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Australian historians on teaching historical thinking

‘History anxiety’, as Anna Clark has called the collective concern over how well the past is being taught to students, is rife in Western countries grappling with settler pasts and populist presents. What is the best way to deal with this anxiety? According to Clark, the answer is to teach students ‘historical thinking’, defined as the ‘capacity to think or reason like a historian’ (xxiv). As established in the influential work of Sam Wineburg, Peter Seixas and Tom Morton, historical thinking reflects the capacity to establish historical significance, use evidence, identify continuity and change, take historical perspectives and understand the moral dimension of historical interpretation. All of this helps students to develop a ‘historical consciousness’, which is the ability to ‘orient themselves in time’ (xxv). Historical Thinking for History Teachers aims to provide new history teachers with the tools to teach historical thinking. The volume’s 23 chapters will each work as a stand-alone resource for interested practitioners, including experienced teachers. The collection both hits and misses its target of being a helpful resource for new teachers, which is probably not surprising given the number of contributions and variety of content. Some of the ‘misses’ are a result of chapters that are too theoretical (the chapter on empathy and ‘moderate hermeneutics’), or niche (the case study of drama pedagogy for history teachers), or misunderstand the nature of ‘historical skills’ (for example, the presentism of the chapter on values is a problem). The best essays in the collection expand or critique the utility of these ‘historical thinking’ skills in relation to the content the curriculum covers. The directive to teach ‘historical thinking’ becomes a problem for history teachers when curriculum design emphasises skills and neglects content, as it has done in New Zealand since 2007. For this reason, the most striking essay in the collection is Paul Kiem’s survey of the impact of inquiry-based, skills-focused learning. He convincingly demonstrates that teaching content knowledge is more than just memorisation and is the only way to allow students to fully develop ‘historical thinking’ skills. His example of the futility of generic source analysis practice for students should be a wake-up call for history teachers, especially in New Zealand, where this practice has been adopted wholesale, assessment included. Likewise, Tim Allender’s chapter promotes the importance of different forms of ‘teacher talk’ in the classroom as a crucial catalyst for developing ‘historical thinking’. This will be a relief for many new teachers who have finished training with the notion that the less talk