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Abstract

In various jurisdictions around the world, the methods of historical thinking have come to frame and organise how history education is taught. These methods, informed by robust and ample research, offer students a comprehensive entry into historical knowledge construction. Moreover, these methods help shift history away from a transmission centric approach towards one that asks students to engage the past and employ disciplinary thinking skills to construct and engage the past. While such an approach can be helpful in driving new approaches to the past, it's theorisation and scholarship is largely predicated on a normalised and unquestioned Western inheritance, the result of which is the expression of pedagogical method that reinscribes Western ways of knowing. In this paper, I argue that, as a result, historical thinking is often (re)presented without due consideration of both (a) how historical thinking is presented and assumed as universally transferable and; (b) done so without attention paid to the subjectivities that give rise to its conceptual base. Such practices, quintessentially Western in nature, pose challenges in settler contexts where teachers and students are being asked to begin the difficult work of unpacking and questioning Western and colonial knowledges and ways of knowing. While this is not to suggest that we dispense with historical thinking, the normalised presence of an (implied) universally applicable method raises necessary questions about the work yet to be done in complicating not just what students learn but how they do so.

Instructing students in history museums: A systematic literature review

“…One study quantitatively analysed questionnaires to get a view on how museum educators and experienced teachers prepared and designed instructional activities (Escribano-Miralles, Serrano-Pastor & Miralles-Martínez, 2021a). The other three adopted a qualitative approach: through means of interviews, document analysis or physical observations, specific instructional practices were examined, such as inclusive heritage education practices (Gómez-Hurtado, Cuenca-López & Borghi, 2020), museum educators' questioning practices (Tigert, Fotouhi & Kirschbaum, 2021) or museum educators' more general approach towards instruction (Zarmati, 2020). Theoretically, these studies used a variety of frameworks, both general pedagogical, such as the Vygotskian sociocultural theory of learning (Tigert et al, 2021) as well as more specific ones such as heritage education (Gómez-Hurtado et al, 2020), or a combination through adopting a 'learner-based model of heritage education' (Escribano-Miralles et al, 2021a).…”

“…Theoretically, these studies used a variety of frameworks, both general pedagogical, such as the Vygotskian sociocultural theory of learning (Tigert et al, 2021) as well as more specific ones such as heritage education (Gómez-Hurtado et al, 2020), or a combination through adopting a 'learner-based model of heritage education' (Escribano-Miralles et al, 2021a). Zarmati (2020) introduced the concept of pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) at the beginning of her study. She did, however, not examine educators' PCK as such, nor the various constituent parts of it (their content knowledge and pedagogical knowledge).…”

“…Dialogue between the two institutions, if existing, did not seem to enable discussion about for example goals, students' prior knowledge or their learning needs (Wright-Maley et al, 2013). Besides, analysis of self-reported practices revealed that mostly only teachers considered how classroom and museum education could be connected, and only they were engaged in designing pre-and post-visit activities (Escribano-Miralles et al 2021a;Zarmati 2020). These empirical findings contrast with the ideal scenarios of the cases above, but point towards the challenges that accompany the many opportunities that collaborative approaches entail.…”

“…History museums (and by extension historic sites, heritage sites or memorial sites), communicating historical narratives often supported by a selection of artefacts or material culture, have been far less considered as the object of research (Andre et al, 2017;Marcus, Levine & Grenier, 2012;Schep, van Boxtel & Noordegraaf, 2015). In addition, previous research has mostly focused on learning and learners' experiences and less on instructional practices and instructional agents' perspectives (Marcus et al, 2012;Zarmati, 2020). Combined, this raises the question of which research has specifically addressed instruction in history museums and what this research has yielded.…”

Curriculum as invader: Normalising white place in the Australian curriculum

“…In the Australian context, the nationalisation of the curriculum has worked to support the needs of the colonial formation in the globalising context (Lingard, 2018), the result of which is, and has been, the nation-state's (re)investment in the reproduction of a settler national (colonial) imaginary through curriculum. Further to this, curriculum has been used as an outlet of anxieties about the (mis)representation of colonisation, a contestation that extends beyond content to the epistemic foundations of the disciplines subsumed under curricular banners (Parkes, 2007;Smith, 2020b). The concept of place is a critical concept in this curricular problem, central as it is explicitly (or otherwise) to how young children are asked to think about the locations of their own and others' ongoing historical and geographic identifications (on stolen lands).…”