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Growing polarization in European societies has changed not only political landscapes but also public debates about the past, which has, in turn, had an impact on the way history is taught and talked about in schools. This article explores how these trends are experienced by history educators across Europe and asks which issues history educators perceive to be controversial and sensitive and how they approach the prejudices they frequently encounter when addressing controversial and sensitive issues. Based on focus group discussions with 33 participants from 25 European countries, the article identifies three different forms of prejudice and describes how the focus group participants tried to undermine nationalism, counter xenophobia and fight anti-Semitism. Interpreted from a practice theory perspective, the examples shared by the focus group participants indicate that teaching strategies from the disciplinary approach "toolbox" can help to undermine nationalist stereotypical thinking if they are fine-tuned to the interests and emotions of the learning group and that history teaching routines shaped by the disciplinary approach need to be interrupted on occasion in order to reflect on and deconstruct xenophobic or anti-Semitic prejudice. Overall, the article argues that history teachers need to be aware of the affective dimension of historical learning, including underlying or open prejudices held by students, in order to support the teaching of democratic education goals such as respect and openness to cultural otherness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This mixed-methods study explored the factors secondary history teachers use to determine historical content for their classrooms and the degree of perceived control in decision-making. Through a survey (N = 260) and follow-up interviews (n = 23), we found that secondary history teachers in the United States ranked historical significance most highly in their curricular decision-making, but the extent to which teachers felt they were able to exert control over curricular decisions was influenced by required assessments and other contextual factors. Nevertheless, many teachers also prioritized student interest and relevance when choosing historical content. Interviews revealed complexity in teachers' thinking and additional context-specific (dis)incentives (e.g., fear of controversy) regarding curricular choices. Implications for teacher education and policy are emphasized. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Teachers' beliefs about skills play a significant role in how they teach those skills. Similarly, students' mastery of a skill is influenced by their ideas about its value and what the performance of the skill exactly entails. In this study, 10 history teachers and 17 students in secondary school (age 16–17) were interviewed about their beliefs about historical empathy, objectives, and teaching strategies. The results show that the participants primarily saw historical empathy as a skill that can be learned. As main elements of historical empathy, they named contextualization, awareness of their own positionality, personal connection, and historical imagination. Inviting an eyewitness, visiting a historic site, and classroom discussions were considered particularly effective teaching strategies. Most teachers reported that they did not provide explicit instruction. Most teachers and students connected historical empathy to empathy in daily life. Extending this connection could be a significant way to work on citizenship competences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A recent report by the Southern Poverty Law Center revealed that many history teachers avoid or minimize conversations about race for fear they will trigger "racialized conflict." This silence should raise alarms, as we know that race and racism permeate the lived experiences of teachers and students and inevitably surface in historical discussions. In this article we use a racially charged moment from a middle school discussion of the New Deal to propose three interpretive frames that might support teachers in navigating moments of racial stress in history discussions. We understand interpretive frames to be schematic lenses that guide teacher perception, interpretation, and action in classrooms, and we propose three frames—disciplinary literacy, critical literacy, and racial literacy—that respectively address the historical, structural, and psychosocial dimensions of race and racism. We apply each frame to the classroom incident to illustrate how each might help teachers respond to moments of racial stress. Ultimately, we argue that these interpretive frames represent a suite of mutually reinforcing tools that might be leveraged by teacher educators to help teachers anticipate racial stress and turn paralysis to pedagogy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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 constructive-interpretive method, we found that in most of the lessons observed, few references were made to specific individuals. At the same time, many teachers talked about people in history by referring to generic people, to general categories of people, or by using personification. Using examples, we discuss the educational significance of the different ways history teachers talk about people in history through the prism of multiperspectivity as an aim in history education. We conclude that discussing the connections between the practice of talking about people in history lessons and multiperspectivity may contribute to teachers' awareness of another way they can promote multiperspectivity in class. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study reports five Dutch expert history teachers' approaches to multiperspectivity in lessons on three topics varying in moral sensitivity (i.e., the Dutch Revolt, Slavery, and the Holocaust) and their underlying considerations for addressing subjects' perspectives in different temporal layers. The lessons were observed and videorecorded, and the teachers were interviewed. Lessons were analyzed using a theoretical framework in which three different temporal layers of perspectives were distinguished, each with its own educational function. Teachers addressed multiple temporal layers and functions of multiperspectivity in almost all of their lessons. However, teachers' focus on temporal layers and function differed between lessons. Four categories of considerations for or against introducing specific subjects' perspectives were found: functional, moral, pedagogical, and practical. Moreover, teachers engaged in "normative balancing," meaning that not all perspectives were perceived as equally valid or politically desirable, showing where multiperspectivity ends. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the relationship between the philosophy of ethics, history education, and young people’s historical ethical judgments. In the last two decades, “ethical judgments,” which focus on making decisions about the ethics of historical actions, has been acknowledged as a second-order historical thinking concept in history education. Despite the expectation that history students should make reasoned and critically thoughtful historical ethical judgments, this aspect of history education is under-emphasized and under-theorized. In addition, the limited research available indicates that history teachers’ and students’ ethical judgments are often oversimplified because they focus on the conclusion about the rightness or wrongness of an action over the thought processes involved in arriving at a justified position. Using refugee migration as an example of historical and contemporary controversy, we consider how the philosophy of ethics could enlarge the “ethical” in ethical judgment and offer history education a rich conceptual lens through which to explore making ethical judgments in, and about, the past. We argue that the kinds of questions, concepts, and lines of argument ethicists explore could better inform students’ historical ethical judgments by illuminating the contested landscape upon which ethical judgments rest. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While the conceptual work on critical pedagogy is undeniably rich, few empirical studies have examined its applications in K-12 classroom settings and impacts on students. Based on ethnographic research in 2 public 11th grade U.S. History classrooms with critical teachers, this article describes 3 pedagogies that enhanced students’ critical consciousness and agency to act on the world: naming, questioning, and demystification. These pedagogies emerged via dialogical relations between each teacher and her particular students, in 1 particular time and place. Thus, they are not presented as models to be applied elsewhere but rather as generative examples that educators can use to consider critical pedagogy in their own contexts. In addition, the study reveals how a standards-based U.S. History curriculum—constraining though it may be—can play a role in emancipatory pedagogy. Through centering instruction on students’ immediate social realities, but tying these to historical antecedents, including histories of oppression and resistance, the teachers empowered their students to name and question contemporary hegemonic forces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

History education scholars have recognized the need for test validity research in recent years and have called for empirical studies that explore how to best measure historical thinking processes. The present study was designed to help answer this call and to provide a model that others can adapt to carry this line of research forward. It employed think-aloud protocols with 12 high school history students to explore whether selected multiple-choice items from a new test of historical thinking—theHistorical Thinking Test(HTT)—elicit the intended aspects of historical thinking among high school history students and whether these new items elicit these constructs at higher rates than items from extant standardized history tests. Data revealed that HTT multiple-choice items did, to varying degrees, elicit aspects of historical thinking and that HTT items elicited the intended aspects of historical thinking at higher rates than selected multiple-choice items from extant standardized tests. Yet the HTT items also elicited construct-irrelevant reasoning, which weakens an argument for their use as measures of historical thinking. Implications for history testing and the efficacy of multiple-choice items as measures of historical thinking are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using an analytical framework based on the concept of historical distance, this article explores how Dutch history teachers and educators navigate between the past and the present when making curriculum decisions on the sensitive topic of the Transatlantic Slave Trade and Slavery. Four history teachers and 2 museum educators were selected on the criteria of ethnicity, professional context, and student audience. They were interviewed twice, using open questions and a task-based design directed at 14–15-year-old students of various cultural backgrounds. Two conclusions are drawn: (1) the curriculum decisions of the selected participants can be interpreted as configurations of historical distance, which are the result of interactions between various types of knowledge, values, and beliefs. Some participants make a distinction between their own personal distancing and the curriculum decisions they take, while others do not or are unsure about deciding, and (2) curriculum decisions are difficult to predict. Some teachers and educators have a preference for certain distancing approaches but do not always follow it, depending on the historical sources they are dealing with. The conclusion discusses how research on history teaching can be facilitated by a deeper comprehension of the decisions teachers and educators make as navigators of historical distance. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The ability to make connections is an important aspect of teaching history and a vital skill in our increasingly globalized world. This study examines how preservice and practicing teachers organize and connect world historical events and concepts for themselves and for instructional purposes. Findings are based on interviews with 2 card-sorting and think-aloud tasks. Analysis of card-sort maps found that participants made different kinds of connections that give insight into the types of knowledge needed for and the challenges involved with teaching world history. Participants were able to represent the most sophisticated historical processes when they discussed how to connect events to other events. All of the participants made fewer event-to-event connections in the second card-sort focused on instruction, and all but 1 changed the organizational scheme of the cards. This second finding indicates a shift in how participants represented their thinking of world history for themselves and how they might represent it for their students. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Museums have great potential to help secondary students develop a deep understanding of the past; however, we know little about what history teachers actually do or want to accomplish when they utilize museums. In this study, the authors draw on questionnaire and interview data from 94 secondary history teachers in Connecticut in an effort to understand teachers' objectives, practices, and dilemmas in using museums. The results indicate that while teachers value museums for their potential to promote historical understanding, a number of factors limit the quantity and quality of museum trips, including cost, logistics, and teachers' level of knowledge and skill related to museums. Many teachers view museums as authoritative and do not ask students to evaluate the way museums present the past, thus neglecting the potential of museums to promote historical thinking. In addition, teachers implement practices to prepare students for museum visits; few, however, use follow-up activities or tap museums' virtual and human resources to promote history learning in the classroom. Better professional preparation and ongoing professional development could position teachers to realize the promise of museums to promote deep—and lifelong—learning of history. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The United States government has invested nearly one billion dollars in funding to professional historians and history educators across the country since 2000 to strengthen the teaching of American history in elementary and secondary schools, yet we know little about how these programs impact student learning. Using data from one such Teaching American History (TAH) grant, the authors employ multilevel models to investigate the effects of professional development on students' written responses to document-based questions at the fifth, eighth, and eleventh grades, and qualitative analyses of teachers' activities to learn about connections between classroom lessons and student outcomes. Findings indicate that fifth and eleventh grade students whose teachers were involved in ongoing networking activities for at least 30 hours in one year resulted in improved student performance. In addition, during the year, teachers of successful students engaged in activities that allowed them to increase their content knowledge and broaden their approach to teaching with primary documents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

History teachers are faced with numerous literacy-related decisions about the types of texts they use and how students are taught to learn with texts. Teachers' decisions about texts and instruction reflect their knowledge of historical inquiry processes and attitudes about the purpose of history instruction, specifically whether instruction on historical processes should be integrated with instruction on the historical narrative. Eight high school history teachers were observed over a three-week period to assess their literacy-related decisions. Records were kept of the texts they used and the activities and instruction they provided in association with various types of texts. Frequency counts were made for each teacher for different texts and activities, and comparisons were made across teachers. Additionally, an analysis was conducted to assess the way different texts were used. Results indicated that teachers relied heavily on textbooks and general literacy instruction, such as worksheets and vocabulary training. History-specific literacy instruction did not occur, even when teachers used primary source materials. Primary sources were used most often to illustrate points the teacher made during lecture. Teachers rarely provided multiple-text activities for their students. The results revealed a lack of integration of historical process instruction in these classrooms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article challenges the tradition in much history education research of privileging teachers' content knowledge--and within this area, their understanding of evidence and epistemology--in explorations of the knowledge shaping their pedagogical reasoning and practice. Moving away from the normative statements that often follow from this emphasis, it offers an empirical examination of how four secondary-level teachers in England made pedagogical decisions, using their efforts to cultivate students' historical empathy as an illustration. In this study, the history teachers employ thirteen different types of knowledge that are categorizable as student factors, structural factors and teacher factors, and deploy the types in combination as "knowledge packages" responsive to changing circumstances. Any one of the relevant elements of teacher knowledge- from student preconceptions to capacities, curricular resources to time, teachers' energy level to command of subject matter--might take precedence and determine the curriculum at a given moment. These findings give weight to an emerging strand of history education scholarship that strives to holistically capture the nuance and variability in teachers' thinking, rather than focusing narrowly upon one aspect of it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through surveys, interviews, observations, and field notes, I examined the beliefs and practices of six high school world history teachers regarding the use of digital primary sources and the potential added value of formal training in technology as a tool for instruction. Access to equipment (namely computer projectors and school computing facilities) was paramount in terms of digital primary source use; teachers with high levels of access to computing equipment were high-frequency users of digital primary sources, while those without access were not. While formal training did not necessarily result in an increased use of digital primary sources, it did affect the manner in which they were used. Teachers with low levels of technology training tended to use digital primary sources as an additive to their instruction instead of as a vehicle from which to engage students in historical thinking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article draws upon writings by social studies educators and historians to articulate a new approach to training history teachers. We argue that the divide between advocates of historical thinking and of historical content can be overcome through a better understanding of what it means to know history. By examining the nature of the historical discipline, we argue that historiographical knowledge, or learning through reading and criticizing secondary historical texts in relation to each other, may better prepare teachers to think about history. Such an approach can improve teachers' knowledge of the past and their awareness of the interpretive nature of all historical writing. Historiographical training can also give teachers the tools to stay current in the field. This essay defines historiographical knowledge, demonstrates how historiographical knowledge offers a more accurate view of how history is constructed, and suggests how historiographical knowledge can inform a range of pedagogical approaches in social studies and history classrooms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This exploratory study examined how the reading of two revisionist history text accounts concerning President Andrew Jackson influenced the historical interpretations and understandings of two prospective elementary teachers, who at the time also were teaching history during their final internship semester. We begin by providing some of the historical background that the texts traverse, describe the texts and the specific readings themselves, and situate both with regard to the two prospective teachers who were the study's readers. We then describe the reading task and the analytic procedures used to make sense of the teachers' verbal-reports about their reading. The data for each reader is presented as a vocalization trail. This trail starts at the beginning of each reader's encounters with the texts. It then follows that reading to the end. The analysis and discussion focuses on the key verbalizations related to how the readers emerged from the experience with reconstructed understandings from the texts. The results suggest that rhetorically powerful revisionist history texts may have the capacity to re-narrativize the thinking of prospective teachers who are intellectually curious about and receptive to new ideas about the past. Implications for learning to teach history in diverse, urban public schools and for how that learning is provided in teacher education programs are discussed, and questions for further research also are considered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Addressing the possibilities opened up for the teaching of social studies by a growing body of critical literature in and about history, this paper examines ways in which history/social studies educators might respond responsibly to the challenges posed by that literature in order to thoughtfully re-consider why we learn history, what we do (and could do) with it, and for what (and whose) purposes. With much of what was previously taken for granted in the poetics and politics of history now under scrutiny, this paper explores what it might mean to teach history that is aware of its construction and what opportunities such an awareness might afford the pedagogical practice through which students not only come to know a past but also to realize a present and a future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A literary criticism of the book "History on Trial," by Gary Nash is presented. It examines the author's standpoints in the book, including the performance of students in history education and the incompetence of history teachers. It also looks into the author's history standards, which he believes would create equality and democracy. Moreover, the author discusses the meaning of history as well as how things came to be.

The scope of this study is teachers' historical thinking with regard to the interpretation of a particular set of historical texts and interpretive tasks. It also focuses on teachers' disciplinary perspectives as factors in their historical thinking. The study takes Wineburg's (1991) research on the historical thinking of academic historians and high schools students as a point of departure. The teachers in this study read and "thought aloud" about the same documents on the Battle of Lexington used by Wineburg, then attempted to construct meaning and to assign credibility to particular sources for portraying the truth of historical events. The emergence of three distinct profiles in this study provides a possible framework for sorting through the experiences of history teachers in order to form a basis for understanding their historical thinking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article summarizes findings from a detailed study of an exemplary fifth-grade teacher's approach to teaching U.S. history. The teacher's general rationale, goals, and methods are described, and the article focuses examples on a unit on the English colonies that was recorded and analyzed in depth. The teacher's approach is notable for the limits placed on breadth of coverage in order to focus on connected main themes and related basic facts; the use of storytelling, rather than the textbook, as the major source of information to students; the frequent integration of history content with language arts teaching; and the emphasis on significant writing assignments and cooperative learning activities instead of more typical worksheets and tests. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The central purpose of this exploratory investigation is to describe and analyze the teaching of history in five classrooms, each representing one of five typologies developed earlier, the storyteller, scientific historian, relativist/reformer, cosmic philosopher, and eclectic (Evans, 1989b). The study focuses on the effects of each teacher's conceptions of history on the transmitted curriculum and on student beliefs. Data collection included interviews with teachers, in-depth observation, and interviews with students. Results suggest that the impact of teacher conceptions vary considerably, that the teaching of history has little impact on student belief in four of the classrooms, and a profound impact in one, and that approaches to the teaching of history are linked, implicitly, to competing ideological orientations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the early years of the twentieth century, educators challenged the traditional organization and content of the high school curriculum, including the social studies. Nevertheless, many teachers continued their loyalty to an elitist curriculum until World War I, which served as a catalyst for rapid change in the teaching of history, geography, and current events. Indicators of that change are found in the methods and professional journals of that period, particularly The History Teacher's Magazine. Social studies in public schools after WWI was more like our current curriculum than like the history and geography taught prior to the War. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]