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Filtering tag: historical thinking
The climate crisis has a history: do Finnish textbooks teach it?
Posted by Liina-Maria Nevalainen on 2026-10-01
It matters whether history is part of how we teach about the climate crisis: shaped by human actions over time, it is fundamentally a historical phenomenon. That is why students need more than numerical data showing how the climate is changing; they need understanding of how humans have driven those changes. To participate in debates about the climate crisis, they need opportunities to examine [...]
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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 [...]
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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 [...]
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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 [...]
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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 [...]
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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 [...]
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Historical thinking, historical agency, and the future: Time and climate activism
Posted by Matthias Sieberkrob and Nina Reusch on 2025-03-12
Our article examines how climate activists in Germany think historically and thus create visions of the future. From our research, we find that the activists see themselves as part of a tradition of social movements, from civil rights to women’s suffrage, that achieved dramatic change by challenging the status quo. At the heart of our research lies the concept of ‘historical thinking towards the [...]
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A New Pedagogical Tool for Teaching with Historical Empathy
Posted by Sara Karn on 2024-06-10
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 [...]
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