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History education that deals with the controversial and sensitive past is a vehicle for peacemaking in conflict‐affected societies. However, its success is dependent on teachers taking risks to challenge entrenched 'us versus them' views of history. How does a student teacher in Northern Ireland grapple with risk‐taking when learning to teach controversial history? What tensions are involved in bringing a different perspective into the classroom that challenges identity‐based understandings and emotions? This paper analyses interview data from a study on the preparation of preservice teachers for teaching controversial issues. It uses dialogical self theory to examine competing voices that animate a student teacher's practice and reveal how her interpretation of pedagogical lessons from university coursework and professional norms bump up against her identity, family loyalty and related emotions. Her conflict brings into relief tensions of learning to teach controversial history in divided societies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the study presented in this article, the aim is to further the understanding regarding the differences between pupils (aged 15–16) from schools with low or high socio‐economic status (SES), regarding the amount and diversity of content knowledge in history that they have acquired by the end of compulsory schooling. Following a definition of historical content knowledge, we situate the concept in relation to other aspects of the history school subject. This is done to visualize historical content knowledge's central role in more complex aspects of the subject. The empirical material used in the study is pupils' responses on both selected and constructed response items on the Swedish national test in history. In the study, a combination of qualitative and quantitative approaches is used. The results show not only that pupils in low‐SES schools provide fewer examples of historical content knowledge. We can also establish that the historical content knowledge of pupils from high‐SES schools represents several perspectives while there are few perspectives present in the responses from pupils in low‐SES schools. The results are used to discuss how the differences between pupils in low‐ and high‐SES schools may affect their possibilities for educational success and active participation in society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Narrative is fundamental to human thought, yet in many classrooms, expository texts are commonly used to support learning in content‐based subjects, such as history. Given the importance of narrative, it might be harnessed as a powerful tool to support learning. This research compares the impact of narrative nonfiction (NNF) and expository text (ET) on the development and retention of conceptual understanding relating to World War I (WWI). In an experiment involving 78 participants (mean age = 10.2 years, standard deviation = 0.29), pupils were placed into one of two conditions: in one, information about WWI was conveyed primarily through NNF texts, and in the other, through ETs. Participants completed written pre‐, post‐ and delayed post‐assessments to assess development and retention of conceptual understanding. It was found that participants in the NNF condition showed greater chronological and causal thinking skills. In addition, participants in the NNF condition retained significantly more conceptual understanding at delayed post‐assessments than those in the ET condition. Overall, these findings suggest that narrative texts have the potential to be powerful learning tools. Implications for how texts are selected and utilised to support learning in the primary, history classroom are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As one of the most literary and transdisciplinary cultural practices, speculative design has become one of the best mediums for discussing emerging technologies, the Anthropocene and the ecological crisis. When design history is merely perceived as established knowledge about the past and fails to engage in dialogue with reality or individual interaction, it often struggles to inspire students' agency in learning and willingness to deep involvement in research. Alternative design history, however, serves as a type and method of historiography that actively constructs history and alternatively imagines the past. It aims to situate historical knowledge as the context for design problem exploration rather than an end goal of education. This approach guides educators and learners to co‐speculate on historical design knowledge. By 'reversing' specific elements of historical experience, such as gender mentioned in this article, and employing alternative imagination to form what‐if scenarios and pose inquiries about existing historical facts, a distinct form of 'counterfactual history' emerges that diverges notably from traditional design history. Throughout speculation within 'counterfactual history', students can distinguish between historical facts and realities, which enables students to comprehend the construction of historical knowledge, the individuality of historical narratives, and the standpoint of historical discourse. In this way, it helps students cultivate a historical interest that 'starts from the self', guiding them to foster resilient historical thinking and a critical awareness of reality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a contemporary trend in many major research institutions to de‐emphasize the importance of natural history education in favor of theoretical, laboratory, or simulation‐based research programs. This may take the form of removing biodiversity and field courses from the curriculum and the sometimes subtle maligning of natural history research as a "lesser" branch of science. Additional threats include massive funding cuts to natural history museums and the maintenance of their collections, the extirpation of taxonomists across disciplines, and a critical under‐appreciation of the role that natural history data (and other forms of observational data, including Indigenous knowledge) play in the scientific process. In this paper, we demonstrate that natural history knowledge is integral to any competitive science program through a comprehensive review of the ways in which they continue to shape modern theory and the public perception of science. We do so by reviewing how natural history research has guided the disciplines of ecology, evolution, and conservation and how natural history data are crucial for effective education programs and public policy. We underscore these insights with contemporary case studies, including: how understanding the dynamics of evolutionary radiation relies on natural history data; methods for extracting novel data from museum specimens; insights provided by multi‐decade natural history programs; and how natural history is the most logical venue for creating an informed and scientifically literate society. We conclude with recommendations aimed at students, university faculty, and administrators for integrating and supporting natural history in their mandates. Fundamentally, we are all interested in understanding the natural world, but we can often fall into the habit of abstracting our research away from its natural contexts and complexities. Doing so risks losing sight of entire vistas of new questions and insights in favor of an over‐emphasis on simulated or overly controlled studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the place of history education in state‐sponsored nation‐building in war‐torn South Sudan, the world's youngest country. It examines discourses around nationhood transmitted via the first history curricula, textbooks and teacher guides issued in the midst of civil war, after the country's secession from Sudan to its north. The analysis uncovers a central memory of violence and an ostensibly unifying narrative of the South's historical victimisation and struggle. An emerging emotionally charged discourse of "unity in resistance" illustrates the construction of a "usable past" through silencing and othering. Its offshoot is an unsettled narrative whose key focus on unity undergoes repeated rupture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This roundtable explores the art and purpose of teaching histories of peace and justice. Invited by Peace & Change, the participants share their experiences and ideas as teachers of college courses in history, interdisciplinary studies, and sociology. They offer fresh perspectives on how we can engage with the intertwined nature of peace and justice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent decades, Historical Thinking and Historical Consciousness have been two fundamental axes of research in history education. The first approach combines the use of historical sources and the work of the historian. The second includes the social function of history, identity, memory and civic and moral education. These two approaches attempt to provide students with the necessary intellectual tools for analysing the past and relating it to an understanding of problems in the present time. This article reviews the development and shaping of the knowledge domain of history education between 2000 and 2019 in the WoS (Web of Science). To this end, several techniques and tools were used, including R‐package Bibliometrix and VOSviewer. Our analysis identifies five clusters of topics underpinning history education as a specific field of knowledge. This review highlights the fact that research topics associated with Historical Thinking and Historical Consciousness have gradually acquired a more central role to the detriment of History Textbooks or topics generally related to History. Finally, we describe how the term History Educationfunctions as a marker for this knowledge domain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the establishment and impact of the Council on Public History, which aims to develop accessible and engaging public information and exhibits. It also explores the ongoing effort to establish public history as an academic discipline, with a focus on teaching practices. The book "Teaching Public History" features contributions from 11 college faculty members who share their approaches to designing and presenting public history courses. The chapters cover various topics, including reflective practice, condensing course content, assigning grades, collaborative sharing of syllabi, and the need for students to discover and create their own applications of historical information. The article suggests that public history may be useful in adjacent fields such as anthropology, library science, museum and preservation studies, and urban planning. [Extracted from the article]

In the summer of 2020, amidst global pandemic and protest, a youth‐centred non‐profit organisation in Providence, RI, USA led a series of sessions meant to introduce participants to histories of slavery, incarceration, policing, abolition and transformative justice practices. Ultimately, it was an extremely successful experiment in popular education that revealed multiple dynamics: the failings of traditional education to engage with such histories; the uses of contextualising our own lives within the histories we have inherited; the importance of collaborative exploration of such histories and what Paulo Freire refers to as 'problem‐posing' pedagogical models; and the necessity to engage deeply with histories of violence and resistance if we are committed to mitigating contemporary forms of violence and transforming our relationships with each other and within society as a whole. Our case study of these sessions, consisting of dialogue, reflection, research and critical theory, will creatively illuminate these and other dynamics through a deep mapping of the way the sessions and their content were situated within our own collaboration and within our larger community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We studied the natural history knowledge (NHK) of students (18–19 years), considering the salience of nature expressed through the knowledge of names of organisms, routes for knowledge transmission and acquisition and the potential of specific taxa to represent a student's overall knowledge.We report a 2‐year study of the NHK of 149 UK‐resident first‐year biology students surveyed by means of a free‐listing exercise, facilitating the assessment of salience, prior to participation in a residential field course run by the University of Oxford.Each year, students anonymously completed a questionnaire asking them to name any five species in each of five taxonomic groups (birds, trees, mammals, butterflies and wildflowers) found wild in the British Isles, also stating if those named were native or introduced. Metadata were collected on the students' background and sources of knowledge (e.g. family, teachers, etc.).Of the five taxonomic groups, birds were the best known by the students, while butterflies were the most poorly known group. However, although asked for names at species level, while 94% of students could name five British bird taxa, only 55.7% named them at species level, many giving folk generics such as 'duck' or 'seagull' instead. For butterflies, only 12.8% of students correctly named five British species, and 47% named none.Family influences, self‐motivation and knowledge of birds, rather than formal education, best predicted students' overall NHK. While urban/rural residency had a small effect on NHK, it strongly influenced the relative importance of other factors.Factor analysis showed that NHK was best represented by knowledge of birds. Furthermore, the bird species named predicted students' total NHK as well as the students' knowledge of birds. Asked to name their favourite bird, students with family influence were significantly more likely to name native species.We describe the complex interplay between context, family and formal education in developing nature salience; roles which we define as nature 'advocacy'. In the urban context, the advocacy of family and teachers was essential to engage young people with nature, while this was not so in a rural context. We briefly consider the implications of our study for natural history education going forward. A free Plain Language Summary can be found within the Supporting Information of this article. A free Plain Language Summary can be found within the Supporting Information of this article. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Perusall is an online annotation platform that was developed by Harvard University physicists Dr. Eric Mazur and Dr. Kelly Miller in 2019. It has gained popularity among college teachers as a tool to improve student understanding and performance. The author of the article, a doctoral student in history, shares their experience using Perusall for peer reviews in a history class. They found that Perusall facilitated open discussions and allowed students to learn from each other's perspectives. However, they also noted the need for clearer instructions on composing comments and addressing the unequal distribution of feedback. The author concludes by encouraging teachers to transform traditional writing assignments into interactive and collaborative experiences for students. [Extracted from the article]

Normativity has long been a central concept in ethics, medicine, and the social sciences. It has not been fully explored as an element in historiography or historical thought. This article contends that normativity, when taken as a metaconcept that underpins notions of the "normal," "norms," and "normality," can help us understand changing attitudes to the possibility, actuality, and moral exemplarity of historical phenomena, but only if we disaggregate three different modes or registers of normativity: moral, metaphysical, and phenomenal. After exploring the place of moral normativity in historical thought and writing from antiquity to the early modern era, I discuss metaphysical and phenomenal normativity as filters that, from the Middle Ages through the seventeenth century, were applied to reported or recorded experience prior to any decision to derive from it any moral conclusions. I then argue that Baconian empiricism, Humean skepticism, classical probability theory, and mathematical statistics collectively gave rise to a modern sense of what constituted "normality" for past and present events. Finally, I conclude that the late Enlightenment bequeathed to modernity and postmodernity a normalized sense of fundamental rupture (exemplified by the French Revolution and characterized as the "historical sublime") that we still experience and struggle through as we routinely reconstruct history as both a linear tradition and a discontinuous series of "new normals." We also contend with this sense of fundamental rupture as we "renormalize" catastrophes that could reasonably be regarded as beyond normalization while simultaneously fetishizing the experience of disruption, which we have defined as a clinamenic swerve from one normality into another. This paradoxical process is accompanied by a deadened capacity to judge that which is, and is not, normal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The challenges of naming a bounded disciplinary body of knowledge for the social sciences has made it difficult to define and clearly articulate 'what counts' for disciplinary learning in school curricula. The shift to 'new' generic skills with an associated autonomy of curriculum content choice and learner‐centred approaches has introduced further challenges for the social sciences. In this paper, we consider what transformative disciplinary learning might look like for two core social science subjects in New Zealand—history and social studies. We begin by outlining what we mean by transformative disciplinary learning in history and social studies. Drawing on two in‐depth classroom‐based studies, we then examine the strategies, practices and processes that supported or undermined transformative disciplinary learning in history and social studies. In the absence of prescribed content, both subjects relied strongly on procedural approaches (historical and social enquiry processes) which helped to sustain some coherency and disciplinary learning. However, poor topic choice meant that students often missed out on in‐depth knowledge and/or opportunities for effective and transformative citizenship engagement. We conclude by highlighting the importance of content selection if students are to widen their horizons and experience transformative disciplinary learning in history and social studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study examines how students in Grade 9 handle conceptual knowledge through the concept of continuity and change in the context of large‐scale assessment. The research questions address (a) what strategies the students use when they use the two parts of the concept concomitantly and (b) any gender‐related differences regarding these strategies. A total of 100 student responses on a specific item in the national test in history are examined. The method of concept analysis is applied to identify the strategies of the students from the two groups. The analytical framework is based on previous research regarding the concept. The results show that just over half of the students use the concept as expected. Boys are overrepresented among the students that struggle with the concept. Any correlation between the identified strategies is discussed in addition to the implications the results may have on equity and education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article outlines the agenda of a collective research project that aims to explore modalities of historical futures that constitute our current historical condition. To present the collective work adequately, we have teamed up with History and Theory and initiated a long‐term serial publishing experiment. In the coming years, each issue of the journal will feature contributions to this research endeavor. In our project‐opening piece, we briefly introduce the experiment and the premises of the collective research agenda. We begin by recounting the many ways in which increasingly towering novel future prospects have begun to capture the scholarly world's attention across disciplinary boundaries. We then introduce the notion of historical futures. Crediting theoretical inspirations and paying intellectual debts to conceptual relatives, we define "historical futures" as the plurality of transitional relations between apprehensions of the past and anticipated futures. At the core of the article, we formulate our call for a collective investigation of modalities of historical futures and sketch three basic sets of concerns that the explorative works in this experiment may address: kinds of transitions from past to futures, kinds of anticipatory practices, and kinds of registers as interpretive tools that position such practices on a variety of spectrums between two poles (for instance, a value register with the poles of catastrophic and redemptive futures). Finally, we close with a brief note about the necessity of collective endeavors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

History is a key site for the negotiation of national identity, with the ability to define the past shaping the national narrative on who "we" were, who "we" are, and, crucially, who "we" should be. As such, the teaching of history is a site of intense political debate. This paper examines the history module of the Australian Curriculum to understand the extent to which the history curriculum moves beyond Eurocentric, colonial imaginings of Australia's history towards a more inclusive, multi‐cultural, globally‐oriented, cosmopolitan vision of society. Both the curriculum and teaching resources were examined to ascertain the identities and orientations these materials could provide. The research finds that — despite improvements in presenting a diversity of representations, in particular a positive focus on the rights and contributions of Indigenous peoples in Australia and some orientation to diverse migrant histories, the environment, and Asia — the main thrust of the curriculum is a focus on the nation‐state at the expense of global engagement. The funnel structure which deals with broader world history in earlier years, relegates the rest of the world to a temporal and spatial distance, leaving a somewhat myopic narrative that perpetuates traditional, Anglo‐centric narratives, maintaining the perspectives of "Others" as peripheral. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Civic education that prepares students for principled civic participation is vital to democracy. Schools face significant challenges, however, as they attempt to educate for democracy in a democracy in crisis. Parents, educators, and policy‐makers disagree about what America's civic future should look like, and hence about what schools should teach. Likewise, hyperpartisanship, mutual mistrust, and the breakdown of democratic norms are perverting the kinds of civic relationships and values that schools want to model and achieve. Nonetheless, there is strong evidence that young people want to be civically engaged and are hungry for more and better civic learning opportunities. Reviving the civic mission of schools is thus a win‐win‐win. Adults want it, youth want it, and democracy needs it. We propose three means by which educators and the public can reconstruct our common purpose and achieve civic innovation to help democracy in crisis: support action civics, strengthen youth leadership outside the classroom, and engage both students and adults with "hard history" and contemporary controversies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Much of the research into history teaching and ethnicity concludes that the historical narratives that children from minority ethnic groups construct differ significantly from 'mainstream' or official national narratives and are often accompanied by a sense of disengagement or even alienation from the dominant history narratives taught in schools. Our research suggests that in England (or more specifically in London) the picture is more complicated than this. First, we did not find compelling evidence that students from black and minority ethnic backgrounds feel alienated or disengaged from the British history they are taught. Second, we found a surprising similarity across the narratives that different ethnic groups chose to tell us about British history, suggesting amongst other things some curriculum inertia in schools. Where differences did exist, we suggest that these can be explained as much by gender and broad cultural influences as by ethnicity. Third, whilst what students chose to include in their narratives was broadly similar across different ethnic groups, the reasons for including them did differ. Finally, and perhaps most positively, we conclude that students of all ethnic groups are keen to engage more critically with British narratives and would relish more opportunities to do so than current school curricula appear to encourage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study describes an approach to history education which leverages augmented reality (AR). Currently, most learning interventions with AR are designed from the paradigm of an expert‐led model of teaching, where the AR artefact is created by a domain expert; under such a paradigm, the learner has limited ownership of the process of artefact production. The project reported in this paper aimed to broaden the application of AR in education, specifically to history education, by exploring the affordances of such technology in mediating student‐led learning activities, using an approach known as learner‐generated augmentation. The current Singapore Secondary History syllabus adopts an inquiry‐based approach. The need to memorize key facts is still an important part in formulating historical arguments. The study involved the design of a learning activity to help students memorize historical information more effectively by building upon the established memory technique of Memory Palace/method of loci. In this activity, students used a free AR mobile application—Just a Line—to sketch out memory palaces of key information from a prose passage. This activity was trialled on student‐teachers who are majoring in History at the National Institute of Education, Singapore. After they had sketched their memory palaces in three dimensions, they were interviewed on their experience. Samples of their learning artefacts (their sketches) and analyses of their comments, are reported. No claim is made with respect to the absolute efficacy of the approach, given the limited number of participants in the study. The intent of this paper is instead to invite exploration and debate around the wider affordances of AR for learning. Practitioner NotesWhat is already known about this topic So far, initiatives which use augmented reality (AR) in learning have been designed from the paradigm of an expert‐led, rather than student‐centred, model of teaching.The learner‐generated augmentation approach offers a possible way of designing student‐centred learning interventions with AR technology.One of the known challenges of learning history is the accurate recall of historical facts.Memory palace/method of loci is one strategy that can be used to aid memorization, but it suffers from certain limitations.What this paper adds The study described in this paper aims to address the challenges of accurately recalling historical facts, through the use of freely‐available cross‐platform AR software for smartphones.The study takes advantage of the affordances of AR to improve the memory palace/method of loci strategy by providing ways for learners to represent their tacit imaginations of the memory palace more explicitly.Learners can be encouraged to understand that their everyday environments are actually potential contexts for more authentic learning.Implications for practice and/or policy This study demonstrates the possibility of using AR technologies as part of student‐centred learning.This study demonstrates the feasibility of applying the Learner‐Generated Augmentation approach to subject disciplines such as the Social Sciences, which emphasize the socially‐constructed interpretation of events.The study demonstrates the feasibility of using AR technology to build upon the memory palace/method of loci strategy, so that the effectiveness of the latter is less dependent on the abilities of the learner for abstract imagination, thereby making the subject discipline more accessible to a wider cohort of learners.The study suggests that the memory palaces which result from the approach may be used by learners and their peers/teachers as part of Assessment for Learning.As this is the second application of the approach of Learner‐Generated Augmentation to a subject discipline (the original application being in Chemistry) the study suggests that the approach may be translated beyond its original application in the Natural Sciences to the Social Sciences as well. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The "museum boom" is a global phenomenon with various local manifestations and wide‐ranging antecedents. The recent museum boom in Poland, in which a number of national museum complexes have either opened or undergone significant remodeling, is related to changing evidential discourses about collective identity. These discourses are part of the national narratives surrounding the Polish state. This essay asks what can be learned from the Polish museum boom. Notably, museums and museum‐like institutions within Poland serve as a space for education and dialogue that both complements and contrasts with history education in schools and written history books. Through comparative case studies, this essay addresses how the museum boom is rooted in the particularities of Poland's history. Museums elsewhere are experiencing similar shifts, and we ask here what these changes can tell us about the transformations of history museums in Poland. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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'. Scotland has, perhaps, taken an extreme position on this debate by specifying no mandatory historical content in its social studies curriculum. This paper uses 21 interviews with Scottish history teachers to explore how schools use this curricular autonomy: which historical periods they choose to teach and why. The paper suggests that, without access to theoretical debates about the nature of historical knowledge, schools fall back on instrumental justifications for content selection within the curriculum. The result in many cases is an extremely narrow and fragmented syllabus in which pupil preference, teacher interests and the logistics of timetabling guide content selection. The paper concludes that the formulation of coherent school-level history curricula is dependent on the fostering agency among a theoretically-informed teaching profession. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The new national core curriculum has been put into operation in Finland. Teaching and learning is intended to focus on historical literacy. In this paper, we study how it can be assessed with a pen-and-paper test, and what that reveals in regards to the mastering of historical literacy among elementary pupils. To study this, we designed a test where pupils analysed sources, answered open-ended questions, and filled out weighted multiple-choice questions. Furthermore, we implemented the test with the think-aloud method. The results from this indicate the way 12-year-olds read historical documents and formulate their own interpretations. The results demonstrate that most of the pupils succeeded in acquiring historical information from different sources, as well as understanding the interpretative nature of historical knowledge. The test also revealed that pupils can identify some intentions of the sources’ producers, as well as reasoning through their own interpretations using a single source. Some pupils, however, could not process the cognitive noise inherent to the test (i.e. conflicting sources). Some of them also considered an authoritative source to be principally more reliable than other sources. Our study sheds light on which kind of task can be used at the elementary level to assess historical literacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

History education stakeholders in England have consistently judged that some students find formal historical writing prohibitively difficult due to the demands of constructing an extended argument. While policy makers have agreed students need support in their historical writing, recurring themes in centralised resourcing have been wastage, incoordination and replication. Furthermore, two concurrent but largely disconnected discourses have developed and promulgated initiatives relevant to students’ extended historical writing: ‘genre theorists’ and the ‘history teachers’ extended writing movement’. Despite certain goals held in common participants in the two discourses have tended to talk past one another with concomitant issues in resourcing. Unsystematic,cross-fertilisationbetween the discourses has led to cycles of genre theory being collectively discovered, forgotten, and rediscovered by history teachers with knowledge not being built cumulatively. Furthermore both discourses have independently developed similar initiatives in a form ofconvergent evolutionresulting in duplication of labour. Finally,divergent evolutionhas occurred where genre theorists have advocated approaches that are increasingly redundant for history teachers’ requirements. A more activist stance is therefore required to ensure meaningful inter-discursive communication between genre theorists and the history teachers’ ‘extended writing movement’ to ensure efficacy in developing approaches to improving students’ extended historical writing. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This research investigates the understandings of four teachers who teach history in primary and early childhood settings. Data were gathered from participants through semi-structured interviews. The participants were experienced teachers who were in the process of curriculum change – from teachers of studies of society and environment to teachers of history, under the auspices of the Australian Curriculum: History. The focus of the study was on their understandings of content knowledge and the pedagogies involved in classroom teaching, using a pedagogical framework, which sought to identify and categorise the nature of their knowledge base in the implementation phase of the Australian Curriculum: History. The study used narrative inquiry to show how temporality, sociality, and place play out in the lives of these teachers of history. The findings from this study indicate the challenges and opportunities for teachers’ professional knowledge landscapes in times of curriculum reform. Whilst there are a small number of participants in this study, their stories provide insight into how teachers responded to the challenges and opportunities of teaching history and how these teachers have shaped the implementation of the history curriculum. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This qualitative research study examined how two novice secondary teachers drew on preservice preparation to teach language demands of their content area to bilingual learners in urban high schools in a city in the northeastern United States. Data sources included videotaped class observations, lesson plans and teaching materials, and semistructured interviews to elicit participants' perspectives on how they taught language. Findings suggest that participants integrated significant components of language teaching into content instruction, such as explicit vocabulary instruction and group activities organized around structured interactions with classmates and texts, but did not consistently teach language. The implication is that novice teachers need more guidance to identify and teach linguistic features of content tasks and texts. Accordingly, this article proposes a genre-based framework to teach language illustrated with classroom scenarios that demonstrate how linguistic analysis and cognitive scaffolds can be incorporated into brief targeted activities that support both language and conceptual development. Although recommendations are based on history genres, implications of this analysis may be relevant to a broad group of researchers, teacher educators, and teachers focused on promoting disciplinary literacy in secondary content classes for bilingual learners. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The increased interest in basing teaching on disciplinary thinking has had a profound impact on the syllabus for history in Sweden. Within this context, we examine how students demonstrate one aspect of disciplinary thinking in history, namely reasoning about historical sources. The material used is written answers to an assignment about historical sources in the national test in history for year 6. The analysis shows that many students are able to show at least some aspects of disciplinary thinking about sources, though the vast majority has problems with contextualising the source in the assignment. One explanation put forth is that the syllabus is not yet fully enacted in teaching practices. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper describes an activity to celebrate the lives of Florence Nightingale and Florence Nightingale David in statistics classrooms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports an empirical study that takes a multimodal analytical approach to examine how mobile technologies shape students' exploration and experience of place during a history learning activity in situ. In history education, mobile technologies provide opportunities for authentic experiential learning activities that have the potential to re-mediate students' understanding of space and place through enacted interaction, and to make the learning more memorable. A key question is how learners work with the physical and digital information in the context of that learning experience, and how this supports new experiences and understanding of space and place. Findings suggest that embodied mobile experiences foster the creation of both physical and digital markers, which were instrumental in concretizing the history experience and developing new narratives. The findings also show how different representational forms of digital information mediated interaction in specific ways and how digital augmentation can lead to conflation in student understanding of space and time. These findings inform our understanding of the value of mobile applications in supporting embodied learning experiences and provide key implications for pedagogical design, both in situ and back in the classroom. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the creation and implementation of the course "The Art and Craft of Teaching History" by the Department of History at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee.

Among the disciplinary skills necessary for understanding in the social studies classroom is the ability to determine context and build meaning from past events. Historical buildings are an important component of historical study, and they serve as a type of nontraditional text that students can decode and use to construct meaning about multiple historical contexts. The skills used to understand and analyze historical buildings are in and of themselves important, but engaging them also builds critical deep comprehension skills as well. This paper presents a research-tested framework for historic building analysis that can be used to build disciplinary analytical skills in history, while meeting the challenges of the Common Core Standards, which require that students be able to deeply understand a variety of types of traditional and nontraditional texts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent research suggests that Muslim boys have become the ‘New Folk Devils’ of British education, who are characterised by resistance to formal education, especially at secondary level, and under-achievement. Since the 1990s, British Muslim boys would appear to have become increasingly alienated from compulsory schooling, especially in the humanities subjects which lack obvious instrumental value. This mixed-methods study of the performance of 295 secondary school British Muslim boys in their compulsory school history provides evidence which interrupts this narrative of the academic under-achievement and educational dis-engagement of Muslim boys, especially in the humanities subjects. When viewed through the prism of a laminated, non-reductive model of educational success, this indicative sample of British Muslim boys could be considered to have had significant success at a traditional humanities subject such as history intellectually, spiritually, emotionally, instrumentally and civically. This paper therefore proposes that history can provide a vital meaning-making tool to generate the success of Muslim boys in a variety of significant dimensions both in and out of school. It suggests how history can be more fully and effectively harnessed by teachers, parents and policy-planners to encourage internal integration and external social engagement in British Muslim pupils. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

My purpose is to test the proposition that academic historians are central - rather than peripheral - to the practice of public history. Public history generally refers to work that is pursued outside the academy, by the combined efforts of historians and lay people, often pursuing a heritage agenda with a strictly local remit. The resulting enlargement in the scope of historical enquiry is greatly to be welcomed, but it should not be treated as the sum total of public history, still less as grounds for disparaging the historical profession. The civic importance of academic historians arises from their ability to enhance public understanding of national and international issues which form no part of 'public' history as usually understood, because they transcend questions of locality and identity. The health of a representative democracy depends in part on the citizen's readiness critically to examine issues which do not affect him or her directly but which are in the public interest. This argument was first made by the leaders of the historical profession following the Second Reform Act in 1867. During and after the First World War it was put into practice, not least within the pages of History (taken over by the Historical Association in 1916). More recently the relationship between active citizenship and critical history has been re-asserted for the digital age by the History and Policy website. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent public discussions of curriculum and pedagogy that have accompanied the English National Curriculum review have been structured around clichéd dichotomies that generate more heat than light and that, as Robin Alexander has argued, reduce complex educational debates to oppositional and incompatible slogans. This paper begins by exploring the ways in which these dichotomies have structured recent debates and goes on to critically explore arguments in two contemporary debates, in the fields of history education and music education, assessing how these debates have been framed and the extent to which the debates can be considered fruitful and progressive. In the first case, we seek to show, through a discussion of ‘knowledge’ and ‘skill’ in history, that bipolar thinking is both inadequate and dysfunctional in relation to the matters under discussion. A third term – disciplinary understanding – is advocated and explored. In the second case, we demonstrate that dichotomous thinking about formal and informal music education has generated a debate that has become more sophisticated as various authors have problematised and critiqued informal learning. Analysis of these debates suggests that dichotomous thinking is pernicious when dichotomies are used only as slogans, although dichotomies can be generative when they are used as starting points to open discussion, not to close it. The paper suggests that the difference between the debates might be explained by the varying degrees of political involvement in them. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Many have contemplated Chinese foreign policy and its future direction, but few have queried how Chinese history might illuminate both. This is unfortunate since researchers have shown that history can influence foreign policy agendas, discourses, and national goals. Moreover, it provides an invaluable tool for comparative analysis. The purpose of this introduction is to provide historical background to the articles comprising this special issue, whose contributors employ historical analysis, with the period preceding and following the Xinhai Revolution as a basis, to illuminate contemporary Chinese foreign policy - e.g., China's interest in remaking the international order and its security norms - or to suggest differences between past and present - for example, in regards to China's Asia- Pacific posture. This introduction also hopes to stimulate further work on Chinese history and foreign policy by highlighting similarities and differences between past and present with respect to, inter alia, pressures against China's territorial integrity, sovereignty, and independence, the penetration of foreign actors and ideas into China, and domestic factors limiting China's efforts to filter external influences and to respond to them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

People who have impacted generations have left legacies we can explore today through biographies. The 5L instructional design introduced in this article includes five components: Listen, Learn, Locate, Link, and Legacy. In the 'Listen' section, teachers use storytelling and read-alouds to introduce individuals who shaped history. During the 'Learn' component, each student selects a historical figure and, using print and online sources, examines his or her life. In the 'Locate' portion of the design, students use graphic organizers to locate and record important events in the person's life alongside related world events or cultural opportunities of the period. In the 'Link' component, students connect with someone else to share their work and receive feedback and questions. The final section, 'Legacy,' encourages students to consider the financial, intellectual, social, or other kind of legacy left by the historical figure as well as the legacies they themselves want to leave the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article suggests that "critical" imperial history, which today dominates the study of the British Empire, emerged out of disappointment with the character of the new states that arose out of the empire's end. The shortcomings of these states came to be explained by a narrative of a crippling "colonial legacy," a narrative, this article contends, that even while reversing the older whiggish history's valuations reproduced some of its central distortions--its moral simplification, its exaggeration of the transformative power of the colonial state, and its neglect of precolonial times and of the agency of colonized peoples. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the parallels between George H. Mead's theory of time and Boris A. Uspensky's semiotics of history, looking for implications relevant to the symbolic interactionist theory of historical processes. It suggests that Mead's theory of time and theory of communication hold important implications for semiotic analysis of the historical dimension of sociocultural phenomena. A further aim is to link the symbolic interactionist tradition of the Chicago school with the Tartu school and its semiotics of history. This would fuel the further development of both theoretical orientations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Michalinos Zembylas examines how history education can be reconceived in terms of Jacques Derrida's notion of 'hauntology,' that is, as an ongoing conversation with the 'ghost' - in the case of this essay, the ghosts of disappeared victims of war and dictatorship. Here, Zembylas uses hauntology as both metaphor and pedagogical methodology for deconstructing the orthodoxies of academic history thinking and learning about 'the disappeared.' As metaphor, hauntology evokes the figure of the ghost in order both to trouble the hegemonic status of representational modes of knowledge in remembrance practices and to undermine their ontological frames and ideological histories. As pedagogical methodology, hauntology reframes histories of loss and absence and uses them as points of departure to acknowledge the complexities and contradictions that emerge from haunting. Pedagogies of hauntology are constituted as responses to 'spectacle pedagogy' in teaching about the disappeared, that is, a ubiquitous form of representation that manifests the ghosts in a sensationalized and ideological manner. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It has been suggested that the new National Curriculum for history in primary schools should focus on content and on knowing the dates of English kings and queens rather than on the process of historical enquiry, in order to promote a shared sense of identity. Charlotte Mason was a very patriotic, nineteenth-century British educationalist who saw learning history as not Anglocentric and as an active engagement with primary and secondary sources, in order to interpret the past through retelling, role play and art. This article collates her thoughts about history education scattered throughout six volumes of her writing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author argues that the history of slavery, culture, and politics of the southern states in the U.S. is not unique when compared and contrasted with the history of humankind. She asserts that much of the world has had to face questions of volatile issues such as slavery, the role of labor, and transitioning to societies and economies that are primarily agrarian to more modern and industrialized economies. In addition, the author argues that there are several nations that have not undergone the economic transformation from rural to urban and, thus, similar patterns of development and difficulties that characterized the American south will emerge in other parts of the world.

The history education community's efforts to help pupils distinguish between the discipline of history and rawer forms of collective memory have been beset with problems from inside and outside the education community. From without, teachers face criticism for their supposed failure to foster narrowly celebratory versions of Britain's past; from within, pressure to reduce history to generic 'skills' of the 'new cross-curricularity', apparently in the interests of relevance, utility or engagement. This article will argue that such genericism is, first, redundant, in that it adds nothing to strong disciplinary practice in fostering thinking, reflection, criticality and motivation; and, second, inadequate: disciplinary knowledge and concepts are necessary in order to reach or challenge claims about the past. The argument is built from history teachers' discourse about their own efforts to find out how to make disciplinary history work at the pedagogic site. The article examines history teacher efforts to address complex problems of uniting content and concept and of motivating lower-attaining or marginalised students whom others (variously) claim can be helped only by narrow narratives or by giving up on disciplinary rigour altogether. The story of history teacher efforts contains valuable lessons for curriculum reviewers about the potential of strong classificatory framing for emancipatory and engaging learning. The article argues that any improvement of the existing Key Stage 3 curriculum is pointless, however, unless wider cultural and structural problems impeding lower-attaining students' entitlement to the subject are resolved. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Integrating and accessing structured textual content obtained from different sources is a challenging task and becomes even more so when dealing with multiple languages. The objective of this article is to showcase the technological efforts towards the creation of a digital European history textbook repository that integrates respective textbooks from various countries and publishers. The content integration is achieved by introducing language independent metadata based on space (locations), time (dates), and thematic categories (history gazetteer). Providing adequate interfaces such metadata can be used to offer language-independent access to Multilanguage history textbook content. The specific focus in this article will be on (1) presenting the metadata, (2) the data management approach including indexing the history textbook content and (3) the resulting textbook repository including its GIS-based interface, allowing for a combination of map, timeline and keyword based search of the history content. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article the author discusses the people's ideas that influenced his teaching. He notes that his skill in teaching history made him look back to identify the people who influenced him on his profession. He recalled how Dr. Hunter R. Rawlings, III, an associate history professor at the University of Colorado, inspired him to persist. He also recalled Christopher H. Munich, a law professor at the University of Denver, who also inspired him.

This study evaluates how well the authors of Wikipedia history articles adhere to the site's policy of assuring verifiability through citations. It does so by examining the references and citations of a subset of country histories. The findings paint a dismal picture. Not only are many claims not verified through citations, those that are suffer from the choice of references used. Many of these are from only a few US government Websites or news media and few are to academic journal material. Given these results, one response would be to declare Wikipedia unsuitable for serious reference work. But another option emerges when we jettison technological determinism and look at Wikipedia as a product of a wider social context. Key to this context is a world in which information is bottled up as commodities requiring payment for access. Equally important is the problematic assumption that texts are undifferentiated bearers of knowledge. Those involved in instructional programs can draw attention to the social nature of texts to counter these assumptions and by so doing create an awareness for a new generation of Wikipedians and Wikipedia users of the need to evaluate texts (and hence citations) in light of the social context of their production and use. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this essay Thomas Fallace argues that John Dewey can best be described as a pragmatic historicist and a genetic psychologist. This means that Dewey believed that the best way to understand any idea, phenomenon, or entity is to trace its history, that the history of the individual and race pass through distinct stages of development, and that the most effective way to educate was to coordinate the form and content of these phylogenetic and ontogenetic stages to one another. Fallace demonstrates how these ideas informed both theory and practice at the University of Chicago Laboratory School. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The relationship between Australian political and social history has received little historiographical attention. Political history has been lauded or, more often, dismissed as traditional historical practice, while from the 1960s social history took its place as a catch-all phrase for various “new” histories concerned with everyday life. This article examines the place of political and social history in the nascent Australian academic historical profession of the 1950s to the early 1970s, and then explores the impact of the new social history on academic political history. It will suggest that while there was only limited exchange before the late 1980s, in the last twenty years social history has contributed modestly to a reconstituted understanding of political history as part of lived experience. “[...] I can read poetry and plays, and things of that sort, and do not dislike travels. But history, real solemn history, I cannot be interested in. Can you?” “Yes, I am fond of history.” “I wish I were too. I read it a little as a duty, but it tells me nothing that does not either vex or weary me. The quarrels of popes and kings, with wars or pestilences, in every page; the men all so good for nothing, and hardly any women at all — it is very tiresome: and yet I often think it odd that it should be so dull, for a great deal of it must be invention [...]”. 1 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article will focus on an event in the educational history of Wales in the 1980s which still impacts both on school practice and on thinking about concepts of Welsh identity. That event was the creation of the History Committee for Wales which was charged with devising a history curriculum for Welsh schools in the wake of the 1988 Education Act. The story will be told largely by using evidence gleaned in elite interviews with the ministers, senior inspectors and civil servants most closely associated with the decision to support or accept the creation of this committee. The significance of the decision will be assessed by charting the progress of curriculum devolution in Wales from the beginnings of state education and the implications of this for ideas of Welshness. This background will be briefly sketched, as will the background to the 1988 Education Act on a wider canvas. General reaction to that act in the Welsh Office will be discussed before the detailed implications for the subject of history will be explored in detail. It will then be argued that wider discussions as to how schools should approach and reflect the history and culture of nations not only shed important light on devolutionary processes which were gathering pace at the time but also reflect the nature of Welshness as perceived by senior figures in the world of education policy-making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]