Historical Thinking, Culture, and Education is a peer-reviewed, open-access, scholarly journal that seeks to enhance the study of the creation, appropriation, and dissemination of historical knowledge and culture in formal and non-formal educational settings.

What Does It Do?

The journal offers a critical space for the reflection and exchange of innovative ideas, seeking to strengthen scholarly debates by entertaining theoretical and empirical work from both the scientific mainstream and beyond to support the accessibility and visibility of a variety of approaches. The journal seeks to particularly foster transnational and cross-cultural understandings between academics, scholarly traditions, ontologies, and epistemologies from diverse geographies and contexts. The interest here is on, but not limited, to foci from one to several settings and contexts, depending on the questions asked, underlying challenges and developmental needs, and issues of theory enhancement. Connecting different domains of knowledge and supporting interdisciplinary collaboration, the journal addresses key theoretical and empirical questions and needs, gained from practical investigations with innovative research methods that serve to generate new scholarly insights and wisdoms.

Why (Is This Important)?

In light of today’s global insecurities, the journal believes that a heightened awareness of transnational and cross-cultural understandings of the uses of historical knowledge and culture can have positive impacts towards fostering dialogue and mutual comprehension. Better grasping key nuances in how historical knowledge and culture are defined and operationalized across different national and social settings can not only help to understand how such processes function in one’s own cultures, epistemologies, and societies of belonging, but how they can also take shape to broaden horizons and provide a fuller appreciation of world realities beyond one’s own doorstep.

What Is Different?

Historical Thinking, Culture, and Education stands out in three important ways. Mindful of the need to constantly be at the forefront of key conversations and to offer our readership high quality contributions, the journal seeks to:

1. Provide access to current and future-oriented, culturally developed, cross-cultural, and interdisciplinary research and theory.
2. Foster dialogue between different scholars and different research traditions and paradigms.
3. Provide a fast turnaround rate from start to finish for publishing high quality contributions in a timely manner.

With these objectives in mind, Historical Thinking, Culture, and Education offers two types of papers. The first comprise standard, research papers on theory and research. Of a more experimental nature, the second type constitute what we call miniatures, which showcase innovative additions through the presentation of conceptual creations, dilemmas, and anomalies through empirical and theoretical work that foster our understanding of historical thinking, culture, and education. A discussion section will complement this second type of papers.

In bringing these two types of papers together, the overarching aim is to not only provide descriptive and interpretive understandings of social reality and phenomena, but to also offer a forum for reflecting on the practical, social, political, and ideological implications of the knowledge gained and mobilized.

With a strong editorial team, editorial board members, and a community of reviewers, comprising scholars from around the world and possessing a broad scope of combined expertise, Historical Thinking, Culture, and Education moreover seeks to offer the necessary assistance for maintaining high scholarly standards in the empirical and theoretical work we publish.

Four Key Goals

Four key goals guide Historical Thinking, Culture, and Education’s vision.

Goal 1: Openness to diverse traditions and contexts connecting theory, empirical insights and practical needs.

• We seek to promote a scholarly exchange that is open to diverse scholarly traditions in theoretical and empirical work throughout the world and to advance key questions related to the production and transmission of historical knowledge and culture in diverse educational settings and non-formal historical encounters.

Goal 2: Strong focus on transnational and cross-cultural dialogue.

• We aim to establish a platform for sharing transnational research in the field of history education, viewed broadly in its outreach, with a strong focus on cross-cultural understandings of key concepts – such as historical thinking and reasoning, historical epistemology, historical ontology, historical consciousness, historical culture, public history, historical learning in and out of schools, and the professional development of teachers, curators, and community organizers – and with the aim of developing new impulses for theoretical and empirical work.

Goal 3: Encouraging innovative and interdisciplinary research.

• We encourage innovative and interdisciplinary research that builds on the current state of international work and that is embedded in the relevant literature, references, and scholarly discourses of the field of history education, and its annex areas of study, including, but not limited to, history, sociology, anthropology, philosophy, literature, cultural studies, educational science and subject didactics, political science, Indigenous and Black studies, diaspora studies, collective memory and remembrance culture, and digital humanities.

Goal 4: Fostering knowledge and agency for social change.

• We foster the sharing of theoretical and empirical research that connects scholarly work and educational practices in ways that empower key actors and stakeholders to participate in the creation and use of historical knowledge for making change towards a more inclusive society and a more peaceful coexistence among peoples and nations. The aim is to initiate key actors and stakeholders into using historical thinking and education for better understanding today’s world and for better shaping our future on this unique planet.