This article explores how recent curricular reform in Australia has been responsive to a culture of redress. It argues that taken together, the 2008 National Apology to the Stolen Generations and the 2010 national curriculum reform marked a turning point, whereby settler colonial injustices have since been systematically included in the…

The paper discusses the Finnish core curriculum (curriculum framework) for basic education, with focus on how lower secondary education in general, and history teaching specifically, is meant to develop the student's democratic citizenship. Developing the student's democratic citizenship is not an explicit aim of history teaching in the current…

Concerned by the growing tendency of politicians and press to revive the moral balance-sheet approach to British imperial history and by some evidence of its resurgence in schools, Alex Benger set about devising a framework which would keep pupils' analysis rigorously historical, rather than moral and politicised. In this article, he sets out his…

Jane Card's previous work on the power of images in conveying particular interpretations and her advice about how to use visual material effectively in classrooms will be familiar to readers of "Teaching History." In this article she focuses specifically on the capacity of visual representations to convey a compelling message about the…

Jacob Olivey set out to design enquiries which would enable his pupils to reconstruct, using evidence, the perspectives of people in the past. In this article he shares in detail the planning and outcomes of two enquiries: one for Year 7 and one for Year 8. Olivey offers a example of 'the curriculum as the progression model', considering how to…

The disapplication of level descriptions in the 2014 National Curriculum has spurred many history departments to rethink their approach not only to assessment but to their models of progression. In this article Rachael Cook builds on the recent work of history teachers such as Ford (TH157), Hawkey et al (TH161), Luff (TH164) and Arscott and Hinks…

The review study deals with the presentation of methods of acquainting pupils and students with the Shoah events at various levels of institutional education. Based on the opinions and positions of leading experts on the subject, we summarize the most important methods in the field. In the introduction we present the importance of one line of the…

Faced with cutting her Key Stage 3 curriculum to two years, Natalie Kesterton and her department were determined to do more with less. Not only did they want to ensure that their pupils developed a secure, wide-ranging knowledge of British and world history, they also wanted to address deficits in pupils' chronological security and 'sense of…

This special issue examines curricula and their histories as they have evolved throughout the 21st century as part of transnational and national education policies. With a specific focus on the policy transitions that are taking place in Europe, the articles demonstrate how curriculum making processes move in different directions, following their…

Pressures on curriculum time force us all to make difficult choices about curriculum content, but the eighteenth century seems to have suffered particular neglect. Inspired by the tercentenary of the accession of the first Georgian king and the interest in the Acts of Union prompted by this year's referendum on Scottish independence, Katharine…

This article introduces the fifty states project, a year-long study of the United States that uses crowd sourcing to bring authentic materials into the social studies classroom. The project started five years ago, when author Kelly McPherson decided that she wanted to have a care package sent from all 50 states to help students learn about the…

Ten years ago, two heads of department in contrasting schools presented a powerfully-argued case for resisting the use of level descriptions within their assessment regimes. Influenced both by research into the nature of children's historical thinking and by principles of assessment "for" learning, Sally Burnham and Geraint Brown argued…

History is the most contested of curricular subjects in all western democratic states. This article begins by setting out competing models of a history curriculum highlighting the shifting trends that have taken place in different types of schools in England in recent years. The different models of a history curriculum are critiqued from the dual…

Katie Hall and Christine Counsell attempt to construct a Key Stage 3 scheme of work out of the draft National Curriculum for history that was released for consultation in England in February 2013. They explain the process by which they attempted to convert the programme of study into a coherent, workable plan that would fulfil the stated aims.…

Although history teachers have long been frustrated by the limitations of the National Curriculum Attainment Target and by demands to use it for purposes for which it was never intended, its official abolition has come as quite a shock. As Michael Fordham makes clear, we now have an unparalleled opportunity to rethink the way in which we assess…