history didactics are no exception…

Purpose: This article considers the impact of competing knowledge structures in teaching Australian Indigenous history to undergraduate university students and the possibilities of collaborative teaching in this space. Design/methodology/approach: The authors, one Aboriginal and one non-Aboriginal, draw on a history of collaborative teaching that…

Research suggests young people generally do not perceive History to be a subject that is relevant to their lives and futures. Across the world, history curriculum policy regularly attracts public debate but, as it is usually dominated by political rhetoric, the students who experience it remain overlooked as policy actors with valuable…

Historical significance continues to be the forgotten element of history education. Without student capacity to establish what they think is important, or why they would care about certain events and people from the past, students will continue to be disinterested in the study of history. This paper draws on the results of a three-year study aimed…

This article explores how recent curricular reform in Australia has been responsive to a culture of redress. It argues that taken together, the 2008 National Apology to the Stolen Generations and the 2010 national curriculum reform marked a turning point, whereby settler colonial injustices have since been systematically included in the…

Design education in Australia is still largely dominated by Westphalian perspectives, values, histories and ways of learning. The focus on Euro-western aesthetics, technologies, timelines and processes marginalises other identities, cultures and places. This signals to students that they should internalise, value and master dominant narratives,…

In this article, two autoethnographies from Australia and New Zealand provide a means of engaging students in difficult histories of colonial nations. The first looks to knowledge as a basis of understanding others, and the second focuses on concepts of empathy and vulnerability as a way of understanding difficult histories. Each of these…

Existing research on history education's role in agendas of transitional justice is focused on societies undertaking regime change or rebuilding after extensive conflict and often centres disciplinary competencies as part of educational reform objectives to support political transition. However, the orientation towards transitional justice in…

Purpose: This essay engages with scholarship on history as a discipline, curriculum documents and academic and public commentary on the teaching of history in Australian, British and Canadian secondary contexts to better understand the influence of the tension between political pressure and disciplinary practice that drives the history wars in…

Australian Holocaust museums are at a crossroads regarding their exhibitions and educational programming. Originally survivor driven initiatives, they now face the dual challenge of negotiating the loss of the survivor generation and interpreting the goals of Holocaust education in light of their absence. To do so, they must confront the question…

Background: This paper outlines the findings of a sociocultural study that examined how digital contexts shape historical thinking. It was assumed that the tools used to engage with historical information mediate thinking, and that when evaluating historical information online, participants would draw upon heuristics associated with Historical…

Research indicates that effective learner-centred feedback requires learner agency, impact and sensemaking. While scholars are focusing on supporting agency and impact, limited research has addressed sensemaking. This is problematic, because if learners fail to understand feedback, impact is likely to be reduced. In response, this study examines…

Learning History in upper primary requires the development of at least two key skills: historical perspective and historical empathy. Picture books might offer one approach to supporting the development of these skills with these children. Informational Picture Books (IPB) indicate positive results linking the use of the IPB with improved critical…

The paper critiques the curriculum construction of historical consciousness within Australian school systems. National and trans-national discourses about identity, culture, gender, race and class influence the development of historical consciousness in Australian classrooms. During this unprecedented period of shared grief and global trauma,…

The paper presents an evaluation of History and Korean Studies WIL internships at Monash University Library, focusing on past students' views of the program in relation to their future career, and past host-supervisors' perceptions of its benefits. Data collection for the qualitative research was conducted through semi-structured interviews with…