Authors

Amaia Lamikiz Jauregiondo

Abstract

Starting from an analysis of the Basque competence-based secondary school history textbook EKI and the perceptions of teachers using it, these pages aim at investigating how history teachers relate to the textbooks they use in the classroom and the role these teaching materials play in the promotion of deeper historical understanding of their students. The Baque case offers a good opportunity to see how competence-based teaching materials are used to teach historical competences and how they may have affected the teaching of history in Basque secondary schools. Two main research questions are addressed: how this competence-based textbook integrates historical thinking skills and how it affects teachers´ understanding of history and teaching practice. The results suggest that theoretical reflections on historical thinking and epistemic questions have not permeated school teaching practices yet; however, the textbook does introduce students into historical thinking concepts and has produced changes in teachers’ practices. Besides, this research has detected the interest of further investigating how we deal with historical thinking in the everyday practice of increasingly diverse classrooms.

Keywords

History education, Historical thinking, Historical competencies, Textbooks, Teaching practices