The teaching of history is connected to sensitive issues, which provoke social divisions and debates and which do not have scientific consensus. Sensitivity is explained by the social missions of history teaching: to catalyse the construction of identity, to build a border between "us" and "the other - the stranger". The…

Determined to do justice to the complexity of the seventeenth century, as a messy but crucial period in British history, and to develop their pupils' disciplinary understanding of how and why interpretations of the past are constructed, Dan Keates and his department set out to exploit the rich seam of interpretations of Cromwell. The quest to…

Adding further insight into how historical thinking can be used as a lens to examine debates about difficult historical events and philosophies, Gabriel Reich's piece on continuity, change, and historical consciousness shifts the focus to the U.S. context. Reich points out that in the case of Confederate monuments, their greatest power may be in…

This article recounts our efforts as three critical teacher educators to respond to the postelection aftermath at an Hispanic-serving institution by organizing a conference aimed at re(engaging) our students in the kinds of critical conversations we deem essential to the profession. By considering the ways in which neoliberal ideology has shaped…

In this article Kerry Apps introduces students to the significance of the witch-hunts in the modern era, at the time when they occurred, and in the middle of the eighteenth century. She presents her rationale for choosing the witch-hunts as a focus for the study of significance, and shows how her thinking about her teaching has evolved through her…

Historians collect and verify evidence and then interpret it in an acceptable way. A general consensus is that history does not present us with an absolute truth -- the most we can hope for is historians' reliable, evidentially based interpretations of the historical topic. History not viewed as interpretation has long raised alarm bells in…

This article presents the current perception of dialogical teaching models as a notion that is concerned primarily with the cognitive layers of the dialogue, and focuses on the cognitive functions of learning, information processing, interpretation and decision-making. This perception, according to different researchers, ignores the relational…

Purpose: The article shows the use of specific educational media in social studies in vocational schools to foster a differentiated historical and political literacy. Design/methodology/approach: Accordingly, the article examines a sequence of lessons taught by the author in a vocational classroom, fostering reflexive historical-political…

As the twentieth anniversary of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda approaches, Mark Gudgel argues that we should face the challenges posed by teaching about Rwanda. Drawing on his experience as a history teacher in the US, his experience researching and supporting others' classrooms in the US and UK, his training in Holocaust education and his knowledge…

Alison Stephen, who has wrestled for many years with the challenges of teaching emotional and controversial history within a multiethnic school setting, relished the opportunity to link her school's teaching of the Holocaust with a comparative study of other genocides. As she reports, her aim was to not create a hierarchy of suffering or…

The most common activity in a social studies classroom should be the analysis of primary sources. Students are intrigued and engaged by edited and unedited documents, written statements, transcribed speeches, photographs, pictures, charts, graphs, cartoons, and even material objects. Ideally, the goal of social studies teachers is to prepare…

This study illustrates the processes by which 8 pairs of adolescents in Northern Ireland struggled to come to grips with tensions between school and community history. Findings are based on data collected through open-ended, semi-structured interviews with students from a variety of backgrounds. Although these students appreciated the attempt by…

Holocaust education has been most successful in creating empathy, historical understanding and present responsibility against racism/antisemitism and towards human rights by telling true stories of children, women and men who were victims of these crimes during the Nazi period, while also raising awareness of the consequences for the present. The…

Background/Context: Emotions often accompany discussions of ethnic matters, yet there have been few sustained investigations in education of how, and with what implications, emotional responses are (de)legitimized in the classroom, especially when conflicting historical narratives are involved. Emotions have remained in the margins of educational…

The social studies profession has always been at its weakest in dealing with the analysis of racism and class (Ladson-Billings, 2003; Marshall, 2001), and the new technocratic atmosphere and discourse generated by No Child Left Behind (NCLB) will serve to make such analysis completely absent, despite the rhetoric of the National Council of the…