News

Stories We Inherit, Stories We Make: History, Culture and Belonging

Posted by Jason Todd on 2026-01-21

It has taken me eight years to write publicly from my doctoral research. Anyone who has been through peer review will know how demanding that process can be: condensing years of ethnographic work into a single article, opening yourself up to searching questions, and learning to wait. But time also brings perspective. Returning to this work now, I do so with deep warmth towards the thirteen young [...]

A more-than-human experiment

Posted by Katherine Elisabeth Wallace on 2026-01-20

My article reflects on a problem I have been contemplating for some time now: how do you teach history in classrooms when you know there is more than one way of encountering, representing, and understanding the past? In the context of the Special Issue this article appears in this question becomes, how do you manage “outside” versions of the past that conflict with the “inside” of the history [...]

Supporting Historically Informed Civic Leaders

Posted by Sara Karn, Kristina R Llewellyn and Penney Clark on 2025-11-12

How can textbooks support the development of historically informed civic leaders within a democratic society? As we suggest in our article, Never the two shall meet? Connecting historical and democratic consciousness in Canadian K-12 history textbooks: by paying greater attention to the connections between historical and democratic consciousness. And by this we mean developing both temporal and [...]

“What can we actually do?” The place of ALL teachers in developing Democratic Consciousness in Australia

Posted by David Nally, Steven Kolber and Keith Heggart on 2025-11-11

Teachers, especially history teachers, are crucial to helping students realise their role as citizens within our democratic society. Typically, Australian democracy is an exercise in national unity; In 2024 it represented an airing of divisions. Racial, regional, and economic fissures were aired, yet at the same time we also saw the highest number of democratic elections in world history (nearly [...]

How can poetry be used to learn and teach history?

Posted by Sarah Godsell on 2025-11-07

In our article, we argue that poetry is a site of history education and exploration. We do this by looking at two types of poetry use in history education: firstly, we look at using published poems. We take two examples and look at how they can be used to convey a historical argument, a historical perspective, and a historical moment. We also think about the poems beyond a ‘historical thinking’ [...]

The forgotten half of the past world. The representation of women in Flemish and Hungarian history textbooks for secondary education

Posted by Karel Van Nieuwenhuyse on 2025-09-29

Think for yourself about ten names of people who you believe played an important role in world history. Chances are you will immediately come up with names such as Jesus, Mohammed, Genghis Khan, Columbus, Michelangelo, Voltaire, Watt, Smith, or Hitler. Strikingly, they are all men. It is probably not so easy to spontaneously come up with names of women. Yet throughout world history, women have [...]

History Textbooks Under the Microscope – A New Approach through Latent Profile Analysis

Posted by Ulrike Kipman and Christoph Kühberger on 2025-09-11

When we look back at our own schooling, many of us remember the history textbook as a constant companion. It structured lessons, framed what was important, and often carried an aura of authority. But as researchers, we began to wonder: How do students themselves actually experience these books? And what does that mean for how they learn to think about history? This curiosity led us to conduct a [...]

UCL Press’s History Education Research Journal Now Indexed in Scopus!

Posted by HERJ Editorial Office on 2025-07-30

We are proud to announce that the History Education Research Journal (HERJ) is now indexed in Scopus, a leading abstract and citation database for peer-reviewed literature. This achievement marks a significant milestone for HERJ and the global community of scholars working at the intersection of history education and pedagogy. Scopus indexing ensures that research published in HERJ is now more [...]

Reimagining the Past: The Role of Immersive Learning Experiences in History Education

Posted by Wouter Smets and Vincent Euser on 2025-07-16

Museums are undergoing a transformation that has profound implications for history education. Our research article, “A Comparative Case Study of Two Immersive Learning Experiences in Museums”, provides an analysis into how emerging immersive technologies are redefining educational experiences beyond the traditional classroom. This study is an exploration of how history education can thrive in [...]

History Education Beyond the Classroom

Posted by HERJ Editorial Office on 2025-06-17

The History Education Research Journal is excited to share the launch and publication of a new special series on ‘History Education Beyond the Classroom’. Edited by Prof Arthur Chapman (IOE, UCL’s Faculty of Education and Society, UK) and Prof Rūta Kazlauskaitė (University of Helsinki, Finland), this open access special series brings together a collection of high-quality articles that explore [...]

Teaching History in HE during the pandemic and beyond

Posted by Marcus Collins and Jamie Wood on 2025-06-16

In the year or so after the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, History teaching in UK higher education was transformed, as lectures and seminar were shifted online, fieldtrips became impossible, and examination halls were closed. We – history lecturers – had to shift our teaching online and our students were forced to work remotely, foregoing much that is vital to the ‘student experience’ [...]

Burden of Benefit: Is Professional Development Beneficial in the History Classroom?

Posted by Jeffrey M Byford, Presley Shilling and Alisha Milam on 2025-06-05

Since the increased emphasis on high-stakes testing in the United States, school administrators have prioritized professional development to enhance content knowledge and teaching methods in the classroom. Traditionally, professional development has focused on subject areas considered vital to national interests. Subjects such as mathematics, science, and language arts receive the majority of [...]

How do we grasp genocide in the classroom?

Posted by Fredrik Stenhjem Hagen and Vidar Fagerheim Kalsås on 2025-05-28

As the Holocaust becomes an ever-increasing part of history teaching on all levels around the globe, questions on how and why teachers should approach the topic have been studied and discussed multiple times. So much in fact, that there is a specific term for the field: Holocaust Education. Scholars who have critically engaged with Holocaust Education have over the last decades pointed out [...]

Teaching Truth in a Time of Suppression: White History Teachers Navigate the CRT Backlash

Posted by Charley Brooks on 2025-05-07

Since 2020, classrooms across the United States have become battlegrounds in a culture war over how to teach race and racism. Sparked by a wave of legislation that claims to ban "critical race theory" (CRT), these efforts are less about an academic legal theory and more about restricting conversations about systemic inequality in education. Though CRT as a framework originated in legal [...]

Everyday History: Exploring Informal Historical Learning in Children's Homes

Posted by Christoph Kühberger on 2025-04-25

How do children develop a sense of history before formal schooling begins? In my article, I explore how children between the ages of 7 and 12 engage with the past in informal contexts—through toys, books, costumes, games, and media within their home environments. Based on ethnographic research conducted in 39 Austrian households, this study offers insight into a largely overlooked form of [...]