Positive LGBT+ content in educational materials promotes a diverse and inclusive school environment for all students, particularly LGBT+. However, worldwide evidence shows that textbooks underrepresent LGBT+ issue. A possible explanation for this pattern is that most study topics do not lend themselves for issues related to sexuality and gender.…

This article examines two key practices in shaping Holocaust remembrance: Educational trips to Poland for Israeli youth and Holocaust films. Both educational tour guides and cinematic directors face challenges in representing trauma, navigating between historical realism and fragmented, implicit representations that reflect the post-traumatic…

Sound is one of the most commonly used physical phenomena that most of us use without considering its nature. Moreover, students often face difficulties in understanding acoustic phenomena, the most frequent one of which is the substance-based view of sound instead of a process of pressure and density differences. The current study introduces…

This paper examines two research questions: How do teachers refer to historical figures when teaching difficult past events? Which approaches to teaching difficult past events are reflected in teachers' ways of talking about historical figures? The paper is based on an analysis of lessons by three 11th grade history teachers in Israel on the…

Teachers of history will sooner or later encounter issues that are met with disbelief, protest, or feelings of discomfort by the pupils. This special issue aims to contribute to the field of research into teaching sensitive and controversial issues in history by integrating historical, educational and socio-psychological perspectives and theories.…

In spite of the importance of the topic, there are few comparative studies of the aims of history teaching, even in Europe. Domain-specific epistemic beliefs are relevant for understanding the teaching and learning of history and the development of deliberative thought. We studied epistemic beliefs in the context of the general aims of history…

In this article, we examined how high school teachers talked about people in history lessons and how they engaged in or shunned multiperspectivity aspects as they talked about people who lived in the past. Based on an analysis of 40 hours of observations of 5 different classes in 3 Jewish high schools in Israel according to the…

"After the death of the last witnesses the memory of the Holocaust must not be left to historians alone, now is the time for works of art" Aharon Appelfeld. This study focuses on the role and contribution of monuments to educating about Holocaust commemoration in Israel. Holocaust monuments are located throughout Israel, from north to…

This study explores the silencing and voicing of sensitive topics in history education from a cross-national and multilevel perspective. In this mixed-method study, we undertook a quantitative analysis of a 'teaching sensitive issues' questionnaire and qualitative analyses of history curricula and teachers' verbal responses. The findings show that…

The present study is about sensitive issues in history teaching that have probably been experienced by most teachers in the field. We conducted a questionnaire study in Austria, Belarus, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Israel, Italy, Serbia and The Netherlands to assess which issues were experienced as sensitive in class, what the reasons were…

There is an increased interest within the history education community in introducing students to the multi-perspective and interpretative nature of history. When these educational goals are pursued within collaborative contexts, what are the relationships of individuals from conflicting groups with historical accounts that they produced as a…

Interfaith education appears to have a strong potential for prejudice reduction and for overcoming Islamophobia and antisemitism. Common in-group identity theory contends that awareness of interreligious similarities would reduce intergroup streotypes and anxiety. However, optimal distinctiveness theory assumes that pointing to similarities would…

We examined the response of high school students in Israel to biographical texts. Students were exposed to three sub-genres of biographical texts (a literary-biographical text, an autobiographical text and a scientific-biographical text). These texts all differ from the conceptual schema of ordinary school texts. The data were collected from 64…

In recent years, a number of studies have explored the link between Zionism and the latent racism prevalent in Israeli society. As a result of these studies, it has become clear that successive generations of Israeli citizens (and non-citizens) are exposed to a single historical and cultural narrative. Such a narrative is intentionally designed to…

This study examines changes to Jewish day school students' narratives of the history of Israel after a two-and-a-half-week trip there. Seventeen students were interviewed about the history of Israel before and after the trip. Before the trip, most students' accounts lacked logical connections among the different events. The observations on the…