Peter Seixas

• University of British Columbia

Schools have been a key site for state-sponsored histories since 1945, particularly in view of their universal compulsory impact on children and youth. But the nature of history in schools changed over time, varying in relation to political, cultural, and geographic contexts. In order to make sense of these variations, this chapter proposes a theor...

In the field of history education, the terms “historical thinking” and “historical consciousness” draw from two different pedagogical traditions, Anglo-American and German, respectively. In this chapter, Seixas compares the two, asks where they overlap and explores the theoretical and practical benefits attained by clarifying their differences at a...

What are history teachers to do with the ubiquitous discrepancy, conflict, and contradiction among historical interpretations that abound not only in academia but also within and across larger cultures? How can the morass of relativism be avoided after acknowledging that there is not one, true history that “matches” the past? Seixas argues that the...

Key terms and concepts are crucial tools in teaching and learning in the disciplines. Different linguistic traditions approach such tools in diverse ways. This paper offers an initial contribution by a monolingual Anglophone history educator in dialogue with German history educators. It presents three different scenarios for the potential of transl...

‘Historical thinking’ has a central role in the theory and practice of history education. At a minimum, history educators must work with a model of historical thinking if they are to formulate potential progression in students’ advance through a school history curriculum, test that progression empirically, and shape instructional experiences in ord...

Similar to educators in mathematics, science and reading, history educators around the world have mobilized curricular reform movements towards including complex thinking in history education, advancing historical thinking, developing historical consciousness, and teaching competence in historical sense making. These reform movements, including the...

Ercikan and Seixas are currently editing an international collection of chapters on assessing historical thinking (Routledge, 2015), with contributions from the U.S., Canada, Sweden, Switzerland, the Netherlands and Germany. Despite differing national contexts, common challenges have emerged across the studies, as various jurisdictions attempt to m...

In this paper, I am dealing with conceptual problems, turning attention to the second order concept of historical agency, which was identified early as important for historical understanding, but which has received little subsequent attention from history education researchers, despite its attention from philosophers, sociologists and historians. I...

What role does history play in contemporary society? Has the frenetic pace of today’s world led people to lose contact with the past? A high-profile team of researchers from across Canada sought to answer these questions by launching an ambitious investigation into how Canadians engage with history in their everyday lives. The results of their surv...

It is possible to long for the past: we long for something that once was present but is no longer – nostalgia. We hope for something that has never been present but might be in the future – dreams: this is the core of progress in the modernist project. What can “longing for the present” mean? We desire a situation that we already have? We long to b...

Prescriptions for the reform of history education routinely advocate increased use of primary historical sources in the classroom, as being fundamental to the teaching of historical thinking. Yet there have been no studies of student-teachers' learning how to teach using primary sources. This exploratory study defines the task faced by student-teac...

Investigated how 14 10th-grade Canadian students established relationships among historical phenomena as they developed a sense of historical reasoning. Two predominant forms of reasoning about historical significance that emerged included narrative explanation and analogy. Ss generally spoke about policy lessons as if history were now under contro...

This article examines the ways in which students reason about past and present in relation to questions of ethnic identities and loyalty to the state in a time of war. In digitally recorded discussion groups of three, they studied documents from the largely German–Canadian town of Berlin, Ontario, which, responding to images of the German enemy, ch...

Critiques articles by M. Booth, S. Greene, K. T. Spoehr and L. W. Spoehr, G. Leinhardt et al, and E. L. Baker (see PA, Vols 11375, 11387, 11413, 11396, and 11438, respectively) on the psychological study of the teaching and learning of history. The focus of the review is the tension or distance between the theory and methodology employed by these a...

How do individual and social memories get re-worked in the crucible of a teacher education program, as student-teachers prepare to teach history to the next generation in a democratic, multicultural, and multinational state? This study posits four key competencies that student-teachers need in order to transcend history as the simple transmission o...

Although historical thinking has been the subject of a substantial body of recent research, few attempts explicitly apply the results on a large scale in North America. This article, a narrative inquiry, examines the first stages of a multi-year, Canada- wide project to reform history education through the development of classroom- based assessment...

Without judging the book by its cover, the reader of Peter Farrugia's collection of essays cannot help but pause before opening The River of History to contemplate the stunning cover photograph. The view is from an airplane. From upper left to lower right, a dark river eases through a broad and murky, water-channelled wetland. Beyond the river, the...

What do we mean by a ‘canon’? The notion of the canon has origins in Catholic religious doctrine. It comes to history education by way of debates over literature, as a critique of the notion of a universally valid — but overwhelmingly white and male — list of the greatest authors and their major works. Over the last several decades literary critics...

Peter Seixas is professor and Canada Research Chair in the department of curriculum studies at the University of British Columbia. He is the founding director of the Centre for the Study of Historical Consciousness and is editor of Theorizing Historical Consciousness (University of Toronto Press, 2004). 1. Nancy Wood, Vectors of Memory: Legacies of...

Around the world people confront monuments that celebrate historical origins, movements, heroes, and triumphs no longer seen as worthy of celebration. While an analysis of these lieux de mémoire themselves can reveal historical consciousness, the sites become particularly interesting at the moment when they inspire debate, namely, when people ask w...

Our understanding of the past shapes our sense of the present and the future: this is historical consciousness. While academic history, public history, and the study of collective memory are thriving enterprises, there has been only sparse investigation of historical consciousness itself, in a way that relates it to the policy questions it raises i...

In October 2001 the Association for Canadian Studies convened a meeting in Winnipeg of 566 teachers, historians, and others involved in history education. This article situates the conference (as one in a series of comparable events) in larger cultural trends by reviewing those aspects of contemporary popular culture that stimulate a demand for suc...

How do individual and social memories get re-worked in the crucible of a teacher education program, as student-teachers prepare to teach history to the next generation in a democratic, multicultural, and multinational state? This study posits four key competencies that student-teachers need in order to transcend history as the simple transmission o...

As issues of history and memory collide in our society and in the classroom, the time is ripe to rethink the place of history in our schools. Knowing, Teaching, and Learning Historyrepresents a unique effort by an international group of scholars to understand the future of teaching and learning about the past. It will challenge the ways in which hi...

One of the least examined forms of school/university collaboration is that which brings together scholars in a given discipline and teachers in the corresponding school subject. The paper investigates four summer institute sites of the California History Social Science Project, focusing on the language used by historians and teachers to describe th...

Teachers and university professors hold strong, and often different, views on school subjects and academic disciplines. This paper explores the meanings of subjects and disciplines for teachers and university professors who have different subject or disciplinary affiliations as these emerge within discussions about curriculum in a professional deve...

Summarizes a Canadian study that attempted to determine how a diverse group of high school students identified and understood events of historical significance. The students' responses ranged from generally objective and analytical to wildly subjective. Includes a recommended exercise for establishing students approaches to and definitions of histo...

Editor's Note: As educators and policy—makers have attempted to reform or revitalize the school curriculum in the past decade, the history curriculum has been the subject of numerous research efforts and policy initiatives. But, as several of these authors note, policy recommendations are rarely informed by careful attention to either research on h...

The author of this study examines six students' construction of historical knowledge as shaped by school and family. The author explores students' perceptions of the disjunctions and interactions between the two sources of historical understandings. Students representing a range of social studies achievement and ethnic backgrounds were selected fro...

A recent spate of cinema reinterpreting the history of Native American-white relations in North America offers an opportunity to examine how young people view films that cross the revisionist divide in popular culture. This study inquires about the moral dimensions of high school students' readings of ubiquitous filmic representations of the past....

Science, social science, literary studies, philosophy, and history have all encountered challenges to the notion of "objectivity" in the wake of the Kuhnian revolution. These challenges, which problematize knowledge itself, have revived interest in the pragmatist notion of knowledge based in a community of inquiry. The related social constructivist...

[explore] the issues [faced] as we [organize our collective experience of the past in such a way that they provide a meaningful context for our present experience], issues that together constitute the structure of historical understanding / [argue that recent academic historiography] provides insights into naive historical thinking in our own time,...