Recognising that traditional approaches to education, and in turn a teaching and learning pedagogy which focus on the triumvirate of predefined knowledge, situationally applied understanding and domain specific skills were no longer appropriate, in 2009 I embarked upon an exploration of the myriad effects of an engagement with a pedagogy designed…

This article explores an underlying tension between two understandings of historical consciousness. On one hand, the concept is often perceived as a specific ability to historicize the world and thus appears as a modern cultural achievement. On the other hand, it is also conceptualized as an anthropological universal as the ability to make sense…

Debates over which historical content should be compulsory for study in the school curriculum are a common feature of education systems across the globe. These debates invariably weigh the perceived benefits to social cohesion of a 'common core' of knowledge against the perceived risks to democracy of government-sanctioned 'official knowledge'.…

The stimulus for this article came from two developmental tasks that Barbara Trapani was set during the course of her initial teacher education programme: planning her first historical enquiry and bringing the work of an historian into the classroom. Trapani chose to tackle the two tasks together, using Susan Whitfield's accounts -- both of…

Using research from two eleventh-grade U.S. history classrooms in the San Francisco area, this article examines how students draw on their lived experiences to create historical meanings. Specifically, a three-day lesson on "Mendez v. Westminster" was used as part of a curricular intervention to explore the following question: How do…

Tom Bennett begins his article with a tale of a frustrating afternoon with Year 7. We've all been there. In his case, his frustration was caused by his finding a conceptual gap between how well his class wanted to do and the actual quality of their causal thinking. Bennett decided to use counterfactuals to improve their thinking. This article…

When planning a Key Stage 3 curriculum with his department, Will Bailey-Watson began to question some of the common sense orthodoxies regarding chronological sequencing and curriculum design. Drawing on pre-existing debates about curricular structuring in the history education community both in England and internationally, Bailey-Watson identified…

Although most teachers adapt curriculum, we know little about teachers' rationales for modifying materials, how these rationales align with actual modifications, nor whether any patterns exist in the modifications that teachers make. This is especially the case in history/social studies, where research on curriculum is scant and research on…

This research explored the extent to which secondary school history teachers in England willingly engaged with a series of concurrent curriculum reforms, and the factors that shaped their level of agency in the process. The curriculum has been the target of sustained reform by many governments, and accountability measures are frequently used to…

This article is an initial exploration of possibilities opened up by considering trust relations as central to the teaching of history in schools. It is an extension of an investigation into epistemological problems to see whether "trust" is a more fruitful concept to use than "truth" in dealing with those problems and is based…

This article examines representations of imperialism, anti-colonial nationalism, and decolonization in US textbooks for American and World History courses between 1930 and 1965. Broadly speaking, 1930s and early 1940s texts lauded imperialism and associated European colonialism with American imperialist activities. Authors extolled the benefits…

Just a few months after the Supreme Court decided in "Brown v. Board of Education" that segregation in public schools was "inherently unequal" and unconstitutional, a principal from a New York City suburb invited students from several southern schools to see an integrated school in action. Principal Willis Thomson of New…

Heather Fearn was intrigued by the factors that might have led her higher-performing students to talk in historically mature ways about unseen sources without any prior knowledge of the topic in hand. She began to wonder if what she was hearing was not best accounted for by a content-free disciplinary aptitude, but rather that it might be the…

Discussions of diversity in American librarianship usually focus on gender or ethnicity, but historical studies also show a lack of diversity in educational and disciplinary backgrounds. Librarians traditionally hail from the humanities, especially English and history. But as current educational attention shifts to science, technology,…

This article introduces Jörn Rüsen's concept of narrative competence as a useful pedagogical framework for operationalizing a remedial narrative tool designed to help make room for Quebec's English-speaking minority in the teaching of school history. Developed through empirical research and representing a schema-like narrative structure, the…