Teachers' beliefs about skills play a significant role in how they teach those skills. Similarly, students' mastery of a skill is influenced by their ideas about its value and what the performance of the skill exactly entails. In this study, 10 history teachers and 17 students in secondary school (age 16-17) were interviewed about their beliefs about historical empathy, objectives, and teaching strategies. The results show that the participants primarily saw historical empathy as a skill that can be learned. As main elements of historical empathy, they named contextualization, awareness of their own positionality, personal connection, and historical imagination. Inviting an eyewitness, visiting a historic site, and classroom discussions were considered particularly effective teaching strategies. Most teachers reported that they did not provide explicit instruction. Most teachers and students connected historical empathy to empathy in daily life. Extending this connection could be a significant way to work on citizenship competences.

Museums, memorial centres and other heritage institutions use various strategies to evoke an emotional response that serves to elicit empathy with the historical events and actors that are portrayed in exhibitions. To increase historical understanding, however, both emotional engagement with and contextual understanding of these historical figures are needed. Using the concept of historical empathy, this paper examines the continuous interplay between cognitive and affective dimensions of history learning in museums. We conducted a case study at Museon in The Hague, the Netherlands. We studied a learning session on children living through the Second World War, the museum's strategies employed in the exhibition, the entrance narratives of secondary school students participating in the session and their engagement with the exhibition and with the educational activities. While most of the students did not feel related to WWII prior to their museum visit, the museum managed to engage many of them with personal stories and artefacts and by offering multiple and new perspectives. Our findings underscore the interplay between cognitive and affective dimensions of historical empathy and show that museums can serve as powerful contexts for developing this skill among school students.

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Sensitive 'heritage' of slavery in a multicultural classroom: pupils' ideas regarding significance Savenije, G.M.; van Boxtel, C.A.M.; Grever, M. General rightsIt is not permitted to download or to forward/distribute the text or part of it without the consent of the author(s) and/or copyright holder(s), other than for strictly personal, individual use, unless the work is under an open content license (like Creative Commons). Disclaimer/Complaints regulationsIf you believe that digital publication of certain material infringes any of your rights or (privacy) interests, please let the Library know, stating your reasons. In case of a legitimate complaint, the Library will make the material inaccessible and/or remove it from the website. Please Ask the Library: http://uba.uva.nl/en/contact, or a letter to: Library of the University of Amsterdam, Secretariat, Singel 425, 1012 WP Amsterdam, The Netherlands. You will be contacted as soon as possible.

The history and heritage of slavery and the transatlantic slave trade are sensitive topics in the Netherlands. Little is known about the ways in which students attribute significance to what is presented as heritage, particularly sensitive heritage. Using theories on historical significance, we explored how students attributed significance to the history of slavery and its remnants while engaged in a heritage project that presented this history and these remnants as Dutch heritage. Using questionnaires, interviews, group interaction and observations, we researched 55 students at a Dutch junior high school who visited a slavery museum and the National Slavery Monument. The visit reinforced the students' ideas that it was important to preserve the historical remnants of slavery, primarily to remember that freedom and equality have not always existed and because these remnants are important to the descendants of enslaved people. Although the students gained insight into the ways in which significance is attributed to the history of slavery, they did not come to understand the lack of awareness regarding slavery in Dutch society. Although the visit stimulated critical reflection on the interplay between understandings of significance and identity, many students linked the heritage of slavery directly to a black ethnic identity.