News

Insights into the 'engine' of historical thinking

Posted by Jonas Schobinger and Martin Nitsche on 2026-05-20

Although we often say in history education that historical questioning is the 'engine' of historical thinking (van Drie and van Boxtel, 2008, 2018), surprisingly little research has explored how people actually develop historical questions. While teachers encourage students to ask questions about the past, relatively little is known about the cognitive operations involved and how the questioning [...]

What does AI really mean for history teachers?

Posted by Rachel Moylan on 2026-05-12

Our ongoing unregulated massive public experiment with generative artificial intelligence began in earnest in November 2022. While forms of AI had been increasingly integrated into our everyday lives for decades, OpenAI’s public release of ChatGPT marked the first time many people had access to a technology that could imitate human writing in such an uncanny way. Panic set in, and questions [...]

Why Study History? Listening to Undergraduate Students

Posted by Christopher W. Berg on 2026-04-01

In the summer of 1813, John Adams wrote to Thomas Jefferson reflecting on lives lived through consequential times. His observation, that they had passed their lives in serious times, resonates across the centuries. History students today face their own serious times, and the question of why history matters has never felt more urgent or more contested. In the United States, history majors are [...]

Exploring Epistemic Rhythms in Lesson Assignments: Implications for Research, Teaching, and Learning

Posted by Mikael Berg on 2026-03-06

In my article published in the History Education Research Journal, I examine how lesson assignments on historical and contemporary societal issues are designed in schools, with a focus on the kinds of knowledge students need to answer the questions. The study explores which didactic functions teachers can achieve by linking different forms of knowledge in school tasks. The analysis is based on [...]

What is a climate justice approach to teaching history and social studies?

Posted by Heather E. McGregor and Rebecca S. Evans on 2026-02-13

It is our view that all teachers have a role to play in preparing young people for a climate-unstable present and future. But taking on that role is not easy. Teachers encounter a wide range of demands, like focusing on solutions rather than only on describing the problems, engaging in action while avoiding partisanship, emphasising local priorities such as food sovereignty, or teaching [...]

From “wow” to “aha” encounters: pupils, historical consciousness and the magic of museum objects

Posted by Victoria Sofie Percy-Smith on 2026-02-03

What happens when pupils step into a museum and encounter the materiality of the past during an educational visit? Museum education holds many possibilities and outcomes – but not all of them are necessarily “measurable”. So, what happens when we focus on the relation between pupil and object? What emerges when we pay attention to the pupils’ experiences? How might what pupils feel, notice, [...]

Join our team! New Deputy Editor vacancies

Posted by HERJ Editorial Office on 2026-01-30

HERJ is recruiting 5 x Deputy Editors The deadline for applications: 28 February 2026. History Education Research Journal (HERJ), published by UCL Press, is a leading international, Diamond open-access journal dedicated to exploring the global significance and impact of history education. As the journal continues to grow, we are excited to announce five new journal Deputy Editors positions. [...]

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 [...]