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Comparative and reflection on history education across national and cultural boundaries has shown that regardless of different traditions of history education, legislative interventions and research, some questions are common to research, debate and development, albeit there are both differences and commonalities in concepts and terminology. One of the common problems is the weighting of the components “knowledge”, “historical consciousness”, and “skills” or “competencies” both as aims of history education and in their curricular interrelation with regard to progression. On the backdrop of a long standing debate around German “chronological” teaching of history, making use of some recent comparative reflections, the article discusses principles for designing non-chronological curricula focusing on sequential elaboration in all three dimensions of history learning.

The ongoing discussion about what constitutes historical consciousness is intensifying within the growing international community of history-education researchers. What started as an exploration of how life outside schools affects our historical thinking has become a key concept for structuring formal education. This shift has largely been positive; however, there are reasons for caution. If practical adaption means outlining, classifying, and measuring levels of achieved awareness, it also presents a risk of losing the initial reason for considering the wider influence on our perceptions and orientations. My reflection in this article concerns this paradox and how it can affect a complementary concept, use of history. Using examples from everyday historical representations in public life, namely song lyrics, the BLM, and Sweden’s approach to Covid 19, I demonstrate why history education requires a broad understanding of historical consciousness and a readiness to work with public uses of history.

The goal of this study was to identify and analyze Reconstruction narratives in Mississippi History textbooks from 1887-1981 and identify themes that helped maintain the existing social structure/ hierarchy. The Reconstruction narratives in these texts created a myth of corrupt Reconstruction that was run by others who were characterized as evil, dishonest, ignorant, outsiders, and greedy. This narrative helped to support the maintenance of the existing social order from post Reconstruction through the 1960s and 1970s. It also provided, or reinforced, intellectual arguments used to resist desegregation during the Civil Rights Era.

The concept of source criticism has long had a central role in Swedish history curricula. In this essay, the concept is analysed in three contexts. First, a growing epistemological discrepancy is identified over time with regard to the ways in which the aim of history teaching and the use of source criticism is set down in school curricula. The aim of teaching history has changed towards a more post-structuralist approach, while the concept of source criticism is still described from a more empiricist, epistemological stance. In a second context, Swedish history textbooks are found to use the concept of source criticism in an empiricist, epistemological way. In a third context, upper secondary pupils seem to be confused, navigating between two incompatible epistemological views of historical knowledge. The essay ends with a discussion on how to convert the use of source criticism - from the strait jacket it seems to put on pupils historical thinking, to the necessary and helpful tool it should be.

In history didactics the concept of historical consciousness has become an important theoretical framework in developing a meaningful history education. One significant aspect of historical consciousness is to give students a “usable past” to orient to possible futures. Previous research has shown that history is important when students think about the future but that their use of history in meaning-making is simplistic and based on present-day-thinking. Much research has focused on advancing students’ ability to use history in orientation to possible futures, but less attention has been focused on contemporary studies and its role in the process of orientation. By introducing a tentative concept, civic consciousness, the issue of students’ orientation is explored by studying students’ perspectives on democracy in past-present-future. The data consists of 142 narratives and reveals a pattern of normative stances, process orientation and action orientation. These aspects are considered to be important components of civic consciousness and these have implications for how social studies educators should address the challenges of preparing students for the future.

In this article we argue for the use of Counterfactual Historical Reasoning (CHR) in history education. Within the discipline of History the use of CHR as a reasoning and research strategy is very controversial. However, different studies show the potential of CHR for achieving the important students' competencies of historical and creative thinking. We show this potential using a CHR assignment that teacher students from the University of Groningen developed for secondary school students in their last year of pre-university education. We conclude that CHR could be used in history education to uncover and undermine assumptions, expand imagination, argue and reason from a historical context, ask historical questions and analyse sources in a very effective way.

This article studies the reconciliatory potential of history education in post-conflict societies. History education today is understood through post-colonial, multiperspectival studies, which in a post-conflict society contribute to reconciliation by fostering critical thinking, being inclusive in regard to different social groups, and recognising the local, vernacular history culture. The article compares three cases of post-conflict history education, derived from Finland, Bosnia-Herzegovina and South Africa. It concludes by considering the nature of feasible teaching processes and the role of different educational actors.