ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the influence that sociocultural factors have on how school students learn history and what impact this might have on task design. Educators like Counsell have a degree of ambivalence to more popular forms of historical knowledge seeing the place of disciplinary knowledge as a corrective to 'rawer forms of collective memory'. In terms of pupil learning and socio-cultural perspectives, a body of research is emerging that alerts teachers to the social and interactive factors that exert a powerful influence on and mould young people's historical thinking. The concept of historical significance is useful in getting students to work at the intersection of the work of professional historians and manifestations of collective memory. Space for dialogue is critical to the development of teachers and task design when teachers have to negotiate between epistemic knowledge about the subject and the more protean knowledge about school students to fashion this into classroom practice.
