History education in historical perspective: editorial

Special issue: History Education in Historical Perspective

Two traditions loom large in the history of history education research. The first belongs to educational psychology and the attempts to draw history-specific insights from its developmental research frameworks. To this tradition we owe the insights of Jean Piaget’s ‘ages and stages’ model and Jerome Bruner’s opposing argument that any subject can be taught in an intellectually honest way to any student at any stage of development. When history educationalists turned their attention in the 1970s to identifying the fundamental concepts that structured the discipline, they did so because Bruner had brought about a paradigm shift in the way educationalists thought about teaching the school subjects. No longer was history viewed in the manner of Piaget as a difficult subject, too demanding for learners under the age of 16 to study. Bruner’s educational psychology made history accessible through concepts, leading a generation of history educationalists in quest of the ‘second order’, ‘procedural’ or ‘historical thinking’ concepts that today feature in school history curricula worldwide. This educational psychology paired well with Paul H. Hirst’s ‘forms of knowledge’ educational philosophy. The school subjects were to be viewed as disciplines that each offered a different way of experiencing the world, governed by their own rules of conceptual articulation and distinct forms of knowledge in their own right.

The second tradition that looms large in the history of history education research emanates from Germany and the distinct brand of counter-Enlightenment romanticism that nurtured the establishment of history as an independent academic discipline. The differences between the two traditions cannot be understated. Whereas the first, dominant in the English-speaking countries, casts history education as a research specialisation within a broader framework of educational psychology, the second situates history education within a complex history of German Geisteswissenschaften – the human sciences in all their diversity, together with their specialist vocabularies of historicism, hermeneutics and Bildung. As intellectual traditions, they both have their own standards of argumentation, rhetorical cultures and approaches to theory development. In its alliance with Bildung, and even before adding the word ‘history’ to ‘history didactics’, the language of ‘didactics’ alone is thoroughly historical. The project of self-transformation that it entails is one undertaken in history, lending ‘history didactics’ a more historical orientation than its psychologising ‘history education’ Anglophone counterpart.

To outline the features of these two intellectual traditions is not to imply that they operate autonomously in practice. Research into historical teaching and learning is today a truly global affair, and the distinction between an Anglophone tradition of educational psychology and a German tradition of history didactics may be easier to discern in classification than in practice. Indeed, one of the purposes of this special series is to test the validity of drawing such a distinction between the two research traditions as they inform the practice of history education research. A guiding assumption of the special series is that the circulation of ideas in increasingly globalised networks does not diminish the instructiveness of thinking carefully about the intellectual traditions sitting behind our research agendas. That background is where the assumptions we carry do their work mostly in the dark, shaping the inquiries we conduct and the questions we ask without our always fully realising it. It is an irony that history educationalists endorse the value of historical thinking while routinely failing to think historically about the inquiries they conduct and the questions they bring to them. The preponderance of psychology might partly explain this. Psychologisation requires no historicisation. Its methodological inheritances from the natural sciences sit in contrast to the humanistic aspirations of historical thinking and knowledge.

My examination of the concept of empathy in historical understanding, teaching and learning made me sensitive to the ways in which history education cannot be considered in isolation from the history of historical theory and practice. My research traced the development of two strands of history education research back to the debates of mid-twentieth-century philosophers of history concerning the sui generis character of historical understanding. The first strand was that of the London-based W. H. Burston, who promoted the idea that history teaching should be modelled on the distinct logic of historical explanation. Just as historical explanation has a logic distinguishing it from other forms of explanation, so history teachers, Burston argued, ought to teach according to that logic. The second strand was that of the Leeds-based Schools Council History Project, begun by David Sylvester and carried forward by Denis Shemilt and Peter Lee, who took their inspiration from Bruner and Hirst in developing the idea that the school subject of history should be organised around the concepts that define the discipline. This led them from the 1960s to the 1980s to engage with the philosophy of history at levels not seen since. Owing to the insights provided by philosophers of history on the distinct character of the discipline, history educationalists were able to reform the school history curriculum in ways that remain visible today.

The Canadian Peter Seixas may be credited with having globalised this previously localised, British-led work on procedural or second-order concepts. He entered into history education research in the 1990s, befriending Peter Lee and launching a project that would conclude in the elaboration of six key historical thinking concepts. James Miles (2025) in his article, ‘Researching history education in Canada: plus ça change?’, acknowledges Seixas’s influence in the Canadian context before proceeding to examine continuity and change in the national history education landscape. Keeping in mind that historical thinking concepts entered school history as part of a push to reflect the habits of mind of professional historians, Miles’s observations regarding the early withdrawal of historians from curriculum development are particularly striking. The high-water mark of historians’ involvement in shaping Canadian school history policy and curricula may already have been reached in 1923, after which educationalists assumed the leading role and viewed the historians’ retreat from the educational scene unfavourably. By contrast, educationalists’ commitment to John Dewey’s progressive educational philosophy constituted a clear line of continuity throughout twentieth-century Canadian history education.

One of the implications of the shift in educational thinking towards disciplinary methods was the greater use of primary documents in the history classroom. As early as 1910, pioneers such as M. W. Keatinge had made the case that primary source material should be incorporated, but it was only in the 1960s that Bruner’s ideas about active learning embedded primary sources within a disciplinary framework. Lindsay Gibson (2025) explores a particular application of Bruner’s educational psychology to school history in his article ‘The rise and fall of Jackdaws: lessons for designing source collections to teach history’. Gibson offers an account of the 15-year publication of the Jackdaws collections, explaining their initial appeal before outlining the limitations educators faced when using them. Although the primary source collections brought an indispensable element of the professional historian’s work into the school history classroom, they were often too difficult for students to interpret and they frequently aligned poorly with school history curricula. They were also expensive and came without the necessary pedagogical support for teachers using them. From this history of ‘brilliant idea, flawed execution’, Gibson enumerates several points that educators might keep in mind when developing primary and secondary source collections to be used in class.

Mariana Lagarto’s (2024) article, ‘History education in Portugal (a 25-year overview)’, supports the thesis that the two intellectual traditions of history education research outlined previously are today intermingled together with local particularities. Lagarto argues that Isabel Barca’s initiative to travel to the UK to study under Peter Lee at the Institute of Education was the pivotal moment that introduced history education research to Portugal. Lagarto offers an account rich in detail of the leading figures whose findings in various research projects informed Barca’s leadership of the field and the training of Portugal’s history education researchers. Having introduced disciplinary concepts, Barca then sought a more inclusive conception of historical consciousness rooted in Jörn Rüsen’s thinking on narrative competence. Barca emphasises this point in her own contribution to the special series. Her article with Ana Isabel Moreira, ‘Historical narratives: how Portuguese students aged 10 and 15 make use of national history’ (Moreira and Barca, 2024), underscores Rüsen’s influence in shifting the attention of history education researchers towards the temporal dimensions of historical consciousness and the ways in which they contribute to the construction of grand narratives and national identity formation. Interestingly, Moreira and Barca conclude by highlighting the need to supplement the temporal conception of historical consciousness with the cognitive strategies of English-language researchers, once again depicting the state of history education research as two intellectual traditions in need of synergy and alignment.

Maria Repoussi and Georgia Kouseri (2025) respond to the call to investigate the history of history education by offering an account of ‘Greek adolescents on the Asia Minor Catastrophe: perceptions of the past, views on the present, expectations for the future’. Their theoretical framework is that of German history didactics and in particular the pioneering work of H. J. Pandel whom they argue provided Rüsen with the framework that he successfully developed into an international benchmark. Repoussi and Kouseri’s findings emphasise the difficulty of learning history in the absence of received ideas about the ‘other’, in this case the mostly negative preconceptions of young Greeks towards their Turkish neighbours. Greek adolescents enter the history classroom having already encountered their nation’s historical rival in films, music, family stories and through personal interests, solidifying perceptions that prove almost impossible to eradicate, revise or reconceptualise. According to Repoussi and Kouseri, research into historical consciousness is particularly instructive in this regard because it takes adequate consideration of the extent to which informal sites of national narrative formation shape perceptions before and alongside young people’s exposure to formal history education. When so much of the research into historical consciousness is conducted within a framework of German history didactics, David Nally’s (2025) examination of the contributions of the Finnish educational scholar, Sirkka Ahonen, provides a welcome fresh perspective. Ahonen’s conceptualisation of historical consciousness shifts attention to social justice and the question of the ways in which social attachments at different scales – individual, community, national – develop vital connective tissues. In answer to the question that is the title of his article, ‘How can historical consciousness catalyse a social justice approach to history?’, Nally answers that historical consciousness can enable learners to identify the roots of inequality, to challenge the myths that sustain such systems and to create space for future-directed political and ethical engagements.

Catriona McDermid and Stuart Foster (2024) examine portrayals of the British Empire in textbooks from the periods 1920–1939 and 2015–2023. The first of the periods coincides with the waning of the empire and the so-called great tradition of history teaching in Britain – a celebration of uncontested national events delivered as a body of essential factual knowledge. Noting the important point that a considerable time lag separates developments in academic history from those in historical teaching and learning, McDermid and Foster then consider the profound changes to education that took place in Britain in the 1970s and 1980s. By radically re-envisioning history education along epistemological and procedural lines, the Schools Council History Project (SCHP) appealed to history teachers whose pupils now came in increasing numbers from Britain’s former colonies. Textbooks from the more recent period of McDermid and Foster’s analysis reflect an enduring tension, present since the days of the SCHP, between approaching history as a body of knowledge or form of knowledge. Difficulties with the more recent textbooks include a continuing and disproportionate focus on the influence of British colonial elites and a crude and unhelpful ‘balance sheet’ ethics of evaluating the legacies of the British Empire.