To make historical consciousness beneficial for history education research we need to disentangle its multidisciplinary backgrounds so that contradictory approaches and outcomes can be avoided. The aim of this article therefore is to clarify the enigma of its different paradigms. We will discuss two interrelated paradigms: one interpreting…

Joseph Schwab's famous remark, that the field of curriculum is 'moribund'--no longer able 'to …contribute significantly to the advancement of education'--has long echoed in curriculum studies. Although its specific meaning has changed, it still rings in our ears today. It now applies as much to discussions in the United States and United Kingdom…

Curriculum theorists have acknowledged the relevance of "hermeneutics", or theory of interpretation and understanding, to curriculum studies. In the European "Didaktik" tradition hermeneutics has also been applied to the curriculum work of educators, but such an extension is rarer in the Anglo-American tradition. Educators in…

The purpose of this article is to provide a unique overview of how third-order concepts, linked to moral consciousness, are expressed in research articles on historical consciousness related to education, as well as to document how frequently the concepts are applied between 1980 and 2020. A count of word frequency says something about how popular…

What might a distinct university contribution to teacher education look like? This paper tracks a group of prospective teachers making the transition from undergraduate to teacher on a one-year school-based postgraduate course. The study employs a practitioner research methodological framework where teacher learning is understood as a process of…

Autobiography presently occupies a beleaguered place in education, not unlike teachers, whose lives have been diminished through the current emphasis on testing outcomes. This paper uses WG Sebald's writings as a place from which to relook at the relationship between writing and a life lived. Sebald was a German writer born in the shadow of WWII…

The present paper takes the approach of critical hermeneutics in human rights education (HRE) that has been developed theoretically and tries to operationalize it in pedagogical practice. In particular, a group of Greek-Cypriot teachers were trained in a series of workshops on how critical hermeneutical approach (CHA) could be taught in the…

Teacher action research seeks to bring together action, reflection, theory, and practice; and it is acknowledged as a way to value and honour teachers' practical knowledge. The purpose of this article is to conceptualize teacher action research as "Bildung," applying Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics as a theoretical…

This study reviews six traditional approaches to hermeneutics and presents a dialogic understanding of hermeneutics. It concludes with specific applications of hermeneutics to curriculum development practices in schools with a focus on inter-subjectivity. While 20th-century access to post-structural notions of subjectivity through aesthetic…

The documented social-subjects curricula for Scottish 5-16 year olds are analysed for representations of "self-in-society". Such representations are important in Scotland because it is expected that the new Education-for-Citizenship framework will in part be delivered through the social subjects. However, citizenship education is also…

This study examines the national division of history teaching in Bosnia and Herzegovina in the war and post-war period. The process of division of schooling into three curricula (Bosnian Serb, Bosnian Croat, and Bosniak) is presented. Representations of other national groups are central in 8th-grade history textbooks used by the three national…

This study argues for the need to collect data on the interaction of imaginative processes and moral and ethical qualities of narrative. It locates the curricular context of experiential narratives and provides a narrative illustration of key terms from a moral theory. It reports on research in which experiential narratives were told to grades…

Presents a response to, and critique of, the purely postmodernist approach to the study of history. Maintains that an appreciation of the subjective and constructed nature of knowledge still can be integrated, as a component, into a study of the understanding, construction, and transcription of history. (MJP)

Questions the very assumptions that teachers can identify the skills and the knowledge that students need and that learning itself is controllable. Proposes a theory of curriculum development where knowledge and the learning process exist as a co-emerging, mutual, and dynamic relationship between the students and teachers. (MJP)

Advocates adapting a postmodernist approach to history instruction. This would mandate recognizing the subjectivity of all knowledge including the historical record. Recommends embracing this subjectivity and focusing less on history as a subject and more on the development of critical-thinking skills. (MJP)