This article focuses on the controversies surrounding a statue in the Dutch city of Tilburg: the public representation of a nineteenth-century missionary and a kneeling African Surinamese person with leprosy. To understand the current tensions over the statue, the concept of historical consciousness as part of the Dutch changing historical culture…

In history education, the deconstruction of narratives is an important skill for students. The skill teaches them to look critically at the offered texts. In this study, we investigated the extent to which students are able to critically analyse the narratives in their history textbooks. To answer this question, we asked 106 students in…

History education frequently aims at developing active citizenship by using the past to orientate to the present and the future. A pedagogy for pursuing this aim is making connections between the past and the present by means of comparing cases of an enduring human issue. To examine the feasibility and desirability of this case-comparison teaching…

Bjorn Wansink and his co-authors have aligned their teaching of a recent and controversial historical issue--the Cold War--in the light of a contemporary incident. This article demonstrates a means of ensuring that students understand that different cultures' views of their shared past are nuanced, rather than monolithic--a different concept in…

The aim of this explorative study was to develop and test a pedagogy aimed at promoting students' ability to perform historical contextualization. Teaching historical contextualization was conceptualized in terms of four pedagogical design principles: (1) making students aware of the consequences of a present-oriented perspective when examining…

This paper studies the teacher perceived applicability of historical topics for interpretational history teaching and the criteria teachers use to evaluate this applicability. For this study, 15 expert history teachers in the Netherlands striving for interpretational history teaching were purposefully selected. Teachers were asked to mention…

One of the challenges facing students who want to make sense of a source or an interpretation of the past is the need to place it in its context. Various research studies have shown that students tend instead to approach sources and interpretations with a form of "presentism" resulting in a number of misconceptions and misunderstandings.…

In 1855 the Revd C. E. Van Koetsveld established his "School for Idiots" in The Hague. Within two years, he had also opened a boarding facility that accommodated many of his pupils. Legal regulations demanded authorisation for a child to be placed in this asylum. This procedure included a questionnaire on the condition of the child. The…

This article investigates the role of the recent revolutionary past in post-Napoleonic history education in the Southern Netherlands. From 1794 until 1815 the Southern Netherlands had been incorporated into the French revolutionary state and the Napoleonic Empire, respectively. Often, the experience of the revolution is associated with the birth…

In this article the authors focus on how features of a computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL) environment can elicit and support domain-specific reasoning and more specifically historical reasoning. The CSCL environment enables students to collaborate on a historical inquiry task and in writing an argumentative essay. In order to support…