History educators and policymakers often behave as if curricula and classrooms were the key fora, forms and formats mediating young people’s historical knowledge, identities, imaginaries and forms of historical consciousness. However, just as time spent in formal education is just a fraction of the day, so time spent in formal history education accounts for just a fragment of young people’s overall historical learning. History education occurs continually, in all contexts where the intersections of public and personal pasts, presents, and futures are brought to light and negotiated in the various formal and informal settings of everyday life. This special series maps and reflects upon some of these wider fora, forms and formats of history education in their social, formal and technological variety. Bringing together a collection of high-quality articles, this series examines how these diverse forms of history education contribute to the representation, mediation, and formation of historical identities, vocabularies, experiences and imaginaries. This series explores how history education could and should think about these forms of presenting, representing and enacting pasts, and the implications of their omnipresence in young peoples’ lifeworlds for the aims, forms, contents, sites, media and impacts of formal history education.

Articles are published open access and can be read freely online by anyone; please see the article list below.

Publication date: from the 22nd April 2025

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Editors

Prof Arthur Chapman, IOE, UCL’s Faculty of Education and Society, UK
Prof Rūta Kazlauskaitė, University of Helsinki, Finland

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Articles

Research article

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