The paper critiques the curriculum construction of historical consciousness within Australian school systems. National and trans-national discourses about identity, culture, gender, race and class influence the development of historical consciousness in Australian classrooms. During this unprecedented period of shared grief and global trauma,…

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,…

This article discusses the challenges faced teaching the promotion of 'British values', especially for trainee teachers. The advancement of these 'British values' as set out by the Department for Education is confusing, contradictory, and appear to exclude a sizeable minority of pupils of minority backgrounds from the current historical narrative…

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…

This paper critically examines the framing of historical knowledge in the primary and "broad general education" phases (ages 4-14) of Scotland's "Curriculum for Excellence". The paper focuses on curriculum documentation, particularly the curriculum's aims and "Experiences and Outcomes" and evaluates these in light of…

The article discusses the link between a curriculum based on academic subjects derived from disciplinary knowledge and a progressive pedagogy that endeavours to engage students from all backgrounds with it. Section 1 describes the realist theory of knowledge which justifies the argument for this accommodation between curriculum and pedagogy.…

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…

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…

The teaching of history has attracted more controversy and media attention than any other subject in the ongoing reform of the curriculum in Scottish primary and secondary schools, "A curriculum for excellence." This gives head teachers increased powers to decide on the curriculum as long as it satisfies four general capacities rather…

This article discusses the increasing emphasis on using pictorial sources in teaching, learning and assessment in history and asserts that pedagogies for interpreting visual imagery need to be purposefully aligned in relation to the particular media or production contexts under study. Expecting students to be able to glean meaning from images…

Interactive whiteboards (IWBs) have rapidly become an integral feature of many classrooms across the UK and elsewhere, but debate continues regarding the pedagogical implications of their use. This article reports on an in-depth case-study from the wider T-MEDIA project (Teacher Mediation of Subject Learning with ICT: a Multimedia Approach). A key…

'Europe' has been increasingly 'invented' and 'reinvented' in discussions about education, curricula and identities over the last five decades. The 'European dimension in education' was a term increasingly used by the European Union and the Council of Europe to denote their educational policies encouraging national educational systems to endorse a…

This article addresses the themes of this special issue by examining the disciplinary dimensions of learning and teaching within undergraduate courses in the areas of biology and history. Key ways of thinking and practising that biology and history lecturers wished to foster in their students are identified. It presents a relational view of the…

This article raises general questions regarding the relations between curriculum and ideology in reforming, specifically indigenizing the curriculum by focusing on the importance attached to the history curriculum under reform circumstances. Through an examination of indigenization of history curriculum in the context of Kyrgyzstan, a post-Soviet…

This article explores pupil attitudes towards history as a school subject in England, with a view to developing a better understanding of the factors which influence disaffection or engagement with the subject. The study attempts to identify what pupils like and dislike about how they are taught and what they are taught in history lessons. The…