In 2022, New Zealand history will shift from an optional to a compulsory subject across all levels of schooling. Teaching about New Zealand's difficult histories has the potential to reconstitute settler-Indigenous relations to show how historical colonial injustice impacts people today, but it raises questions about whose history will be…

A pragmatic response to the government announcement that New Zealand histories will be taught in all schools by 2022 are the questions of what should be taught, and how? I argue that iwi and hapu must be at the forefront of conversations. This article looks critically at how Janene, a Pakeha museum educator, taught Year 13 history students about…

This article examines a particular incident in the Waikato wars, 1863-4 and its relevance to the newly mandated New Zealand History curriculum. The new curriculum will for the first time make the teaching of local history compulsory in years 1-10. I examine the wide variety of submissions about the content of this curriculum. As the Royal…

This article sets out to challenge conventional descriptions and explanations of war and teaching about war. It draws on raw data from three qualitative arts-based projects to illustrate the complexity of cognitive and affective understandings of the place of war, past, present and future, through the jarring dissonance of "mash-up"--a…

This article contributes to discussions surrounding the development of 'analytical tools' sensitive to the fluid nature of collective memory and all its 'varieties, contradictions, and dynamism' (Olick, 2008: 159). It explores the methodological challenges of investigating how young people in New Zealand and the United Kingdom negotiate processes…

This article shares insights from a survey of primary school teachers across the Manawatu-Whanganui region about history teaching at Years 1 to 6. By focusing on the voices of primary teachers, the article aims to fill a gap in public debates about the new Aotearoa New Zealand's histories curriculum so far outweighed by the viewpoints of policy…

As the commemorations of the 100th anniversary of World War 1 draw to a close, it is timely to reflect on what we have learnt about that time in our history. This study used the "New Zealand School Journal" as a data source to investigate what school children were learning about the war at the time. In this article, we discuss the overt…

This article explores the concept of historical empathy and how it can foster a greater understanding of a significant episode in New Zealand and Australian history, the 1915 Gallipoli Campaign. It also highlights the potential that the concept holds for encouraging students to participate in civic society. It does this by drawing upon the…

Across the globe, the centenary of World War I has prompted the creation of new exhibitions devoted to its commemoration. In New Zealand, Michael Harcourt wanted to explore whether teaching strategies intended to help students to engage critically with such exhibitions would have any lasting impact on the young people's approach to subsequent…