Historical consciousness has been increasingly visible in Australia and other English-speaking countries in the aftermath of the Soviet Union’s dissolution in 1992. To a significant extent, it has been linked with incorporating a wider variety of perspectives into history curricula, and what constitutes best educational practice, as well as attempts to integrate Indigenous knowledge systems in schooling within post-colonial contexts. Sirkka Ahonen has significantly influenced these implementations of historical consciousness by advocating that it is intimately connected with the transmission of stories and myths that generate, change and discard aspects of group identity as it evolves over time. This article explores how Ahonen’s understandings of historical consciousness can guide a social justice approach to implementing history curricula, which counters post-truth conditions. In particular, this latter concept is an umbrella that includes misinformation, widening inequality, polarised politics and fragmented sociopolitical cohesion that characterise a post-truth context. To address this proposition, the first section provides an overview of the historical context in which Ahonen developed her theories of historical consciousness. The second section dissects how aspects of her analyses work against factors that characterise a post-truth context. Finally, the last section examines how Ahonen’s thinking might be adapted and operationalised in other contexts, using Australia as a case study.

This article examines how historical thinking in the German climate movement incorporates the concepts of the future and the Anthropocene by paying a particular emphasis on Dipesh Chakrabarty’s reflections. Through a qualitative content analysis of journalistic interviews with activists from different political groups, the study explores how these actors conceptualise historical time, predict future scenarios and think historically. The findings highlight that activists often perceive the future as dystopian, grounded in their critique of capitalism and ecological threats. The urgency of climate action is emphasised, particularly in the context of perceived tipping points in planetary and human time. The study suggests that historical thinking in the climate movement is not only about temporal orientation, but also about fostering collective agency aimed at systemic change. This approach challenges the theory of the didactics of history by introducing new ways of integrating future perspectives into historical thinking processes, which are crucial in the Anthropocene.

For more than a century, educators and historians have advocated for the importance of using primary sources for teaching history. One of the most innovative and popular collections of sources in the past 60 years were Jackdaws: Collections of Contemporary Documents, which were published by Jonathan Cape between 1963 and 1977. Jackdaws are folders that contain reproductions of primary and secondary sources focused on significant historical events, people, developments, themes and topics in history. In this article, I provide a brief history of Jackdaws, and explain why they were initially popular as a learning resource for teaching history, and why their popularity waned in the mid-to-late 1970s. I conclude by highlighting several lessons that can be learned from the rise and fall of Jackdaws that might help history teachers and educators design collections of primary and secondary sources for teaching history. The three reasons that best explain why Jackdaws became popular learning resources in school history classrooms between 1963 and 1977 are that they were aligned with innovative educational theories at the time, they were flexible and adaptable to diverse contexts, and they were interesting and exciting for students. Despite being heralded as a groundbreaking and revolutionary resource for teaching history, Jackdaws failed to transform history teaching and learning for four main reasons: they were too difficult for some students; they were an awkward fit for some school history curricula; they were expensive and difficult to manage; and there was a lack of pedagogical supports to help teachers use them effectively.

This article explores history education research in Canada by analysing three important studies conducted prior to 1970. The article considers how history education has shifted across these reports and what questions and problems remain stubbornly consistent and contemporary in history classrooms, despite regular interventions, reforms, papers, studies and curricular initiatives. The three research projects discussed in this article provide glimpses into how research on history education in Canada has been conducted, and what assumptions, questions and beliefs have driven it. In comparing these three studies, the article identifies important continuities and changes for Canadian history education researchers over time. In thinking across these three studies, the article also identifies and reflects on what paradigms of educational thought are present in each case, and how the socio-cultural-political context they were conducted in shaped the research. The article argues that each of these three studies reflects key debates in educational theory, including questions about progressive education and the civic and citizenship function of history education in society. The article also raises questions and issues for researchers interested in conducting national studies of history education in other national contexts with similarly decentralised education systems. Finally, the article addresses what might be learnt by current history education researchers doing similar work today.

The year 2022 marked one hundred years since the defeat of Greece in the Greco–Turkish war (1919–22) and the end of the Greek presence in Asia Minor, two events that are registered in Greek historiography and collective historical memory as the ‘Asia Minor Catastrophe’. The Asia Minor Catastrophe gradually evolved into an important pillar for the formation of collective memory and historical consciousness in modern Greece. However, its links with contemporary historical culture and the attitudes of Greek citizens on critical foreign policy issues, especially regarding Türkiye, have not been explored. For example, does the historical perception of the Asia Minor Catastrophe influence citizens’ attitudes regarding Greek–Turkish relations? Do Greek citizens’ views on contemporary Greek–Turkish differences determine their historical perception of the Asia Minor Catastrophe? With these thoughts in mind and in order to address the above question, we attempted to explore 18-year-old adolescents’ perceptions of the Asia Minor Catastrophe. The sample for the research involved 20 18-year-olds attending a state school in Athens in spring 2022. A semi-structured interview was chosen as the main research tool for the study, and the views expressed by the participants were recorded, while the data analysis followed the lines of qualitative content analysis. Adolescents’ perception of the Asia Minor Catastrophe seems to influence their attitude towards contemporary Greek–Turkish issues.

This article aims to root history education in Portugal, which is interlinked with Isabel Barca’s efforts to enhance the discussion about the relationship between history, history epistemology and situated cognition. By the late 1990s, history education had begun to be taught at the University of Minho under the influence of the Anglo-Saxon paradigm, mainly Lee, Ashby and Shemilt’s ideas. Important milestones were, in the 2000s, the creation/coordination by Isabel Barca of: (1) an academic master’s degree related to history teaching; (2) the HiCon projects (2003–11), focused on deepening knowledge about Portuguese teachers’ and students’ historical thinking and historical consciousness; and (3) the Jornadas Internacionais em Educação Histórica (International Journeys of History Education), conceived to share results with national and international researchers, and that contributed to building bridges with other academies, namely in Brazil. History education has influenced Portuguese history curricula since 2001 (apart from the years 2011–2015, when there was a right-wing shift), and has inspired the competencies in history oriented to develop students’ historical thinking. As the new curricula and paradigms in history teaching were challenging to school teachers, Barca has inspired the Portuguese History Teachers Association to promote several scientific events and continuing professional development since the 2000s. This was how her workshop classroom model based on history education (the ‘aula-oficina’) became known among teachers, and contributed to practice changes in schools. Through the years, Portuguese history educationalists have continued to deepen knowledge in this area, and to share the results in national and international academic communities, and also with school teachers.

Debates over the content, aims and purpose of school history are salient features in educational landscapes across the world, and in recent years in the UK many such debates have focused on how the history of the British Empire should be taught in schools. With the aim of better understanding how British imperial histories are, and have been, approached in English classrooms, this study compares two samples of history textbooks, one of books published between 1920 and 1939, and the second of books published between 2015 and 2023. Additionally, the study explores changing traditions in English history education more generally, and in particular compares how histories of the British Empire have been narrated under the influence of two pedagogical traditions: the ‘great tradition’, which dominated English history education for most of the twentieth century until the 1970s, and ‘new history’, which came to dominate from the early 1970s onwards, and which was particularly influenced by the establishment of the Schools Council History Project in 1972. A complex range of factors have influenced how histories relating to the British Empire have been narrated in textbooks over the years, but the study particularly considers the extent to which the founding principles of the Schools Council History Project continue to influence how histories are narrated half a century after the establishment of the project, and what implications this might have in the context of empire histories specifically. We also consider how such patterns may influence further developments in textbook portrayals of British imperial history in the future.

This research offers a comparative analysis of how colonial history is narrated in Bolivian textbooks, before and after the 070 Educational Reform. The 070 Educational Reform, introduced in 2010, aimed to decolonize, depatriarchalise and reaffirm Indigenous and Afrobolivian identities. Three specific features of colonial narratives were analysed: ‘identity representation’ (the specific description of different groups of people within the narrative); ‘responsibility’ (the association between individuals and their actions); and ‘contemporary legacies’ (the causal relationship between the past and present). Text and images from six textbooks pre-070 Reform and five textbooks post-070 Reform were examined through sociocognitive critical discourse analysis (text) and multimodal critical analysis (images). Findings from this study indicate that textbooks have made partial adjustments post-070 Reform. ‘Identity representation’ showed the most progressive change. ‘Responsibility’, on the other hand, continues to omit the accountability of the Spanish and the Catholic Church for colonial abuses. Textbooks only briefly discuss colonial legacies, and characterise these legacies as positive. This research contributes not only to research on colonial narrations in school textbooks, but also on the educational impact of decolonizing reforms. It provides suggestions for publishing houses and the Bolivian government to improve the impact of the 070 Reform in textbooks.

The rise of right-wing populism and extremism has challenged Western societies in recent years and raised fears of the destruction of liberal democracy. Against this backdrop, it seems reasonable to encourage students in history lessons to study the rise of National Socialism in order to prevent similar developments today. However, researchers and educators have emphasised that ‘learning from history’ does not take place in a straightforward way; moreover, it is questionable whether contemporary right-wing extremism can be best understood by studying the Nazi era. In order to understand how history education could contribute to citizenship education in this respect, this article asks how the topic of contemporary right-wing extremism is approached in German educational media, and how it is linked to the Nazi era. Based on an analysis of the pedagogical approaches towards the topic in 28 history textbook series, it investigates how the pedagogical approaches, the narrative about right-wing extremism and the subject position of the reader/player are intertwined in two selected textbooks and in one serious game. In conclusion, the article reflects on whether the innovative educational design of the serious game could inspire history education to find new approaches to the topic and thereby to contribute to citizenship education.

This article explores the intersection of history education and traumatic narratives, focusing on the impact of out-of-the-classroom learning experiences on the teaching of history during turbulent periods. Through a case study of history teacher training in contemporary Israel, it investigates how exposure to others’ troubled histories and past traumas outside the traditional classroom setting influences the personal, disciplinary, pedagogical and professional-educational development of prospective history educators. Drawing on qualitative analysis of reflection sheets and teaching materials generated by students during a course conducted in February 2024, the research focuses on field trips to two non-canonical sites of historical trauma in Israel: the Museum of the Kfar Qassim Massacre and the Gush Katif Museum. In both these locations participants encountered others’ narratives of collective suffering, loss and conflict. By examining the material produced amid the students’ own recent traumas, the article illuminates the complex interplay between historical consciousness, pedagogical practice and societal upheaval in the training of history teachers.