Historical Consciousness and Historical Thinking

Historical Culture and Peace: How Older Generations Address the Need of Younger Generations to Learn About Their In-Group Past

“…Older generations, on the other hand, build a positive social identity (Tajfel, 1982) and introduce children to historical consciousness. Living with grandparents and listening to their narratives, in fact, provide children with "a rich base of information about the fundamental structures and processes of everyday life during those (past) times" (Seixas & Peck, 2004, p. 115), creating the first scaffolding for the later development of their capacity for historical thinking (Seixas & Peck, 2004;Seixas, 2017).…”

The Education of History Teachers in Europe—A Comparative Study. First Results of the “Civic and History Education Study”

“…The Changing Role of School Subject "History" and "Civic Education" in the Era of "Accelerated Cultural Change" The more recent debates on history teaching and learning have made explicit that democratic societies are in dire need of new forms of historical thinking and learning (Cajani & Ross, 2007;Stradling & Row, 2009;Davies, 2012): Forms which are no longer exclusively legitimizing the political and/or cultural tradition of the nation state at hand; forms, which provide techniques and strategies for developing "historical learning" (Stearns, Seixas & Wineburg, 2000;Rüsen 2005), "historical consciousness" (Seixas, 2004;Straub, 2005) and "historical thinking" (Seixas, 2017); forms which make the historical information comparable, analyzable and interpretable in transnational and global perspectives, and, by doing so, transgress the borders of national history and positivist approaches to the past (Taylor & Guyver, 2012;Berger, 2017).…”

“…by supporting the development of competences for acting and reflecting adequately to the process of accelerated cultural change (Ecker, 1997a). In this sense the subject "history teaching" has been described by scholars of history didactics to contribute to the "historical consciousness" (Stearns, Seixas & Wineburg, 2000;Seixas, 2004;Rüsen, 2005;Straub, 2005;Lukacs, 2009) and to "historical thinking" (Seixas, Morton, Colyer & Fornazzari, 2013;Seixas, 2017) on different levels: 1) the reflection of the individual person and his/her own self-development, 2) the communicative processes and the negotiations on historical narratives in the here and now of the history classroom or the university course, and on 3) the level of collective reflection of political, economic, social or cultural developments in public historical debates, performances and publications, i.e. the "historical culture(s)" of societies.…”

“…Within the last thirty years the understanding of the school subject "history" has changed quite substantially: Today, most theoretical discussions in history didactics converge in the idea that the main goal of the school subject "history" consists in the development of "historical literacy", "historical thinking" (Seixas, Morton, Colyer & Fornazzari, 2013;Seixas, 2017) and "historical consciousness" (Seixas, 2004;Rüsen, 2005) of pupils and students.…”

The Teaching of Recent and Violent Conflicts as Challenges for History Education

“…As it can be easily imagined, it is not the same to teach, for example, the history of Roman Empire than to discuss in the classrooms about a national civil war that happened one or two decades ago. In this respect, most of the present advances on history learning and teaching research have to do with how to teach and learn historical contents (Seixas 2017). On its part, most of the research on history textbooks has to do with what is included in the textbook.…”