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Filtering tag: history education
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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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 [...]
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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 [...]
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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’ [...]
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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 [...]
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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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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 [...]
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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 [...]
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History education in Portugal
Posted by Mariana Lagarto on 2024-12-12
This article is part of the special series History education in historical perspective that explores different national contexts of history education. The article provides historical insight of this research field in Portugal and it was grounded on data collected and analysed from a literature review and interviews with Isabel Barca (pioneer of history education in Portugal), Helena Pinto and [...]
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Comparative portrayals of the British Empire in history textbooks, 1920s–2020s
Posted by Catriona McDermid and Stuart Foster on 2024-12-06
For this special series of HERJ on History Education in Historical Perspective, we wanted to link the theme of the series with our current research exploring how the British Empire, migration and belonging are taught in English secondary schools (see portraitemb.co.uk). We compared how histories of the British Empire were narrated in English history textbooks from the 1920s and 1930s with how [...]
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History Education in Historical Perspective
Posted by HERJ Editorial Office on 2024-11-06
The History Education Research Journal is excited to share the launch and publication of a new special series on ‘History Education in Historical Perspective’. Edited by Dr Tyson Retz (University of Stavanger, Norway) and Prof Terry Haydn (University of East Anglia, UK), this open access special series brings together a collection of high-quality articles that explore different national [...]
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Learning from history – how could it work?
Posted by Maren Tribukait on 2024-10-25
There has been a lot of discussion on whether it is possible to learn from history – especially from the abysses of the 20th century. In the current political situation, this question seems to be more relevant than ever as quite a few people seem to have forgotten about the era of National Socialism and fascism. Although there might be a lot of reasons for this, I wondered whether the pedagogical [...]
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Do they know national history?
Posted by Ana Isabel Moreira and Isabel Barca on 2024-09-12
Our article in History Education Research Journal brought together Portuguese students from two different educational levels (6th and 9th grade) and based on their written narratives, we tried to understand how they use historical knowledge on a specific subject. In this case, each student told the History of Portugal that they knew, and the content of these texts allowed us to study two main [...]
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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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