At first glance, learning in history might be characterized as committing to memory sanctioned stories about the past. Yet a deeper consideration of this process opens up several questions about the specific features that make the generation of shared knowledge about the past possible and meaningful. Some of these questions regard the very object of such learning: What makes specific aspects of the past historically significant? What relations among people, events, and phenomena are especially salient in fostering understanding of the past? Another set of questions regards the affective and cognitive traits and abilities that characterize a successful learner in history. Researchers from different countries have worked at the intersection between history, history education, and educational psychology, and have investigated how experts and novices address historical questions on the basis of sources provided to them, identifying certain differences in their strategy use, their ability to contextualize information gleaned from the sources, their use of prior knowledge, and their ideas about the nature of historical knowledge and historical evidence. Researchers have also studied the influence that learners’ epistemic beliefs, school curricula, pedagogical practices, testing, and classroom discourse may have on student learning in history. By their variety, these studies have illustrated the complex nature of learning in history and evidenced several tensions among educational goals and between these goals and educational practices in the 21st century.
Article
Learning in History
Liliana Maggioni and Emily Fox
Article
Science Fiction as a Basis for Global Curriculum Visions
Noel Gough
Most Anglophone curriculum scholars who participated in the reconceptualization of their field during and since the late 1960s are likely to acknowledge the generativity of Joseph Schwab’s landmark essay, “The practical: a language for curriculum,” in which he argues that effective curriculum decision-making requires the anticipatory generation of alternatives, reasoning that such decision-making neccesitates that there be available to practical deliberation the greatest possible number and fresh diversity of alternative solutions to problems. For this reason, the literature and media known generically as SF (an initialization that encompasses not only science fiction but also many other “sf” terms) are generative resources for the anticipatory generation of global curriculum visions. From its 19th-century archetypes in the works of Mary Shelley, Jules Verne, and H. G. Wells, to its 20th- and 21st-century manifestations in multimedia franchises focused on space travel and exploration (Star Trek, Star Wars), genetic modification and mutation (X-Men, Spider Man) and artificial intelligence (AI, Ghost in the Shell), SF consistently demonstrates that imagined and material worlds are always already so entwined that they cannot be understood in isolation. In their exemplifications of the arts of anticipation, SF texts across a wide variety of media exercise the speculative imagination and exemplify conceptual tools for understanding and negotiating the global milieux of contemporary curriculum theorizing and decision-making.
Article
Taking a Well-Being-Centric Approach to School Reform
Helen Cahill, Babak Dadvand, and Annie Gowing
The well-being challenges of the 21st century are deeply ethical in nature and require activation of collective as well as individual responsibility for the ways in which others are treated. For this reason, school reform initiatives need to equip young people with a wide range of capacities to engage with the challenges of advancing both the wellness of humanity and that of the planet. There is a robust body of theory and research available to inform school reform efforts that aim to accomplish improved individual and collective well-being. This knowledge base emanates from different paradigms and disciplinary traditions. Brought together, these knowledge sources highlight the importance of ensuring that schools invest efforts toward developing ethical, critical, personal, social, and creative capabilities that enable young people to enact care for self, others, society, and the planet. A transdisciplinary approach that expounds on research and theory from diverse disciplines, including well-being education, critical, feminist, and postmodern traditions, and scholarship on youth voice and participation can help efforts toward well-being-centric school reform. Evidence suggests that research-informed well-being education programs can have positive impacts in terms of improved mental, social, and relational health, contributions to learning, and fostering critical thinking skills. These are the skills that are needed by young people to navigate and respond to ethnical challenges with care, compassion, and a sense of responsibility as a relational ethos. Taken together, these advances in thinking and knowledge, derived from different traditions of scholarship, can be harnessed to inform a “well-being-centric” approach to schooling reform that is responsive to the past, present, and future lives of persons, peoples, and the planet. A well-being-centric approach to school reform should harness developments in education knowledge and thinking generated across diverse disciplines within the past 50 years, since the 1970s. This, in turn, requires disrupting the ways in which the disciplinary structures and assessment regimes of secondary schools work as impediments to the transformative change needed to advance student well-being and learning in these changed and challenging times.
