Interpersonal Understanding in Historical Context

Understanding students’ historical understanding is a complex and challenging endeavour, for history teachers as well as for researchers from diverse fields. Since historical situations contain interpersonal and social issues that happened in the past, not only history educators are interested in how students understand them. Also, psychologists and educational scientists aim to gain knowledge how students deal with interpersonal issues in the context of history. The present book shows in which way historical understanding can be viewed as interpersonal understanding and gives indications for the limitation of an interpersonal approach regarding historical situations. The different contributions of this volume give insight into an interdisciplinary discussion about how the fields of social and historical thinking are interrelated with respect to educational issues and challenges. This book confirms the impression of an increase in empirical work in the domain of history education. The authors present empirical approaches from the fields of history education, developmental psychology and educational science using different theoretical and methodical means and thus contribute to a larger picture of what teaching and learning history at school is about.