My article, Designing historical empathy learning experiences: a pedagogical tool for history teachers, explores the pedagogies that history teachers use to foster historical empathy—a cognitive (thinking) and affective (feeling) process of attempting to understand the thoughts, feelings, experiences, decisions, and actions of people from the past, within their historical contexts. For this study, I conducted interviews with secondary school history teachers. In Canada, where the teachers I interviewed are located, historical empathy and its associated affective dimensions have been marginalised within historical thinking research and practice. Instead, the more cognitive-oriented term ‘historical perspectives’ is used in the historical thinking framework conceptualised by Peter Seixas, which has been taken up in provincial and territorial curricula across Canada. In part because of the exclusion of historical empathy from this historical thinking framework, scholars have paid little attention to understanding how teachers in Canada approach historical empathy in their history classes, if at all. The findings of this study highlight that historical empathy is nurtured by teachers over time using a variety of different teaching approaches and choices, as well as activities, tasks, and projects.

This study’s findings are part of a larger study of historical empathy within history education in Canada, entitled Perspectives on Historical Empathy for History Education in Canada: Purposes, Problems, and Possibilities. For many of the history teachers I spoke with, despite being seasoned teachers, they sometimes struggled to incorporate historical empathy explicitly into their teaching, due to a lack of resources to support their pedagogical approaches. This was especially true when it came to engaging the affective dimensions of learning about the past. To help address these challenges, I decided to create a pedagogical tool (Figure 1 in this article) to guide the design of historical empathy learning experiences, which is directly informed by my conversations with history teachers. In publishing this article in the History Education Research Journal, an international, open-access journal focused on history education, my hope is that this will be an accessible and useful tool for history teachers across different educational contexts and grade levels. I look forward to hearing from teachers about how they use this pedagogical tool in practice, as well as conducting future studies to explore how the tool may be expanded to address other considerations, challenges, and approaches. In the meantime, the ideas offered by teachers in this study provide other teachers with starting points for planning historical empathy learning experiences.

Designing historical empathy learning experiences: a pedagogical tool for history teachers by Sara Karn (McMaster University, Canada) is published in History Education Research Journal, volume 21

Sara Karn is a Postdoctoral Fellow for Thinking Historically for Canada’s Future, based at McMaster University in Hamilton, Canada. She received her PhD in Education from Queen’s University in 2023. Sara is also a certified K-12 teacher in Ontario and has taught courses for pre-service teachers. Her research, publishing, and teaching spans the fields of history and social studies education, experiential learning, and environmental and climate change education. Learn more about Sara’s research and teaching on her website, which features other historical empathy resources for educators.

interviews qualitative research history teachers teaching and learning pedagogy historical thinking history education historical empathy