Historical consciousness, knowledge, and competencies of historical thinking: An integrated model of historical thinking and curricular implications

Abstract

Comparative and reflection on history education across national and cultural boundaries has shown that regardless of different traditions of history education, legislative interventions and research, some questions are common to research, debate and development, albeit there are both differences and commonalities in concepts and terminology. One of the common problems is the weighting of the components “knowledge”, “historical consciousness”, and “skills” or “competencies” both as aims of history education and in their curricular interrelation with regard to progression. On the backdrop of a long standing debate around German “chronological” teaching of history, making use of some recent comparative reflections, the article discusses principles for designing non-chronological curricula focusing on sequential elaboration in all three dimensions of history learning.