From Bold Beginnings to an Uncertain Future: The Discipline of History and History Education (original) (raw)
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Theory & Research in Social Education, 2020
is a collection of 24 chapters written by leading international scholars in history education. The book itself is a tour de force as it aims to synthesize in a comprehensive manner "the growth of history education as its own research field" (p. 1). The rationale behind such an endeavor, as suggested in Peter Seixas's foreword, is the growing preoccupation over recent political and social events and the need for history education specialists to take a stance and move the discipline "towards the central place that it deserves" (p. xviii). There is a sense of urgency to take action that transcends the 24 chapters that compose the edited collection, as well as a collective astonishment toward the speed in which the field has grown from a side consideration shared by some historians to a fully fledge academic discipline in less than 20 years. This growth is explored through five different lenses that compose the five sections of the book. The first section considers the policy, research, and societal contexts of history education. Its chapters propose an overview of the field from its beginning to today, identifying gaps that research still needs to address. The second section is centered on the different conceptual constructs found within the discipline such as historical thinking, historical consciousness, historical reasoning, historical empathy, historical agency, and global history education. The third section explores the ties between history education, identity, and ideology. The authors question the narratives proposed in classrooms and their influence on students' agency and growing sense of identity. The fourth section is more pragmatic and includes a vast array of teaching and assessment practices. From professional development to addressing controversial issues in the classroom, the authors look at the complexity of K-12 history instruction. Finally, the fifth section's theme is historical literacies, which encompasses working with evidence, as well as teaching with alternative media such as films, games, and museums. Learning history is not limited to the walls of a classroom, and students build their understanding of the discipline through family history, films, videogames, and museum visits. Teachers have rapidly integrated these alternative media into their teaching, but their effect on students' learning is not always well known. This last section underlines how certain scholarships, such as teaching history using film, are well established, while others, such as teaching using digital simulation gaming, are still emerging fields of study. It would be impossible, due to the length requirements of this review, to summarize each of the 24 chapters individually. Instead, three general ideas that bind the chapters together will be used to give an overall sense of the book. Keeping with historical fashion, these three ideas will be, in essence, chronological as they will look at the past of the discipline, the current preoccupations in research, and the questions that should be addressed in the future.
The Missing Links in History Education
The Canadian Journal for Social Research, 2011
This article explores the relationship between historical and pedagogical specialists in the field of history education. It outlines several limitations in the current state of history education research and considers as a consequence of these limitations the disconnect between how students learn history at the secondary level and how they learn history at university. After presenting the results of a study into what university history students themselves say about this gap between high school preparation and university expectations, it concludes by offering suggestions for how to forge better connections between different groups of history teachers.
A Lesson from the Past and Some Hope for the Future: The History Academy and the Schools, 1880-2007
The History Teacher, 2008
THERE IS A LONG HISTORY in the United States of collaboration between the academy and K-12 educators.1 Indeed, history, as an academic discipline in America, began in an atmosphere of professorial concern about history's place in the schools. Frederick Jackson Turner, the originator of the famous frontier thesis of 1893, began an address to an audience of K-12 teachers in 1891 with the words "we teachers," expressing a sentiment that all of us in the academy more than a century later would do well to remember. Turner and Charles Homer Haskins
Can History Stand Alone? Drawbacks and Blind Spots of a “Disciplinary” Curriculum
Teachers College Record: The Voice of Scholarship in Education
Background/Context Over the past quarter-century, many historians, politicians, and educators have argued for an increase in the amount of history taught in schools, for a clear separation of history and social studies, and for an emphasis on disciplinary structures and norms as the proper focus for the subject. Unfortunately, discussions of history education too often rest on the problematic belief that the academic discipline can provide direction for the nature of the subject in general education. Description of Prior Research Throughout much of the 20th century, U.S. history educators made common cause with other social educators to promote principled and critical understandings of society. Both groups stood in opposition to calls for more nationalist views of history education. In the mid-1980s, however, this situation began to change, as a coalition of historians, educational researchers, and political pressure groups promoted history as a subject distinct from and independent...
Common trends in Contemporary Debates on History Education
Popp S. (ed.), Yearbook of International Society for History Didactics, 2008
In the frame of this paper, I claim that controversies –even if it is only a matter of one- in History Education is not a local phenomenon that could be explained only in relation to social and political national, or regional conditions. Globalization does not only organize everyday life. It demands that we enlarge the explanatory framework by taking into consideration the interdependence of historical phenomena on a global scale. Globalization moreover constitutes the key concept to understand humanity in its third millennium. Controversies on History Education is a typical global case, as they have acquired more and more common aspects so that they can be read overall as battles in the same war which is being waged in different parts of the world. We consequently have probably to extend the vertical and even the horizontal way to think of them in favor of the global one. What is at stake surpasses the frontiers of the nation-state in question and finally concerns future global developments and the formation of the citizenry in the contemporary world.