ABSTRACT
Although the notion of ‘historical consciousness’ was established as a key concept within German history education as far back as the 1970s, use of the term has only spread slowly through the Nordic countries to inform European and North American educational discourse. The Centre for the Study of Historical Consciousness, established in Canada in 2002, defines historical consciousness as ‘individual and collective understandings of the past, the cognitive and cultural factors which shape those understandings, as well as the relations of historical understandings to those of the present and the future’ (https://www.cshc.ubc.ca/about/). It thus extends far beyond school history to embrace all the cultural resources that inform people’s views of the past (including, for example, popular films, documentaries and novels, heritage sites, public monuments and commemorations, as well as more intimate family photos), and to consider how that understanding is brought to bear on their understanding of the present and their assumptions about the future. This notion of ‘orientation in time’ – the way in which people conceive of the relationship between past, present and future, and thus draw on history to extrapolate likely future trajectories and inform their decisions about how to act in the present – is therefore central to the study of historical consciousness. Although Rüsen has claimed that ‘history is the mirror of past actuality into which the present peers in order to learn something about its future’ (2006: 67), some research has suggested that young people pay little (if any) attention to this rear-view mirror, not least because the view it currently offers is too fragmented to be of any use.
