The concept of 'powerful knowledge' has become extremely influential in discussions about curriculum in England over the last ten years. However, the concept seems to have done little to revolutionise curriculum design, and in some cases it has led to curricular narrowing and a focus on an increasingly nationalistic narrative in history. Michael…

Controversial issues are often regarded as abundant in history education. Most topics can be regarded as controversial in one way or another. The purpose of this article is to analyse the way history teachers in Swedish lower secondary schools relate controversial issues to a particular view of the nature of the subject of history. By analysing…

In a 2017 book chapter on the continuing erasure of Indigenous epistemes in academia, the Sami scholar Rauna Kuokkanen posed an important question: is it acceptable for a site of learning to be so ignorant? Foregrounding Indigenous scholarship from the Arctic, this article examines the potential of history education to address this question. Based…

We have studied how eliciting historical empathy in a class of 13th grade students through using the film "12 Years a Slave" (McQueen, 2013) supported their in-depth understanding of slavery in nineteenth-century USA. Historical empathy is one of the core elements of the new curricular reform implemented from 2020 in Norway, and it is…

Analysis of primary sources has been recognised to have a significant impact on the development of students' historical thinking. This study explored US history teachers' attitudes and practices to using primary sources by interviewing six history teachers and observing 29 history lessons between August and November 2016 in Indiana and California.…

Amid a growing national debate regarding the current health and future direction of the history curriculum in Britain, there have been numerous calls for an examination of its roles and purposes, and questions have been raised as to how far it engages an increasingly diverse student body. This article examines the perceptions and attitudes of…

This article analyses the changes in education legislation and the history curriculum in Spain over recent decades. To this end, the characteristics established for the teaching of history in the last two education laws, passed in 2013 and 2020 -- the first by a conservative government and the second by a progressive one -- are studied and…

This article considers the representation of the controversial issue of the Great Irish Famine (1845-50) in 27 recent Irish and UK history textbooks for the secondary level. Key contested issues -- imports and exports, the British government's laissez-faire economic policy, providentialist interpretations, and victim--perpetrator discourses --…

Addressing legacies of past injustice is a central concern for transitional justice. It has most commonly been attempted through a 'truth-telling' approach; it is assumed that if the truth of past injustices is made known, then justice can be acted upon within contemporary society. 'Truth telling'--and disciplinary approaches to learning about…

This article presents a study that examined the historical social narratives of 14-17-year-old Finnish-speaking adolescents in Finland and transnational settings. Our goal was to research what kinds of narratives young people would tell when they were asked to write the history of a group or nationality most suitable for them. The research…

This article focuses on an approach to the concept of historical time in early childhood education through the lens of cognitive psychology. It consists of three parts: (1) theoretical approaches, inspired by three broad scientific fields -- cognitive psychology, pedagogy and history; (2) the presentation of educational examples, formed by…

Over the past thirty years, there has been a growing body of research investigating the efficacy of pedagogical interventions to enhance the historical literacy skills of primary and secondary school students. However, there exists no systematic review or meta-analysis summarising the impact of such research or the efficacy of interventions…

This article outlines a trend in popular historical culture which has seen the increasing replacement of a concept of history that rests on some form of evidence base by visions of fictional pasts, or -- to put it more precisely -- by an ambiguous blend of the past and fictional pasts. Drawing on ethnographic research focused on the contents of…

Multiple-documents-based (inquiry) tasks are often used to examine historical thinking, as they require students to apply discipline-specific ways of reasoning and writing. Intervention studies using such tasks have often relied on principles from cognitive apprenticeship to make these discipline-specific heuristics explicit to students. While…

Student interest in studying history is in decline in Ghana, as it is in secondary schools in many other parts of the world. Can student interest be stimulated, and can they be better served, by a curriculum that includes a focus on community, belonging and co-creation? This article details a preliminary intervention of just such a learning unit…