Regular debates about the history curriculum in England have tended to focus both on the particular substantive knowledge to be taught and on the relationship between and historical knowledge and historical thinking (or disciplinary literacy). Much less attention has been in recent decades to the concept of ‘historical consciousness’ (Rüsen, 2004): the meaning that young people make of the history they study and the purposes that learning history serves for them. The issue (which had been much more prominent in European and North American research traditions) resurfaced powerfully in England in the context of calls for curriculum reform triggered by the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020.

The research reported in this seminar sought to explore history teachers’ own perspectives on the importance of historical consciousness by drawing on a corpus analysis of history teachers’ published discourse within the professional journal Teaching History. Our analysis of 109 articles published between 2016 and 2022 examined the authors’ stated purposes in relation to the teaching ideas and lesson sequences that they shared and the extent to which they appeared interested in the question of what young people brought to their history lessons and on the purposes that history might serve for them. Tracking these elements over time allowed us to consider the extent to which teachers’ concerns and practices in this respect changed from the point at which the last round of curriculum reforms (initiated by Michael Gove) had all been implemented, through to the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020 and the subsequent two years. The most striking finding was the extent to which teachers making reforms to their curriculum rooted the rationale for those changes not in the needs of young people or the purposes that history might serve, but in the changing practices of academic historians.