Historical Thinking, Culture, and Education
Historical Thinking, Culture, and Education is a peer-reviewed, open-access, scholarly journal that offers a critical space for the reflection and exchange of ideas on the creation, appropriation, and dissemination of historical knowledge and culture in both formal and non-formal educational settings. Seeking to enhance scholarly debates from both the scientific mainstream and beyond to support the accessibility and visibility of a variety of approaches, the journal seeks to particularly foster a transnational and cross-cultural dialogue as well as an interdisciplinary understanding between academics, scholarly traditions, ontologies, and epistemologies from diverse geographies and contexts. Connecting different domains of knowledge, the journal addresses theoretical and empirical questions, while also showcasing innovative methods that seek to generate new scholarly understandings, with the aim of creating a global community of academics who are mutually concerned with the promotion of sound scholarly work.
University of Applied Sciences and Arts Northwestern Switzerland (FHNW), Center for Citizenship Education and History Didactics
Postcolonial and decolonial perspectives in history education and historical culture
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The acclimation of historical thinking to the “northern spirit” of northern Canadian social studies curricula
This article details our findings from the Thinking Historically for Canada’s Future project, wherein we conducted a descriptive survey of selected social studies curricula from the Canadian territories of the Yukon, Northwest Territories, and Nunavut. Examining documents published between 1996 and 2021, we sought evidence of the presence of second-order historical thinking concepts. We found that principles of historical thinking were being acclimated to purposes and pedagogies evident in five themes that characterize the history education in northern curricula: 1) history education as cultural reclamation; 2) reconciliation and resistance framings; 3) linear and cyclical models of time; 4) the role of non-human beings; and 5) student-centred, experiential learning. We provide empirical examples of how curriculum authors in Canada’s northern territories integrate tenets of Indigenous education, incorporating knowledges, languages and cultures relevant to northern communities, while nested in a curricular system grappling with colonial and Euro-Canadian roots and ongoing influences.
This contribution examines the role of ambiguity and the integration of tolerance of ambiguity in history education in response to debates within postcolonial studies. It argues that fostering tolerance of ambiguity holds potential for supporting students in engaging with contested historical narratives, while cautioning against the risk of slipping into relativism, which may undermine orientation in interpreting the past or present. Dealing with complexity emerges as a central human challenge and appears to be a core concern of history education in our world shaped by plurality, ambiguities, contradictions, and persistent (post-/)colonial power structures. In addressing the challenges involved in cultivating tolerance of ambiguity, the contribution critically reflects on tendencies toward binary thinking in historical narratives. It emphasizes the role of history education in enabling critical dialogue and in questioning (post-/colonial) narratives, advocating a differentiated approach that takes seriously the complexities of the past, the present, the future, and their entanglements.
History and its educational relevance for overcoming tensions in current times
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Attitudes towards colonial history and postcolonialism in Germany
How much do people in Germany know about the colonial era, and how do they perceive contemporary historical culture that addresses this period? Do they consider such engagement relevant? Do they recognise connections between the colonial past and the present? And how, if at all, do they relate the colonial era to other historical events and developments? These questions are central to the project Colonial History, Historical Culture, and Historical-Political Education in North Rhine-Westphalia (Kolonialgeschichte, Geschichtskultur und historisch-politische Bildung in Nordrhein-Westfalen). This working paper outlines the project’s structure, research questions, and methodology. In addition, it presents initial findings from one of its core studies, conducted in collaboration with the polling institute forsa. To date, this study constitutes the first nationally representative large-scale survey on this topic in Germany. Reflecting the character of a working report, the paper also discusses methodological challenges encountered during data collection and preliminary analysis.
The colonial library and its discontents
This paper examines, focusing on the Indigenous period, how colonial epistemologies have shaped archaeology, museum display, and formal education in the Canary Islands, asking how coordinated legal, institutional, and pedagogical reforms can disrupt this “colonial library.” Drawing on a documentary corpus and a purposive sample of textbooks, the study uses thematic document analysis to identify recurrent narrative frames that marginalize Indigenous perspectives. Framed by decolonial theory and the concept of the colonial library, the paper analyses museological and curricular mechanisms of reification and presents the educational project Memorias Guanches package as a school based intervention for primary and secondary students, and as a practical example of decolonial pedagogy, that aligns classroom activities with heritage governance instruments and museum practices. Findings point to persistent Eurocentric framings, but also to institutional openings (legal reform, exhibition revisions). The article concludes with a discussion of future tasks.
This article explores the development and outcomes of an international history teacher training course initiated by researchers from Germany, The Netherlands, and Sweden. The course, part of the European University consortium EUniWell, aims to enhance teacher students’ international experiences and knowledge by facilitating encounters between students from European coun-tries. The course focuses on heritage as a central theme, theoretically framed by moral aspects, inclusion, and emotion networking in heritage and citizenship education. Through online seminars and one on-site week, held in Cologne, students engaged in international groups, visited heritage sites, and developed teaching materials. The course emphasized the importance of multiperspectivity, critical thinking, and cultural reflection in history education. Evaluations revealed positive student experiences, highlighting the value of international collaboration and the impact of heritage on learning. The findings suggest that integrating moral perspectives and inclusive practices in history education can foster democratic citizenship and enhance educational outcomes.
The numerous images of cultural difference in art history have formed part of the legitimization process of colonial ideologies. They play an important role within current debates on researching, teaching, and learning against the backdrop of colonialism. In the wake of decolonial endeavors within German-speaking academia, it is of interest to take a closer look at the discipline in Austria. Referring to Viktoria Schmidt-Linsenhoff and her thesis of the “colonial unconscious” in German art history, this paper transfers the discussion to the Austrian context. Particular attention is paid to the concept of exoticism and its manifestations in the visual arts. Using case studies from the late 19th century, this paper examines the various ways non-European people were represented at the time of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy. The entanglements of artistic practices with European colonialism emphasize the necessity of postcolonial re-readings of images in Austria’s historical culture and art history.
This article explores the colonial dimensions of Salzburg’s cultural heritage by examining the early modern Cabinet of Art and Curiosities in the former residence of the prince-archbishops. The collection serves as a case study tracing historical global entanglements of European colonialism and to critically assess museal practices. Drawing on both archival sources and secondary literature, we reflect on the historical creation and contemporary exhibition, as well as its framing and persistent Eurocentric narratives and imaginaries of non-European cultures and nature. We argue that, due to Salzburg’s historical special position within the Holy Roman Empire and ideological heritage, the decision to preserve, rather than transform, the Cabinet has become central for the current form of the exhibition.
Problematising the ‘hegemony’ of epistemic ‘universalism’
In contemporary times, history education has been the subject of rigorous debates about the type of knowledge that should shape and define the South African school history curriculum. At the heart of these debates lie questions of epistemology – the idea of what constitutes evidence and valid knowledge or truth when dealing with the past. Within these debates, the paper critiques epistemic universalism. While it cannot be disputed that these Western epistemologies of history are important, universalising their existence creates hegemony, reified by coloniality, which the paper intends to challenge. Subsequently, as an exemplar, the paper interrogates two curriculum documents, focusing on the apartheid school history syllabus of 1967 and the post-apartheid school history curriculum of 2011, as a way of problematising how hegemony leads to epistemicide in relation to history education.
Decolonising Australian history education
History education communities worldwide are grappling with the imperative to decolonise history education. Australian history education researchers are uniquely placed to contribute to this project, owing to their experience of decolonising history education within a settler-colonial context. We do not claim to have any quick fixes, however, recent scholarship provides practical strategies for enacting decolonising approaches and elevating sovereign First Nations voices in history classrooms. The article encapsulates these strategies as actions centred on critically reflecting, listening, learning, localising and evaluating. It also illustrates how the concepts of place, positionality, and settler colonialism provide theoretical underpinnings for this work. Overall, it shows that although structural reforms need to be led by First Nations leaders and communities, non-Indigenous educators have a responsibility for decolonising history education and themselves. International readers will be interested in how these approaches and challenges converge with those in their own contexts.
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How to use image interpretation scaffolds in history classrooms
Images, particularly photographs, are ubiquitous in history education, offering opportunities for fostering historical reasoning. However, adolescents often engage with images passively and superficially, rather than thoroughly and critically examining them. This article introduces two image interpretation scaffolds – sequenced and flexible – that can support adolescent students in the analysis and interpretation of visual historical sources. Connecting integration of the scaffolds to didactical frameworks, this overview discusses how they can promote active inquiry and critical reasoning. Further, this article shows the complementary role of internet search and AI tools (e.g., ChatGPT) in fostering deeper engagement during the analysis and interpretation with the scaffolds. Practical recommendations are provided for history educators to use the sequenced and flexible image interpretation scaffolds effectively, enabling students to view reasoning about and with images not merely as a passive process but as an active inquiry of the past.
History education in transition – transcultural dialogue on historical thinking, learning, and culture. Editorial
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How can history teachers respond to post-truth?
History teachers currently grapple with the impact of misinformation and political polarisation on their discipline. The concerns about these two factors have become more prominent as forms of inequality have widened significantly in the wake of responses to COVID-19. These shifts have taken place at around the same time as an authoritarian-leaning trend has begun to develop, which is underpinned by the assumption that historical and moral decline might be arrested by a sudden and radical shift in policy and leadership. Therefore, the core question of this Miniature is: How can teachers integrate historical consciousness as part of teaching and learning, to respond to post-truth? The first section will contextualise post-truth conditions, while the second will sketch the curriculum context, and a third will suggest how historical consciousness might be applied using a literacy focus, as part of mapping elements to a teaching context in New South Wales, Australia.
Teaching local difficult history through primary sources
Teaching about local, difficult pasts can center students, their communities, and civic action. However, doing so poses personal and professional challenges. Drawing from Critical Historical Inquiry and Activity Theory, this study explored how six experienced secondary social studies teachers reasoned about selecting primary sources to teach the history of policing and activism in Detroit. As teachers developed their text-sets, they navigated a variety of tensions related to their instructional goals, beliefs, and knowledge of students’ identities and communities. We focus on two common areas of tension: how to teach the racialized history of Detroit policing while positioning students as sense-makers and while attending to students’ affective well-being. Findings highlight the complex, situated nature of pedagogical reasoning and the promises and challenges of a critical historical inquiry approach to local, difficult history. Findings also underscore the value of teachers’ multidimensional expertise in designing difficult history curricula.
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The interview with Carmen Gloria Zúñiga González from Pontifical Catholic University of Chile addresses key questions about transcultural dialogue, the role of historical thinking, and the challenges of teaching history. The starting point is the question of how transcultural dialogue and historical thinking have changed in recent years from the perspective of the interviewee. The interview also discusses how transcultural academic exchange can be promoted, taking into account different educational contexts and social values. It further considers how to ensure that the academic debate is not dominated only by socially or economically privileged groups. Other topics include the role of digitalisation and online communities in history education, and the benefits of cross-disciplinary approaches. The extent to which current global challenges such as pandemics, wars and climate change underline the need for increased transcultural exchange in history education will also be addressed.
There are clear challenges and is a clear need for action
The interview with Johannes Meyer-Hamme from University of Paderborn, Germany, addresses key questions about transcultural dialogue, the role of historical thinking, and the challenges of teaching history. The starting point is the question of how transcultural dialogue and historical thinking have changed in recent years from the perspective of the interviewee. The interview also discusses how transcultural academic exchange can be promoted, taking into account different educational contexts and social values. It further considers how to ensure that the academic debate is not dominated only by socially or economically privileged groups. Other topics include the role of digitalisation and online communities in history education, and the benefits of cross-disciplinary approaches. The extent to which current global challenges such as pandemics, wars and climate change underline the need for increased transcultural exchange in history education will also be addressed.
History educators are well positioned to connect, or reconnect, young people to their environmental relations, if they can expand the purposes and vehicles for history learning. This effort may include historical thinking, while also moving beyond it towards better understanding and upholding our relationships to the planet. We offer history educators a set of considerations as they plan experiences for learning that bring environmental topics into their teaching, bridging between theoretical literature and practical guidance. The four facets of experiences for learning on which we focus are: 1) eco-emotional literacy, 2) nature connectedness through experiential learning, 3) storying, and 4) inquiry practices. All facets are characterized by understanding how the past, present, and future are connected in ways that move towards overcoming anthropocentrism. To illustrate the possible learning outcomes of this approach to history education, we describe a teaching unit entitled “What is the story of this watershed?”
This evaluation study investigated the impact of a historicizing workshop on terrorism in Dutch secondary education on students’ self-reported fear levels, statistical and historical knowledge concerning terrorism, and perceived control. Our pedagogy emphasized terrorism’s historical roots and provided facts about the threat of terrorism and knowledge to help students gain a sense of control over it. We used a pretest-posttest design and mixed-method approach. 390 students completed a survey before and after the workshop and 20 students were interviewed. The quantitative results show that students gained statistical and historical knowledge concerning terrorism and experienced a significant increase in perceived control over the threat of terrorism. Moreover, they showed a significant reduction in fear levels. The qualitative results tentatively suggest that increasing knowledge on terrorism (factual, historical, and knowledge on preventing attacks and managing their impact) can help reduce fear. This paper provides implications for teaching terrorism in secondary education.
Student voice in history teacher education
This is a theoretical-conceptual paper that draws on autoethnography to explore using pedagogies in history teacher education that bring student voices and student knowledge production to the centre of the teaching and learning process. These proposed pedagogies are used to create a foundation that centers marginalized knowledges, histories, and historical narratives. This is proposed as a decolonial pedagogy, or a pedagogy built on decolonial impulses, and is invoked as such. Through an auto-ethnographic approach, this paper explores these pedagogies as used in a history methodology course in a Bachelor of Education program in a university in South Africa, to propose the pedagogies that are explored. As the paper is theoretical-conceptual, the data draws from the autoethnographic aspect is used to explore the potential of the pedagogies rather than proving their impacts.
Is there something that connects the diversity of historical narratives?
The interview with Kenneth Nordgren from Karlstad University, Sweden, addresses key questions about transcultural dialogue, the role of historical thinking, and the challenges of teaching history. The starting point is the question of how transcultural dialogue and historical thinking have changed in recent years from the perspective of the interviewee. The interview also discusses how transcultural academic exchange can be promoted, taking into account different educational contexts and social values. It further considers how to ensure that the academic debate is not dominated only by socially or economically privileged groups. Other topics include the role of digitalisation and online communities in history education, and the benefits of cross-disciplinary approaches. The extent to which current global challenges such as pandemics, wars and climate change underline the need for increased transcultural exchange in history education will also be addressed.
In light of multiple crises in the Anthropocene, the required major transformation in various societal and political realms is fraught with challenges and obstacles. In particular, the areas of education and training play a pivotal role in being able to respond “responsibly” to these ambiguities. Using two examples, one from the practice of political action, one from the practice of historical theory, the text problematizes the difficulties, but also the possibilities of “doing” responsibility through the lens of critical historical-political education.
This article is about how dealing with historical experiences of violence and their victims shapes politically relevant attitudes towards violence and how this can be anchored in history didactics. We are interested in the situation in which events that occurred far in the past do not leave pupils indifferent, but rather affect them. Using a nationwide history competition among Russian students, we examine several dozen student works to understand how students engage with narratives about victims and what reactions these narratives evoke. Our findings show that while students show great sympathy for the suffering of victims, this sympathy does not necessarily translate into an attitude that can prevent future violence and promote attitudes critical of power. We argue that historical consciousness arising from the emotional confrontation with historical experiences of suffering is strongly dependent on the prevailing political culture.
This article presents the findings of a qualitative study that explored how 53 students (15-year-olds) narratively determine historical significance in written assignments after an inquiry that compared three genocides, namely the Holocaust, the Cambodian genocide, and the Rwandan genocide. This study takes up the proposal to distinguish between relevance and significance in establishing historical significance. Significance refers to the knowledge and procedures that are related to the historian´s discipline and important for understanding a historical phenomenon. Relevance refers to historical events and processes that people perceive as relevant to understand the present world. The American Inquiry Design Model, which centers on a compelling question, can combine a qualifying dimension of significance with a contemporary dimension of relevance, to qualify students’ historical thinking in combination with a student life-world perspective. The results show that the two dimensions converge and amplify each other and are important to address in history education.
Is there a place for hope in history education?
To hope is an integral part of being a human (Webb, 2012). Several educators have suggested that hope should play a crucial role in education to empower young people to shape their own futures and build resilience (hooks, 2003; Freire, 1994; Jacops, 2005; Vlieghe, 2019; de Winter, 2024). I propose that history can and should offer inspiring examples to provide hope for the future, but teaching "hopeful histories" presents both historiographical and ideological challenges. With this miniature I want to start a broader discussion by exploring the question: Is there a place for hope in history education?
Historicus* in Resonance, Understanding, Encounter
In this miniature the author of the book “Historicus* - Wie wir Geschichte erleben” (2023) presents his key ideas to an English-speaking audience. He analyses individual “historical acts”, describing them under the perspective of “Resonance”, “Understanding”, and “Encounter” and uses various language games to do this (e.g. Hartmut Rosa, Charles Taylor, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Avishai Margalit or Emanuel Levinas). At the end he transforms his theoretical results into the profile of a persona called Historicus*
Standardized assessment of historical thinking competencies in an intervention study using perspectives on German history
To assess the efficacy of an intervention study on the German post-1990 transformation targeting historical thinking, this paper presents the development of a standardized test designed to measure epistemological understanding and methodological competencies. Following a validation study (N = 354 students), we employed a revised test in an intervention study with N = 1,301 high school students in Baden-Württemberg. The newly developed tests underwent analysis concerning their psychometric criteria. The final test contained 38 items with various stimuli (e.g., interview snippets, cartoons) utilizing closed-format responses. The methodological test exhibited sufficient reliability and extensive overlap with a selection of items from an established test. However, the epistemological test showed some limitations in both reliability and validity, suggesting a potential opportunity for improvement through revision. Students’ grades in history and German, cognitive skills, and socioeconomic status predicted their ability scores based on two-parameter logistic (2PL) item response models for both tests.
"Simply" talking about the Anthropocene?
The Anthropocene seems to be on everyone’s lips these days. Whether as a turning point in Earth’s history, a geological epoch, or as a cultural narrative and metaphor, the Anthropocene is currently being debated not only in the scientific disciplines, but also as a fashionable buzzword in the media, popular culture, and the arts. Conversely, some scholars have argued that the term perpetuates anthropocentrism, Eurocentrism, and global inequalities rather than “demystifying” them. Use of the term itself would seemingly encourage ongoing processes of depoliticization. In what follows, I will trace this supposed depoliticization of the Anthropocene. Ultimately, I argue that a critical look at notions of temporality and timescale could not only reveal the politics of the Anthropocene and initiate new modes of historical thinking, but also shake the foundations of history education.
This miniature offers a provocation to consider both how and why the teaching of differing perspectives in history classrooms is undertaken in different nations and the relationship this has with citizenship in liberal democracies. Drawing on some initial survey data from Australian history teachers, the authors highlight the inconsistent understanding of the concept of perspective and the pressing need to maintain a focus on different perspectives at a time when far-right conservativism seeks to establish a monovocal grand narrative that returns to a ‘history of the victors’ approach to the detriment of multicultural, democratic societies.
The article was written in the aftermath of an international summer school held in Prague and St. Gallen in the context of the research and public history project “Train to Freedom” by St. Gallen University of Teacher Education, Charles University in Prague, and other partners. Students and teacher students from the involved universities developed didactical concepts for a virtual tour, a so-called “IWalk”, covering important chapters of the life of Holocaust survivor Petr Fiala, using excerpts of the testimony he gave to the USC Shoah Foundation in 1997 as well as historical photographs, maps, and archival documents. Fiala was one of the 1200 prisoners who boarded the “Train to Freedom” that brought them to Switzerland in February 1945. The aim of this hands-on student project was to develop an interactive educational tool for high school students and a wider public that conveys an actor-centered transnational migration history.