Document Type
Article
Digital Object Identifier (DOI)
10.12685/htce.1392
Journal Title
Historical Thinking, Culture, and Education
Publication Date
2025
Abstract
Teaching about local, difficult pasts can center students, their communities, and civic action. However, doing so poses personal and professional challenges. Drawing from Critical Historical Inquiry and Activity Theory, this study explored how six experienced secondary social studies teachers reasoned about selecting primary sources to teach the history of policing and activism in Detroit. As teachers developed their text-sets, they navigated a variety of tensions related to their instructional goals, beliefs, and knowledge of students’ identities and communities. We focus on two common areas of tension: how to teach the racialized history of Detroit policing while positioning students as sense-makers and while attending to students’ affective well-being. Findings highlight the complex, situated nature of pedagogical reasoning and the promises and challenges of a critical historical inquiry approach to local, difficult history. Findings also underscore the value of teachers’ multidimensional expertise in designing difficult history curricula.
Publisher Statement
Historical Thinking, Culture, and Education is a peer-reviewed, open-access, scholarly journal that offers a critical space for the reflection and exchange of ideas on the creation, appropriation, and dissemination of historical knowledge and culture in both formal and non-formal educational settings. Seeking to enhance scholarly debates from both the scientific mainstream and beyond to support the accessibility and visibility of a variety of approaches, the journal seeks to particularly foster a transnational and cross-cultural dialogue as well as an interdisciplinary understanding.
Recommended Citation
Honold, A., & Eiland, L. (2025). Teaching local difficult history through primary sources: Exploring tensions in teachers’ pedagogical reasoning. Historical Thinking, Culture, and Education, 2(1). https://doi.org/10.12685/htce.1392
Included in
Educational Methods Commons, Junior High, Intermediate, Middle School Education and Teaching Commons, Secondary Education and Teaching Commons
Comments
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
The definitive article is available on the HTCE website at: https://eterna.unibas.ch/htce/index.