ABSTRACT
The challenge for educators is to define the role that history can play in providing young people with insight and agency into conflict-affected societies without compromising the disciplinary rigor which underpins the foundation of the subject’s criticality. This chapter examines this dilemma as it is playing out in practice in Northern Ireland (NI). It investigates literature relating to history’s role regarding the extrinsic aims of the wider curriculum and its relationship to citizenship education. The NI history curriculum seems well-positioned to interact positively with Local and Global Citizenship education, which became a statutory requirement of the revised curriculum in 2007. In societies experiencing conflict and emerging from conflict, history teaching can play a significant role both in contributing to division and in helping transformation from conflict. The ways the work fulfils the curriculum requirements of different subject areas is identified, but without clearly articulating disciplinary distinctiveness, for example that between history and citizenship education.
