Abstract
The notion of historical thinking has in recent years become popular in research on history education, particularly so in North America, the UK and Australia. The aim of this paper is to discuss the cognitive competencies related to historical thinking, as expressed by some influential Canadian researchers, as an history educational notion from two aspects: what is historical thinking and what does it mean in an educational context, and what are the consequences of historical thinking for history education? Our discussion will focus on possible implications of this approach to history education regarding what should be taught in history classrooms and why. By focusing on the notion of historicity, we want to argue that while a focus on a more disciplinary approach to history education is welcome, we think that more attention should be given to what could qualify as a disciplinary approach. We further argue historical thinking and the history educational challenge should be understood as wider and more complex than what history education informed by historical thinking entails.
Highlights
Historical thinking is a notion that has become increasingly popular in international research on history education
The main answer to this problem was that history education requires a reliance on historical sources and accepted patterns of historical explanation (Retz, 2016a)
In its ambition to avoid history education based on the reproduction of unchallenged narratives, the model of historical thinking discussed here, runs the risk of advocating what could become fixed models and methods of how to think historically
Summary
Historical thinking is a notion that has become increasingly popular in international research on history education. Instead of viewing knowledge as an object existing by itself, that could be argued to be more or less the inevitable result of stipulating something as complex and contextually contingent as how historians cognitively approach their trade, we approach human understanding of the world as something necessarily belonging to history cultural and social contexts, it is by no means obvious that history education based on pre-defined guidelines such as the six concepts or ideas stipulated by Seixas above would be the only, or best, way of preparing young people for an active life as engaged citizens of society capable of critically engaging with narratives they come across, or that this is the only conceivable way of describing what historians at universities do cognitively (Donnelly & Norton, 2017). Students need tools to develop their skills in critically assessing historical accounts, but they need to meet narratives that impel them to pose pressing and challenging questions (Hawkey, 2014; Persson, 2017)
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