Knowing or doing history? Teachers’ staging and use of teaching resources in the school subject of history

This article presents an ongoing research project focussed on the use of teaching materials in the school subject of history. Among other issues, the results from the completed pilot phase seem to indicate that the focus in the lessons is on the students’ acquisition of factual or “first-order” knowledge and mostly ignores the concepts and procedures involved in the construction of narratives about the past; in short, the balance between “knowing” (acquisition of substantive knowledge) and “doing” (identifying or asking questions about the past, using sources etc) history, as the curriculum prescribes, does not exist (e.g. Havekes, 2015, pp. 33-39). After a discussion of a case from the pilot phase, the article presents preliminary considerations about the next phase of the project, which will focus on the responsibility of teaching materials for the understanding and use of historical knowledge.