2026/06/17 by Bertjaap van der Ploeg, Tim Huijgen, Joana Duarte +2 · 1 voice
Social Sciences · #Educator Training and Historical Pedagogy #Educational Theory and Curriculum Studies #Cyprus History, Politics, Society
paper · doi:10.14324/herj.23.1.12
openalex publication_date 2026/06/17 · openalex created_date 2026/06/24 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/12
This article examines how two widely used Dutch primary school history textbooks promote historical perspective taking. Historical perspective taking refers to the mental activity of attempting to take the perspective of historical people. In this article, we use a dual conceptualisation of historical perspective taking, comprising historical contextualisation and perspective taking. History textbooks are important in the way history lessons are designed in primary schools because of non-expert teachers’ tendency to follow the textbook. Our corpus of analysis consisted of the textbooks’ tasks, texts and teacher guides. The results showed that textbooks promoted different approaches to historical perspective taking, sometimes leaning more towards a discipline-specific approach of historical perspective taking, including knowledge of the historical context, the use of sources and chronology, with others sometimes leaning towards a more generic approach of historical perspective taking, including imagination about historical people’s perspectives. These different approaches of historical perspective taking in history textbooks foster different educational goals. Awareness of these differences is important among textbook publishers, primary school teachers and other educational professionals if the discipline of history in primary education is to be fertile ground for fostering citizenship competencies.