The epistemology of history is often considered more challenging than the epistemology of other subjects that are taught in school. The reason for this is probably mostly based on the idea that history does not have a corresponding reality with which to verify the knowledge it produces. There are no experiments in history, because the past is already gone, no matter how hard we try to hold on to it. The subjectivity of knowing is also double in history; there is both the subjectivity of the knower, stuck in their own subjective perspective and predispositions, and the subjectivity of the evidence used to gain knowledge (see, e.g., Maggioni’s chapter in this book). All documents we read to establish historical truths are written by someone, in a specific context from a certain perspective, making objectivity not only dependent on the knower, but also on what is possible to gain regarding objectivity from different sources.

However, there is also yet another complexity when it comes to the epistemology of this subject: history is always about some cultural context. History is inevitably a group-making project since all history is about some group of people, and what is made significant—out of all the past events to choose from—is based on the culturally significant questions that are asked about the past. Knowing history is mostly about knowing about specific highlighted events and how these events—instead of others—fit into culturally specific contexts, that is, into narratives written about ‘us’. In some sense, mathematics and physics are also contextually bound by theoretical paradigms that are not void of cultural heritage, but the argument could be made that these are not intentionally cultural. The outspoken perspective of these disciplines is universality, while the perspective of history is always particular, even if there have been several bids to write a more universal history. These could however be criticized for either not writing human history, like so-called Big History (e.g., Christian, 2018), or for concealing the cultural perspective from which it is written (e.g., Fukuyama, 1992).

These issues make teaching about history especially problematic, epistemologically. The already problematic epistemological basis of the subject might have become more challenging for teachers given the renegotiation of the history subject’s objectives that has been ongoing since (at least) the interwar period, accelerating in the second half of the twentieth century. This renegotiation, stemming from problems seen in nationalistic sentiment in education in general and in school history in particular leading to two world wars (Marsden, 2000; Siegel, 2004; Gasanabo, 2006; Elmersjö & Lindmark, 2010), tended to refigure the once obvious objective of the history subject as taught in schools—to promote national cohesion—and expand it with other objectives. When curricula and syllabi in many countries now seemingly tend towards multi-perspectivity, while maintaining a nationally inclined promotion of culturally significant perspectives of certain events, it might be especially challenging for teachers to comprehend the subject’s epistemology. School history seems to have many objectives that could be seen as epistemologically contradictory: fostering critical thinking, maintaining a cultural heritage, promoting the ability of viewing historical events from multiple perspectives, and even deconstructing the very same narrative that is also supposed to be maintaining the cultural heritage. The question becomes: what is knowledge in history?

The chapters of this book investigate history teachers’ epistemologies; how they can (or cannot) be measured, how they might (or might not) influence teaching, and how they are formed, maintained, and changed. This could be considered a very focused scope and it is the intention of the editors to create a more or less open space for researchers in this rather narrow field to investigate this subject from different perspectives, with different intentions, utilizing different concepts. This means that we have not tried to make this book even more focused, beyond the relatively narrow scope itself (history teachers and the epistemology of history), by imposing specific definitions of concepts, or forced theoretical constructs for all chapters. Instead, our intention has been to create a book that does justice to the field by showcasing its diversity, within its limited scope, by giving the talented researchers invited the freedom to present the subject in their own way, amended to fit the context they describe. In turn, this leads to a book where different chapters present the problems, the concepts, and the solutions in quite different ways. We truly believe that this is the best way to present this field of research, where it has been, where it is, and where it might be going.

One consequence of this is that authors in this book make different use of important concepts. While there is a rich literature on the difference between ‘beliefs’ and ‘cognition’, and also between ‘epistemic’ and ‘epistemological’, these concepts are deployed differently in many of the chapters. One way of differentiating between ‘epistemic’ and ‘epistemological’ is to recognize the meaning of the extra syllables. When the word episteme, meaning knowledge, is prolonged with ‘-ic’ it means ‘regarding knowledge’, but when it is prolonged with ‘-ological’ it means ‘regarding a theory of knowledge’. This subtle difference can mean a lot, but it can also mean quite little, depending on the context. When talking about how teachers discuss, view, or understand the knowledge claims possible in history textbooks or their own teaching, the teachers could be said to verbalize a view ‘regarding knowledge’. However, most of the time they verbalize—at least parts of—an entire theory of knowledge, one that they subscribe to and that is present in the way they express their view. For this reason, the words ‘epistemic’ and ‘epistemological’ are often used interchangeably in the chapters that follow, even though some chapters also discuss the difference.

When it comes to ‘beliefs’ and ‘cognition’ there might be more graspable differences put forward in literature. Talking about ‘epistemic cognition’ tend to draw attention to the cognitive processes going on when understanding knowledge or a comprehensive theory of knowledge. An ‘epistemic belief’ rather denotes the underlying principles that guide epistemic cognition. Therefore, beliefs about epistemology can be inferred from epistemic cognition, but at the same time, one could argue that epistemic (and epistemological) beliefs come out of epistemic cognition (see, e.g. VanSledright & Maggioni, 2016; Stoel et al., 2022). This double connection between the two terms makes it somewhat difficult to distinguish between them when research is being reported. Some of the chapters, however, make clearer distinctions than others.

While we recognize that it is important to distinguish between different key concepts, it could also be an impediment for the discussion if concepts are too rigidly defined making them unsuitable for differing contexts. Each author is therefore responsible for the definition of key concepts in each chapter. Since there does not seem to be a consensus on exactly how to define these concepts, we believe that it is better for the discussion to not impose potentially unfit definitions.

A Brief Overview of the Field

The field of research that is interested in the epistemological considerations, cognition, and beliefs that teachers hold is of course very much related to the field of epistemic cognition in general and the field of epistemic cognition in history in particular. Within these fields there have been ongoing discussions for several decades about how people make sense of knowledge and knowledge claims (e.g., Perry, 1970; Kuhn et al., 2000; King & Kitchener, 2002; Maggioni, 2010). It has been a prominent debate within these fields whether epistemic cognition is to be understood developmentally, that is, if cognitive abilities regarding the comprehension of knowledge construction develop from one stage to another, or if epistemic cognition is to be understood as predominantly situated, or dimensional (Hofer, 2016, see also Nitsche et al., 2022). A variety of descriptions and labels for different types of epistemic understandings have been forwarded, and the one that most of the chapters in this book refer to in one way or another is the three level stances forwarded by Liliana Maggioni in an attempt to integrate models for epistemic cognition in general forwarded by Marlene Schommer (1990), Deanna Kuhn et al. (2000), and Patrica M. King and Karen S. Kitchener (2002), but also the studies centred on the understanding of history by Peter Lee and his colleagues (Lee & Ashby, 2000, Lee & Shemilt, 2003; Lee, 2004). The journey towards this model is also elaborated upon by Maggioni herself in her chapter in this book.

The three-level-model of stances that Maggioni favoured were the copier stance, the borrower stance and the criterialist stance. This model had an immense impact on both the field as a whole, and also on the conceptualization of new ways of thinking forwarded in this book. Therefore, they will be briefly elaborated on here. A person taking the copier stance believes that history provides a copy of the past. Therefore, history would also be fixed (since it is a copy of something that has already happened) and good sources, that are not forged or apparently biased, are considered objective vehicles to the past itself. A person taking the borrower stance, on the other hand, would subscribe to the notion of history being subjective, but would not differentiate between different opinions about it in terms of validity of explanations and interpretations. Instead, they would borrow from those sources that fit their own view of a valid narrative. A person holding a criterialist stance would see history as interpretative and dependent on what questions it tries to answer. The criterialist would also utilize disciplinary criteria to establish valid narratives and distinguish them from invalid narratives. This is of course a developmental model that indicates the objective (for history teaching) of going from lower to higher modes of epistemic beliefs.

One of the more prominent features of research on history teachers’ epistemological beliefs is the apparent predominance of inconsistencies in teachers’ (and students’) ways of thinking about knowledge and knowledge claims, especially when researchers use the three level stances, or other ways of measuring epistemological beliefs (for other measures see, e.g., McCrum, 2013; Elmersjö, 2022). A lot of research has shown that teachers and students do not seem to hold consistent epistemological beliefs based in firm principles (see, e.g., Perry, 1970; Maggioni et al., 2009; Mierwald & Junius, 2022; Miguel-Revilla, 2022; Stoel et al., 2022). This means that, if the developmental model is taken seriously and these inconsistencies in epistemological beliefs are also prominent and considered an undesirable feature, there seems to be a double challenge for teachers and teacher trainers in establishing both consistent beliefs in the minds of students and teachers, and also in pushing those consistent beliefs towards more nuanced understandings, in an upward trajectory in the developmental model.

Empirical studies on the epistemology of history and how teachers interpret that epistemology indicate a few areas that need to be more thoroughly researched. For one thing, research into teachers’ epistemic beliefs about history has highlighted that it is difficult for researchers to distinguish between teachers’ thoughts about epistemology and their thoughts about pedagogy and learning in general (see, e.g., Maggioni et al., 2009; see also Elmersjö & Zanazanian, 2022; Stoel et al., 2022). How epistemology is constructed and understood by the teacher might be very important in regard to how students navigate this difficult landscape of knowledge (McCrum, 2013; Mathis & Parkes, 2020; Elmersjö et al., 2017). At the same time, there could also be reason to question the straightforward connection between teachers’ epistemological beliefs and their teaching practice, and that is also a part of the research field that needs to be further investigated. This holds true especially for the situational context—where history is taught—which needs to be taken seriously as an influential part of teachers’ epistemologies (Gottlieb & Wineburg, 2012; Wilke et al., 2022).

The inconsistencies in history teachers’ ways of discussing the epistemology of their subject can also—at least in some cases—be traced back to the difficulties in establishing the objective of history teaching (see, e.g., Halldén, 1986; Evans, 1989; Seixas, 2000), difficulties that in turn may be attributed to the weak classification and weak framing of the subject (Bernstein, 2000; Ledman, 2014). History is a subject that does not have a strong and clear boundary towards other realms of knowledge (i.e., weak classification) and it is also a subject where the sequencing of knowledge is often unclear, as is the teacher’s control over what the students are learning.

Taking where the field is at as an inspiration and a departure point, the chapters of this book engage in conversations with the empirical issues that have been raised and discussed, and also the theoretical, and methodological problems that have been pointed out. The inconstancies in teachers’ epistemological beliefs; the issue of how teachers’ beliefs relate to their teaching; and how methodology in measuring, labelling, and framing epistemological beliefs that teachers hold might influence our view of the field, are all issues that the chapters of this book engage with.

The Parts of the Book

As stated, the chapters of this book engage with teachers’ epistemologies in a few different ways and define concepts in ways that are both contextually and theoretically induced. One concept, which almost all chapters address in one form or another, is the earlier-mentioned ‘wobbling’, or ‘inconsistency’ in teachers’ thoughts on the epistemology of history, or ‘inconsistencies’ that are brought to light when comparing thought and practice. Since inconsistencies in epistemological thought seem to be at the heart of the field, and perhaps the key challenge in bringing the field forward, some comments need to be made regarding how ‘wobbling’ or ‘inconsistencies’ might be deployed in the chapters. Some of the chapters relate teachers’ epistemological wobbling and inconsistencies to a lack of epistemological understanding. This lack of understanding might be caused by either an inability to grasp basic ideas about epistemology, or by a lack of foundational ideas, leading to different notions of epistemology being deployed in different situations without any clear or elaborated principles behind them. One way these inconsistencies might manifest themselves is as differing conceptualizations regarding how the past itself is related to histories about the past, depending on what question is being asked or on what context is being discussed.

Other chapters relate wobbling and inconsistencies in epistemological thought to a problem based in language and knowledge. Without a proper education regarding the epistemological nature of the subject or how this nature has been and can be viewed, teachers might have trouble expressing consistent foundational principles regarding epistemology. Without the proper language to express them, their statements seem to be inconsistent. A third, and related way of discussing wobbling is to focus on how teachers might have difficulty navigating and coordinating history’s simultaneous subjectiveness and objectiveness. When expressing this simultaneousness, inherited in history writing, the teachers have difficulty coordinating them in a coherent manner, which comes off as an inconsistency in their epistemological positioning. A fourth way of viewing wobbling is more related to a different concept—‘epistemic switching’—where teachers, knowing full well what they are doing, switch epistemic principles to fit different contexts or different practical situations related to what they are teaching and who is being taught.

Exactly how teaching contexts (student population, curricula, and syllabi) influence teachers’ wobbling, could be described differently depending on how ‘wobbling’ is defined. How wobbling is viewed, as a problem, or as a natural way of talking about knowledge in different contexts, also influences researchers in the discussion. The reader of the chapters therefore needs to be observant of these definitions. Nevertheless, wobbling in all of these forms is evidently an important part of research about teachers’ epistemologies.

This book is divided into three parts, each with its own theme, addressing different parts of the challenges the field is facing. However, since it is already a relatively focused topic for the book as a whole, there are substantial overlaps between the themes. In the first of these three parts, Epistemology and Context, we have gathered chapters that engage with different contexts and how they might have implications for teachers’ epistemologies. Robert Parkes addresses the problem of epistemic wobbling and identifies the cultural context and the academic context of teachers as being responsible for different sets of epistemic directions. He theorizes that these directions might also be deployed differently in a historical and a didactical setting, resulting in epistemic inconsistencies. Parkes proposes the fostering of an epistemic reflexivity among teachers hopefully resulting in what he calls ‘epistemic fluency’, related to knowledgeable professional action; meaning that teachers who possess such fluency might be able to identify when their own position, or other positions are being challenged. A research agenda connected to this proposition, might make way for changes in teacher education and teachers with apt practical tools to face the challenges of fake news, historical denial, and problematic pasts.

In the only genuinely historical chapter of this book, Johan Samuelsson analyses Swedish elementary school teachers’ ideas and perspectives on history during the first half of the twentieth century. He shows that while there is some merit to the idea that teachers’ epistemological notions about the subject were naïve and objectivistic before the latter part of the twentieth century, it is still an idea that needs to be nuanced. Utilizing 600 teachers’ own accounts of their teaching, collected in 1946 and describing teaching from 1920 to the end of the Second World War, Samuelsson can identity that several epistemic perspectives were practiced in parallel also in the interwar period. This goes to show that the diverse palette of epistemological ideas identified in schools today are not entirely connected to shifts in the aims of the history subject from the last 30–50 years, but actually has a longer history.

In their chapter, Johan Wassermann and Kate Angier discuss findings from a collaborative case study where South African teacher students’ ideas about the history subject and its epistemology come to the fore. While the authors see a mosaic of different considerations emerging from their material, they focus their chapter on two components that may be seen as extremely important in the context of post-Apartheid South Africa: history as present and personal, and history as an African endeavour. This chapter is a good example of the meaningfulness of equipping the concept of epistemology with different connotations depending on the context that is being researched. Given the complex educational context of post-Apartheid South Africa, what history can be, is very much a question of the relationship between being here and now, and being in the past. That is, do we create distance, or proximity to history, and what does it mean when we do one or the other? The authors also recognize that their ideas on epistemology might not ‘fit neatly into the existing scholarship on epistemology and history from the Global North’, and by doing that they also point to the importance of incorporating many perspectives in research on epistemology to make sure it moves forward.

Sarah Godsell also provides a South African perspective on epistemology in her chapter. By drawing on the ‘both sides of the story’-concept (forwarded by Chana Teeger), Godsell explores how pre-service teachers position themselves on neutrality and historical ‘truth’. By connecting the idea of copier, borrower and criterialist stances with the ‘both sides of the story’-approach, the author can show that even criterialist teacher students latched on to the idea of ‘both sides of the story’ as a necessity in history teaching in the context of the disputed history of South Africa, even though its aim to balance two narratives must be considered a distortion of the unbalanced reality of the country under Apartheid. Godsell concludes that teaching history is ‘slippery’, and that conflict in the mind might be a prerequisite to understand history, both for teachers and students.

In a chapter on history teaching in the context of multi-ethnic classrooms, Simon Lundberg specifically addresses the issue of epistemic expressions, as one core feature in unravelling what the context of a teaching situation does to the meaning and aim of the subject itself. The study is based on interviews with 15 teachers who teach in Swedish multi-ethnic classrooms, and Lundberg specifically analyses four of these teachers who showcase relatively consistent epistemic ideas about the history subject. The author then shows how the teachers’ view of the relationship between the past itself on the one hand, and the histories about that past, on the other, makes the intentions for their teaching, while familiar to the naked eye, divert when filtered through their epistemic lens. Lundberg concludes that this might lead to differing functions for the history subject in a multi-ethnic society, dependent on the teacher’s epistemic beliefs.

In the second part of the book, Professional Development and Reflections on Applied Epistemologies, the common theme is the issue of how different developmental programmes, collegial initiatives, and contextual changes that force epistemological overviews might be influencing teachers’ epistemological beliefs. Kenneth Nordgren’s chapter utilizes teachers’ collegial planning of lessons to penetrate their epistemological considerations. The focus of the chapter is on how the act of recontextualizing subject matter force epistemological beliefs to come to the fore, since the process of making specialized knowledge accessible for learners is epistemologically challenging. The chapter is based on a longitudinal study that followed teachers in different subjects that had formed subject specific planning teams. Nordgren comes to the conclusion that disciplinary understandings of epistemology are entangled with practical contexts and didactical experiences, and this indicates a need to understand this entanglement. The relationship between beliefs about epistemology—based in ideas about the discipline—and specific tasks related to the performative act of planning and carry out lessons, therefore needs to be further researched. This also indicates that teaching is an epistemologically demanding profession, and that teachers need epistemic communities based in collegial cooperation.

In a chapter focusing on Dutch elementary school teachers, Yolande Potjer, Marjolein Dobber, and Carla van Boxtel point to the problematic situation that elementary school teachers are in with regards to epistemological beliefs. Since elementary school teachers often are generalists, and not schooled in a specific subject, they are probably less equipped to handle issues of epistemology beyond what is presented in textbooks. By utilizing examples from a two-year development programme called ‘the History workplace’, the authors argue that teacher preparation and professional development play a key role in making teachers thoughts and beliefs about history more nuanced. Since elementary school teachers have limited training in specific subjects from their formal teacher education, professional development is one way to make sure that these teachers also get an opportunity to advance their thoughts on what historical knowledge is, and how it is obtained. Through development programmes, these thoughts can also be tied closer to the act of teaching, making sure newly found nuanced beliefs can be translated into classroom instruction.

Taking practical changes to history teaching—and its assessment—in Quebec during the Covid-pandemic as a point of departure, Catherine Duquette, Marie-Hélène Brunet, Arianne Dufour, and Benjamin Lille discuss how changes in assessment forced teachers to reposition themselves when it came to their understandings of the nature of history. Through collaborative research the authors can show how participating teachers developed a more critical view of the subject, moving away from a positivistic stance, as they were forced to move away from teacher-centric teaching to more student-focused and interpretative teaching in order to meet new demands from assessment. However, while moving away from declarative knowledge towards favouring procedural knowledge, teachers did not abandon or even question the content of the narrative itself. This result leads the authors to theorize about epistemology being layered, and that changes to one layer, might not necessarily change another layer.

Marjolein Wilke and Karel Van Nieuwenhuyse explore the link between teachers’ epistemological beliefs and the character of their teaching. Based on an interview study, the authors identify discrepancies between how teachers view the epistemology of history themselves, and their instructional practices. This perceived disconnect might shed some light on how ideas about inconsistencies in teachers’ epistemic stances relate to different situations. Wilke and Van Nieuwenhuyse offer three potential explanations for this discrepancy. The first explanation is centered around ambiguity about what we are actually measuring when we make statements about teachers’ epistemological beliefs. The second explanation is related to the relatively limited knowledge we have regarding the link between epistemological beliefs and other factors, such as educational beliefs and curricular requirements. The third explanation is a methodological one, suggesting researchers’ measurements of epistemological beliefs might be flawed in one way or another.

By asking 15 history teacher candidates about the relationship between what historians, history educators, and history students do, Richard Hughes and Sarah Drake Brown show that teacher students seem to differentiate between historians, teachers, and students in rather superficial ways. The teacher candidates seemed to be able to document and convey their own understanding of history, and also utilize this understanding in the planning of lessons. However, they also seemed to differentiate between acquired knowledge about what history is, and how it works, on the one hand, and their practical interactions with students on the other. For epistemology, this shows the distance that seemingly exist between theoretical and practical understandings of the history subject’s epistemology. Hughes and Drake Brown analyse their results utilizing the concept of metaphor and puts forward the notion of metaphors as potential instruments in understanding the perceived disconnect between theory and practice. They put forward the conceptual metaphor of architecture to capture the liminal spaces where this disconnect might occur, in moving from one context to another.

Antoine Gauthier-Trépanier addresses the epistemological issues involved in teaching world history. The movement towards global perspectives on history is taken as a point of departure and the author utilizes history teaching in the Quebec college system as an example. Because of a curricular change in favour of global history this context might be considered an opening into the study of the epistemological implications of such changes. The author further emphasizes that since history is a subject with political implications, a curricular change is always debated along political lines. At the same time, such a curricular change also involves teachers, who might see their epistemological ideas challenged by change. At least, it challenges teachers to re-evaluate their views on historical knowledge, what it is, and what it should accomplish. This chapter aims at, and concludes with, a discussion about what curricular change, with epistemological implications, actually does to the subject’s foundations.

In the last part of this book, Reflections on Measurements and Instruments, attention is turned to how we measure epistemological beliefs and epistemic cognition. Because of its impact in the field, a lot of attention in this section is on the two questionnaires developed by Maggioni and colleagues (Beliefs about learning and teaching history questionnaire, BLTHQ and Beliefs about history questionnaire, BHQ). What better way to begin this part of the book than by letting Liliana Maggioni herself contemplate the journey behind thoughts surrounding the development of these questionnaires? Maggioni describes a personal journey in understanding concepts, and developing the tool, that has been used and discussed in the last 10–15 years. By going back to the early works on epistemology and teaching, Maggioni shows how different lines of thought have influenced research in the field in different ways, how meaning-making of the human experience comes into play, and how feelings play a major role in shifting epistemological thought in relation to the human condition. Maggioni delves deeper into the ideas of William Perry, and especially Robert Kegan, and how they influenced the establishment of the questionnaires. She also shows how the field of research interested in epistemic thought in education is based on perspectives forged in developmental studies of epistemic cognition, influenced by insights from the literature formed around historical understanding. Maggioni also brings ideas about how development in epistemological thought might be supported in different ways.

Martin Nitsche offers a way of moving forward. He argues for an integrated perspective in questionnaires, taking both developmental as well as contextual aspects into consideration when researching teachers’ and prospective teachers’ epistemological beliefs. The results from the studies that Nitsche present could be considered a comprehensive argument against research that tries to establish fixed stances based on the development from lower to higher complexity. The author also calls for the integration of different perspectives when discussing epistemological ideas and for more research in the field addressing exactly how teachers’ epistemological beliefs influence teaching, since this is something that seems to be unclear (as many of the chapters in this book also show).

One way the cultural context may be addressed is by adapting questionnaires to specific cultural domains. That is what Erkan Dinç and Servet Ützemur try to accomplish in their chapter on the adaption of the BHQ for Turkish culture. The authors point to the traditional way of teaching history in Türkiye, based in memorization of unchanging facts, as one factor to take into account when utilizing an instrument forged in another context where historical thinking skills are more prominent.

Chih-Ching Chang’s chapter is more focused around a particular study and the methodology of studying epistemological development. Chang analyses the trajectory of teachers’ epistemic beliefs, with an emphasis on personal epistemological development. By utilizing epistemic network analysis, the complexity of personal epistemology is presented in a more illustrative way. Over the course of an academic year, seven teachers were followed, and while there were substantial discrepancies between epistemological perspectives and teaching practices, the study also shows development in teachers’ thinking during the year.

Vojtech Ripka, Pavla Sýkorová, Jiří Münich, and Edita Chvojka look to reimagine epistemic wobbling as situational states of epistemological beliefs. Taking the Czech initiative History+ as a point of departure the authors build on insights from the project and subscribe to the notion that epistemic wobbling is based in differing situational contexts and that instruments of measurements tend to be less accurate in distinguishing between general and situational epistemologies. Teachers who display epistemic inconsistencies might be indistinguishable from a teacher with an advanced epistemic understanding set in certain contextual conditions. If this assertion holds, the authors point to the need to create conditions for teachers to teach on what they see as an advanced epistemic level, rather than try to educate epistemologically sophisticated teachers. Giving teachers the tools to become more advanced in their thinking regarding epistemological issues might not be successful if their teaching will be set in circumstances where they are forced to switch to a less advanced mode of epistemic thinking.

Based in the BLTHQ, but taking its results further by qualitative interviews, the study presented by David-Alexandre Wagner, investigates the Norwegian context and how eight prospective history teachers who had taken the BLTHQ understood it. The interviews revealed some misunderstandings that could be the result of ambiguities in the questionnaire itself, but also how national context seems to influence understanding, when comparing the Norwegian results to previous studies from other national contexts. In line with how many of the chapters in this book explain and discuss inconsistencies in teachers’ ideas and beliefs the author points to both intrinsic and extrinsic ambiguity. That is, the method itself is problematic because there is ambiguity in the measuring statements themselves, but there is also an extrinsic ambiguity, based on the prospective teachers’ own view of the subject, making them misunderstand as a consequence of their own thought. Confirmation bias also comes into play, when interviewees interpret statements as being closer to their own thought, than they actually are.

In the concluding chapter, where he offers a commentary on his reading of all the contributions to this book, co-editor Paul Zanazanian identifies two main areas of reflection that emerge, along with two concomitant tensions that consequently arise and require a response. In relation to the first area of reflection, to what historical knowledge is, he pinpoints a clear overreliance on history-as-discipline for viewing history and thinking about its workings, which given its predominance in the field seems to be problematic because it can blind us to other perspectives and new avenues of thought. Regarding the second, how to best teach history and why, he highlights the further assumption of a direct influence between pre- and in-service teachers’ epistemological beliefs about (disciplinary) history and how it should be taught in schools. To address both tensions, he suggests questioning and reflecting on the unintentional preferences and normative assumptions that we—as researchers in the field—may hold about what we seek to find. Calling for a self-reflexive approach to problematizing our thinking patterns, he promotes the espousal of an everyday, practical life approach to not only perceiving and teaching history, but to also considering it as perhaps a new starting point for better understanding teachers’ own gained practical wisdoms on how to teach the subject. This greatly contrasts with the generalized taken-for-granted reliance on history-as-discipline for understanding what history is and how and why it should be taught.

We hope that this contribution, as a whole, also inspire for further research in the field, unravelling not only new answers, but also new questions about the relationship between the epistemology, understanding, and teaching history.