Teaching history: A discussion of contemporary challenges

Abstract

The authors argue that intellectual shifts and related ideological debates have set new pedagogical demands on history teachers and new programmatic demands on faculties of education. In an attempt to relate the relevance of generating historical thinking (motivating the students to think like historians) to transformative education, the authors outline an history inquiry model based on Dewey’s educational theory. In this model, content knowledge and mastery of the subject matter is as critical as an understanding of teaching and learning history. The paper addresses the challenges set by a dominant relativist self-referential slant, the teaching of history in a multicultural class, and the tendency, in particular in social studies classes, to fall into presentism.