Of dragons and dinosaurs: How children’s toys and games create ideas of the past, of history and of fiction

This article outlines a trend in popular historical culture which has seen the increasing replacement of a concept of history that rests on some form of evidence base by visions of fictional pasts, or – to put it more precisely – by an ambiguous blend of the past and fictional pasts. Drawing on ethnographic research focused on the contents of Austrian children’s rooms, this paper explores traceable manifestations of history and historical fiction, particularly toy dragons and dinosaurs, in their properties as objects and as focuses of their owners’ interpretations as ascertained in interviews. The research finds little clear demarcation in the minds of the children interviewed (all between 8 and 12 years old) between imaginings and cognitive attempts to reconstruct the past. The article examines the influence of these factual–fictional representations on historical thinking from a history education perspective.

‘I’m not Catholic and I’m not Protestant’: Identity, individualisation and challenges for history education in Northern Ireland

Teaching sensitive histories in post-conflict societies makes particular demands on educators to understand students’ identities and their relationships to the past. This paper expands our understanding of post-conflict youth identities and experiences of history education through a small-scale study of students’ life stories in Northern Ireland which defied sectarian boundaries in different ways: some were children of interfaith marriages, while others attended integrated schools or were part of cross-community peace-building organisations. Participants saw themselves as forging new identities and ‘moving on’ from the past, although this process was fraught with ambivalence. I describe these expressions of identity through Ulrich Beck’s (1992) model of triple individualisation. For these ‘post-sectarian’ students, school history was seen largely as a tool towards achieving qualification, far removed from their everyday struggles of self-fashioning.

Cultivating historical consciousness in the history classroom: Uncovering the subtleties of student meaning making with the help of found poetry

This article explores student meaning making in a Grade 11 US history unit on the Second World War. The 10-lesson unit was designed as an experiment that aimed to apply an instructional model of historical consciousness to a classroom context. Although the notion of historical consciousness has gained significant interest in the field of history education, translating it into educational practice remains a challenge. In this study, it refers to a disposition to make meaning of the past for oneself, which is manifested in three meaning-making abilities and processes (Boix Mansilla and Gardner, 2007; Nordgren and Johansson, 2015; Rüsen, 2004). To study the manifestation of historical consciousness in the learning process during this unit, I employed found poetry on collected classroom transcripts and observations, as well as student work. I turned to this qualitative, arts-informed method when I realised the analytic methods that I had employed so far failed to capture important subtleties of students’ historical consciousness emerging from the data. In this paper, I present and discuss the results of my analysis, offer a rationale for using found poetry in history education research and reflect on the need for relevant and meaningful school history.

Retheorising national assessment of the narrative mode for historical causal explanation in England

In history curriculum design in England, currently at least two loci of authority – the history teachers’ ‘extended writing movement’ and the national awarding body Pearson Edexcel – present somewhat contrasting portrayals of the narrative mode for the purposes of historical causal explanation. Nonetheless, both loci suggest they are reappropriating academic knowledge for the purposes of secondary schooling in a fashion similar to what Basil Bernstein (1986) dubs ‘recontextualisation’. As a practising history teacher, I provide a phenomenological critique of Pearson Edexcel’s specifications for the national GCSE and A-level examinations from the perspective of the extended writing movement’s realisation of the Bernsteinian model, with a specific focus on the narrative mode for the purposes of historical causal explanation. In order to characterise the status of historical narrative in the academic field of production, I draw on analytic philosophies of history, theories of history by practising historians and historical explanations from one historiography: the Salem witch trials. Finally, I make recommendations for future reforms in national history examinations in England: constant revaluation with reference to academic knowledge; the avoidance of specific yet unsustainable claims about the discipline of history generally; and the abandonment of a genre-led assessment in favour of an epistemology-led alternative.

Collective memory and historical narratives: The African American civil rights movement

This study explores how undergraduates, as historical thinkers, learn to interact with history and construct their understanding of the past, and examines the role that primary and secondary sources play in narrative construction and revision. Using the African American civil rights movement as a content focus, participants used images to create initial narratives that reflected their understanding of the movement. Half the participants then read an essay on the movement written by a prominent historian, and the other half examined 18 primary sources that reflected the historian’s interpretation of the movement. Participants then each created a second narrative, again selecting images to depict their understanding of the movement. The results of the study suggest that even as students work with primary sources, they need an effective narrative framework based on recent scholarship to forge powerful counter-narratives that transcend outdated interpretations and historical myths. In terms of teaching and learning about the lengthy struggle for racial justice in the United States, simply encouraging teachers and students to ‘do history’ and conduct their own online research is unlikely to change persistent narrative structures that continue to enable and excuse systemic racism.

Table of Contents: History Education Research Journal 18(2)

Issue information for History Education Research Journal 18(2).

The educational power of heritage sites

The aim of this article is to problematise the use of visits to heritage sites in history education in primary school. The empirical basis is a questionnaire and interviews with teachers in Sweden. Theoretically, the perspective is linked to the discussion of affective practices. The results show the connection that some, but not all, teachers recognise between different forms of historical knowledge. According to these teachers, visits to heritage sites activate the sensory experiences of the pupils, which has a positive impact on the pupils’ learning. Two ideal approaches can be discerned when it comes to the use of visits to heritage sites in history education. Such visits form either a teacher-driven, integral part of the education, or the teacher assigns the display of the site to local guides. The two approaches can be related to the history subject that appears in education, although this is ultimately determined by the educational setting.

‘We too find it difficult’: A consideration of site-based Holocaust education as emotional labour

Among the growing body of literature concerning teaching and learning about the Holocaust, very little research has explored the experiences of teachers from an emotional perspective. This study considers the emotion work done by educators who are teaching about the Holocaust at the site of Auschwitz-Birkenau. Through the lens of ‘emotional labour’, the study explores how the educators articulate their emotion work, and how they manage their emotions in situ. The findings reveal a complex interplay of emotion work and self-preservation that results in educators variously altering the extent to which they are ‘present’ and how they choose to withdraw themselves emotionally from certain exhibits or spaces at the museum. The study also reveals the benefits of the informal emotional support network that exists between the educators, as well as the various routines they adopt to help them manage their emotion work. It is argued that the findings of this paper highlight a need for further research into how teachers teach about emotionally difficult histories such as this, in similar and more diverse contexts.

Realising Roma rights through a high-stakes history test: Secondary school students narrating the Swedish Roma past, present and future

Building on theories of historical justice, reconciliation and transformative change, this article investigates how 293 secondary school students make sense of the difficult past, present and future of the Romani in a national history test. Using qualitative and quantitative text analysis, this study seeks to explore whom students foreground as agents of change in regard to the Roma past, present and future. Considering the past and looking to the future, the inquiry led students to narrate four scenarios: no change; a regression to a past state of no rights; a development for the better; a future free from oppression. While the students underscored the importance of a shared responsibility for Roma rights, they stressed the nation state as the single most important agent of change for Roma rights in the present and future. Against the backdrop of justice and change, this study argues that while students realise and recognise Roma rights through their narrational practices, and thus may become empowered to act for a just future, these narratives also re-establish historical cultural and ethnic group boundaries which potentially may disempower young learners.