Introduction

There has been growing interest in analysing history textbooks and history curricula to understand how they present particular ‘truths’ about the past. ¹ Many of these studies highlight the controversial nature of what is included or excluded in history curricula and textbooks and how assumptions and ideologies of race, gender, nationalism and imperialism, for example, are often promoted either explicitly or implicitly. ² At the same time, new approaches to teaching school history recognize the importance of students adopting a critical attitude to historical facts and evidence to develop and apply thinking processes essential to historical awareness and interpretation. Teaching historical controversy is often seen as having the potential to develop important historical thinking skills and understandings as well as prepare students to effectively participate in society. However, highlighting history textbook controversies or teaching historical controversy is fraught with many challenges for educators. Robert Stradling’s study of history education in Europe highlights the role of historical controversy in history education, yet also points to the challenge of how historical controversy might be handled in classrooms:

If one of the main aims in teaching history is to help students to understand the present and how we got to where we are now, then teaching about controversial and sensitive issues of the past is inescapable. Sometimes these issues divide groups or whole societies or neighbouring countries. Such disputes may be about what happened in the past, why it happened, who started it, who was right, who has the best case to argue, and who has been most selective with the evidence. The question is not should we teach them but how should we teach them.

(Stradling 2001: 100) Drawing attention to textbook and curricular controversies and teaching controversy in schools is typically viewed as a risky enterprise to be handled with care. Historical controversy, history textbooks, and the teaching of history are all inevitably embedded in ideological, political, and cultural contexts. They are bound by particular values, world views, and power relations that operate in a given society. ³ Nation-states typically use history education to shape national identities and collective memory (Wertsch 2008). Official historical narratives and history curriculum provide justification of present-day governance by shaping the ways people understand the past and the present. This makes a contextually sensitive understanding of historical controversy, the production of history curriculum and textbooks, and the teaching of historical controversy especially important.