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The aim of this introductory chapter is to render intelligible how history teaching can be enriched with knowledge of social psychological theories that deal with the issue of conflict transformation and partcularly the notions of prejudice reduction and reconciliation. A major aim of history teaching is to engage students with historical texts, establish historical significance, identify continuity and change, analyse cause and consequence, take historical perspectives and understand the ethical dimensions of historical interpretations. Such teaching, enriched with social psychological theory, will enlarge the notion of historical literacy into a study of historical culture and historical consciousness in the classroom so that students become reflective of the role of collective memory and history teaching in processes of conflict transformation and understand the ways in which various forms of historical consciousness relate the past, present and future. This is what the editors of this volume call an interdisciplinary paradigm of transformative history teaching .

This chapter deals with an interdisciplinary attempt to consider how the teaching of violent and recent past implies a challenge for history education in and out of the school. For this purpose three meanings of “history ” (school history , popular one and historiography ) are considered as they imply different representations of both the past and how to teach it. Firstly, a view on the contributions and advances of history education in the last decades is presented. The specificity of teaching violent and recent events, related to political conflicts which are still running in many cases is taken into account. I propose that it is essential to study both what to teach and how to teach in history. I will argue that a meaningful relation between these two important aspects should be developed in order to improve history education in conflicting contexts. From this point of view history education is seen from the point of view of both historical thinking and historical consciousness. Also it is considered how the national character of recent violent pasts is a very influential dimension for its teaching. In relation to it these national master narratives are analyzed as possible obstacles to fully understand troubled and recent past. Thus six dimensions of these types of narratives are analyzed as they offer a framework to understand this obstacle. These dimensions are also considered as providers of possible inputs for improving recent history teaching and learning processes. Also the contributions of social psychology to this improvement is analyzed in relation to the chapters of this book.

In this chapter, we examine laypeople’s narratives about historical processes, collectively constructed, transacted, and transmitted in an effort to remember and make sense of past events, and focus on the constitutive relations between hegemonic and counter-narratives. We rely on concrete examples of narratives about a specific process drawn from Argentine history, the “Conquest of the Desert”. Our aim is to underscore some of the tensions and contradictions that arise in recollections and retellings of historical processes, as well as their implications for the construction of collective identities and intergroup relations.