Introduction

History education curricula increasingly emphasise the importance of introducing students to the interpretive and constructed nature of historical knowledge. The extent to which teachers succeed in doing so is assumed to be connected to teachers’ own epistemological beliefs (e.g. VanSledright, 1996; Wansink et al., 2016; Yilmaz, 2008). In reality, however, studies examining this relationship do not always find such a connection (e.g. Voet & De Wever, 2016; Wilke et al., 2022). Departing from this observation, this chapter sets out to explore how important teachers’ epistemological beliefs actually are in shaping their instructional practice and how researchers can adequately include them in future studies.

In a qualitative research with history teachers, we presented 21 teachers, among others, with a case study about conflicting causes for the spread of agriculture across Europe ca. 6000 BC, during a one-on-one interview (Wilke & Depaepe, 2019; Wilke et al., 2022). Teachers were first asked to choose between a number of options in response to this case study, such as “both explanations can be correct” or “only one explanation can be correct” and subsequently to explain their answer. When reasoning about the case, one participant with seventeen years of teaching experience stated that both explanations could be correct and explained why scholars put forward different, even contrasting, causes for this historical phenomenon as follows:

This is probably due to the background of these historians, or archaeologists in this case. That is already one aspect. Also, they will probably have had other source material. Those are, I think, the two main reasons. (...) Depending on your background alone, if one scholar is from Romania, and the other is from Belgium, you are already going to have a different background, you are going to have different things, different sources probably, and you are going to have a different outcome.

The case study was discussed as a way to capture teachers’ epistemological beliefs about history. It was part of a study examining the role of different factors in shaping teachers’ instructional practices. In order to broadly explore the influence of a wide range of factors, we gathered data via several instruments. Teachers first completed a questionnaire exploring their views on various aspects of history teaching. In a subsequent semi-structured interview, their answers were discussed and explored in more detail. Teachers were also asked to present concrete didactic materials from their teaching practice, exemplary of their approach to history teaching. These materials were discussed in a second interview. One factor that was given a prominent place in this study were teachers’ epistemological beliefs, meaning their views on the nature of knowledge and processes of knowledge construction in the discipline (Buehl & Alexander, 2001). Those beliefs were mapped extensively, among others, via the case study introduced above.

In this particular case, the participant’s response pointed to the role of the scholars’ background and the sources they studied in explaining why scholars sometimes disagree on the most likely explanation for certain historical phenomena. In so doing, the teacher implicitly referred to the interpretive and constructed nature of historical knowledge and therefore reflected advanced epistemological beliefs about history. He understood that historical knowledge is constructed, based on historians’ interpretations of the available sources, and that historical knowledge can therefore be debated and is subject to change. The teaching materials developed and used by the teachers, however, show an entirely different picture: one consisting of a single, closed narrative. His teaching practice did not mention the existence of historiographical debates, nor did it encourage students to critically think of historical sources as anything other than direct reflections of the past. Contrary to this teacher’s apparent advanced epistemological beliefs, his teaching materials actually seemed to reflect—and potentially promote—rather naïve beliefs about the nature of history and historical knowledge. The inconsistency between the participant’s private understanding of history and how he presents it to his students is surprising in light of the common assumption that teachers’ epistemological beliefs have an important role in shaping their teaching practice (e.g. VanSledright, 1996; Wansink et al., 2016; Yilmaz, 2008).

Throughout various existing models describing epistemological beliefs, both on a general and domain-specific level (e.g. Lee & Shemilt, 2003; Maggioni et al., 2004; Nitsche, 2016; King & Kitchener, 2002; Kuhn et al., 2000), three prototypical epistemological stances regarding history come to the fore. These stances are characterised by distinct ideas about the nature of historical knowledge and about the processes of knowledge construction in history (Buehl & Alexander, 2001; Hofer & Pintrich, 1997; Stoel et al., 2017). In a first prototypical stance, historical knowledge is considered as fixed and singular, ready to be uncovered by the historian. Historical sources are considered to be literal mirrors of the past. A second stance emphasises the subjective and uncertain nature of knowledge about the past. Historical representations and sources are regarded as completely subjective, even merely a matter of opinion. Every representation, as well as every historical source, is then considered equally valid. A third stance recognises the inherently interpretive and constructed nature of historical knowledge, yet understands that the quality of historical representations is not equally valid. It is understood that historical representations can be evaluated using disciplinary criteria, for instance related to argumentation and to weighing evidence by judging the trustworthiness of historical sources (Maggioni et al., 2009; Stoel et al., 2017). The first two stances are generally considered to be rather “naïve” views about history, in the sense that they do not accurately reflect disciplinary practices of knowledge construction, while the latter is considered more advanced.

With regard to history teachers, it seems self-evident that teachers holding advanced epistemological beliefs are most likely to design teaching practices that allow students to equally gain a thorough understanding of the discipline of history. To date, however, research on this relationship has found conflicting evidence. Yeager and Davisz (1996) found that teachers who perceived history as a construction were more likely to adopt teaching practices reflecting this view, such as historical analysis and interpretation. However, in our own research with 21 history teachers, as introduced above, we regularly noted an inconsistency, even a disconnect between teachers’ (advanced) epistemological beliefs and their teaching. In fact, while the vast majority of participants in our study demonstrated advanced epistemological beliefs, only a fraction of them designed instructional materials that aligned with such beliefs (Wilke et al., 2022). Other scholars came to similar findings (e.g. Hartzler-Miller, 2001; VanSledright, 1996; Voet & De Wever, 2016, 2019). VanSledright (1996), for instance, described the struggles of a history teacher navigating between their position, and related epistemological beliefs, as a historian versus a history teacher, thereby observing several factors hindering this teacher’s translation of their knowledge “from discipline to school” (p. 282). Voet and De Wever’s (2016) more recent research with 22 history teachers in Flanders (Belgium) equally demonstrated that a profound understanding of the discipline of history did not guarantee that teachers’ instructional practices would better reflect history’s constructed and interpretive nature.

This shows that designing instructional practices that allow students to gain a thorough understanding of the discipline constitutes a huge challenge. The ability to do so has become of crucial importance in light of history education’s shift towards historical thinking. With the introduction of historical thinking as a main goal for history education across several countries (Lévesque & Clark, 2018), history education no longer aims to present students with a single historical narrative, but rather to introduce them to the interpretive and constructed nature of history. This requires teachers to design practices that provide students with knowledge about the past, as well as introduce them to the methods of professional historians (Lee, 2004; van Drie & van Boxtel, 2008). Therefore, it becomes all the more pressing for history education scholars to discover what role teachers’ epistemological beliefs actually play in (designing) their practice. The lack of clear data linking these beliefs to practice, however, raises questions about their importance in shaping teachers’ instruction, but also regarding how scholars attempt to capture these epistemological beliefs in research.

This chapter outlines three potential explanations for the observed disconnect between teachers’ epistemological beliefs and their practice. The first two are related to the nature and functioning of teachers’ epistemological beliefs. The third explanation concerns methodological issues associated with accurately capturing these beliefs. Finally, ramifications for future research on teachers’ instructional practices and for teacher training programs are explored.

Issue 1: What Exactly Are We Measuring? Challenges Related to the Inherent Complexity of Epistemological Beliefs

A first reason for the absence of a clear connection between teachers’ epistemological beliefs and teaching practices seems to be related to the complexity of these beliefs. Three particular challenges can be identified in this regard: the phenomenon of epistemic wobbling, the distinction between formal and practical epistemologies and the notion of a double epistemic standard.

To illustrate epistemic wobbling, consider the following reasoning provided by a history teacher with more than twenty years of teaching experience when discussing the same case study about the spread of agriculture as introduced earlier:

Respondent: Ok, this is my spontaneous reaction. Both explanations can be correct, but one can be more correct than the other.

Interviewer: Ok, could you explain your reasoning?

Respondent: Because maybe there will be evidence that shows this, I think?

Interviewer: That one is more correct than the other?

Respondent: Yes (…) until it is investigated, until is it definitively investigated, there can be two explanations that are correct, I think.

The teacher’s initial response came rather quickly and intuitively, and seemingly pointed to advanced epistemological beliefs. However, when she was asked to further explain, she really started to consider the case at hand and became more hesitant and questioning. Rather than explaining why both explanations could be correct, and connecting this to the interpretive and constructed nature of history, she presented them as working theories existing alongside each other until the definitive answer was found. Her answer thus gradually shifted, making it more difficult to distinguish the underlying epistemological beliefs. A similar ambiguity was visible in this teacher’s responses to another measure for epistemological beliefs that was included in our study: a questionnaire, consisting of a set of statements where teachers were asked to indicate, on a 6-point Likert scale, to what extent they agreed or disagreed with them (Stoel et al., 2017). The questionnaire included a number of statements indicating naïve beliefs about history, such as: “You cannot write well about the past when sources contradict each other” or “Because the past is gone you cannot adequately assess the reliability of historical accounts”, and statements indicating more advanced beliefs about history, such as: “In history education it is important that you learn to support your reasoning with evidence”. Strong disagreement with the first type of statements, indicated by a low score on the Likert scale, combined with a strong agreement (i.e. high score) with statements from the second type would point at advanced epistemological beliefs about history (Stoel et al., 2017). In this teacher’s case, the ambivalence present in her reasoning about the case study was also present in her responses to the statements. She tended to agree with statements indicating nuanced beliefs, but also agreed with some of the naïve statements, indicating that perhaps the advanced epistemological beliefs were not fully developed.

When participants’ scores on a measurement instrument show inconsistencies, an obvious response would be to question whether the instrument is sufficiently reliable. Although this is indeed something to consider—we will elaborate on this further in the chapter—we should also explore whether perhaps these inconsistencies simply reflect the reality of teachers’ epistemological beliefs. We are strengthened in this idea by the findings of Stoel et al. (2017). In a series of studies intended to validate their measurement instrument for epistemological beliefs about history, these scholars found that expert historians and high school students responded differently to the statements. Professional historians, whose epistemological beliefs can generally be considered as advanced, strongly agreed with nuanced statements while strongly disagreeing with the naïve ones. Some students, however, agreed with both the naïve and advanced statements. They described this phenomenon as “procedural objectivism” indicating a stance whereby students “value historical thinking skills because they believe that these skills make it possible to separate true and false sources and could generate true and fixed knowledge” (Stoel et al., 2017, p. 131). In our research, we found several cases of teachers who appeared to be procedural objectivists, such as the teacher introduced earlier in this section. Rather than indicating a deficiency of the measurement tools, these inconsistencies in respondents’ beliefs may suggest that their understanding of history is still developing and that they are in the middle of a transition from naïve to more advanced beliefs, also referred to as epistemic wobbling (VanSledright & Reddy, 2014).

Another challenge relates to the question of which epistemological views we are exactly mapping. Some researchers suggest to distinguish between formal and practical epistemologies (Sandoval, 2005; Sinatra & Chinn, 2012). Formal epistemologies are general ideas about “characteristics of knowledge and its justification in a particular field” (Sinatra & Chinn, 2012, p. 264) and can be evaluated using general questions about a respondent’s views on knowledge (construction) in the discipline. Practical epistemologies refer to those epistemological beliefs that are activated when confronted with concrete, discipline-specific tasks (Barzilai & Weinstock, 2015; Kuhn & Weinstock, 2002). These two types of epistemologies do not always align as beliefs about knowledge in general may not match the epistemic practices used in a specific situation. Existing research, however, often does not explicitly state at which level it is measuring, but it seems that most studies on teachers’ epistemological beliefs and instructional practices focus on the formal rather than the practical level (e.g. McCrum, 2013; Voet & De Wever, 2016, 2019). It thus remains unclear how these two levels relate to each other, as well as to teachers’ instructional practices. Our research therefore combined both. The abovementioned case study was used as a measure of teachers’ practical epistemological beliefs, inspired by the instruments developed by Kuhn et al. (2000) and Barzilai and Weinstock (2015), as it asked teachers to reason about a discipline-specific task. The questionnaire consisting of a set of statements gauged teachers’ formal epistemologies. Based on this study, it appeared that teachers’ formal and practical epistemologies are indeed not always aligned and that practical epistemologies are a better predictor for teachers’ instructional practices, than formal ones. In future studies, it is important for researchers to make a deliberate choice regarding which level(s) to measure, and to be explicit about this. This will allow researchers to gain a better and more comprehensive understanding of the relationship between various types of epistemological beliefs and practice.

What makes the study of teachers’ epistemological beliefs even more complicated is that teachers sometimes struggle to navigate between their role as historians and history teachers, particularly regarding how to present historical knowledge (construction) to their students. For several reasons, which will be explored in the next section, teachers willingly or reluctantly opt to present history as a fixed narrative in their practice, even though their private epistemology as trained historians is different (e.g. VanSledright & Limón, 2006; Wansink et al., 2016). In a review study on teachers’ epistemological beliefs, Maggioni and Parkinson (2008) noted that this phenomenon occurred in several disciplines. They explain how teachers can have a “double epistemic standard” (Maggioni & Parkinson, 2008, p. 453) meaning that their views about the nature of disciplinary knowledge are not aligned with their views about the nature of school knowledge. In our own study (Wilke et al., 2022), we found several examples of teachers making a clear distinction between their epistemological beliefs as historians and as history teachers. One teacher, for instance, stated explicitly that he did not consider it worthwhile to introduce students to different views on the past. As a history teacher, he argued, it was his task to think about “what is the most probable at that point in time and then to present it clearly as a univocal, structured account”. If not, he stated, things would get too complicated for his students. This shows that the teacher makes a conscious choice to present history differently to his student than he understands it himself. This decision points to a distinction between this teachers’ epistemological beliefs about the nature of disciplinary and the nature of school knowledge. In this case, this distinction seemed to be informed by other factors, namely the belief that his students did not have the ability to comprehend history when presented as interpretive. These other factors provide a second explanation for the regularly observed disconnect between teachers’ epistemological beliefs and their instructional practices.

Issue 2: How Do We Conceptualise the Relationship Between Teachers’ Epistemological Beliefs and Their Practice? Challenges Related to the Influence of Other Factors

While it seems evident to assume a direct, linear relationship between teachers’ epistemological beliefs and their instructional practice, this relationship seems to be impacted by a number of other factors. The case of another teacher from our qualitative study provides a very clear example of how different factors mediate the aforementioned relationship. This teacher had three years of teaching experience and had obtained a PhD in history alongside his teaching degree. The interview with this teacher as well as his discussion of the case study and his responses to the statements all clearly pointed to the existence of advanced epistemological beliefs, as could be expected from someone with a PhD in history. As an example of his teaching practice, this teacher presented an assignment on the fall of the Roman Empire, asking students to compare the evidence and arguments regarding the role of Christianity in its demise. The teacher explained that he was inspired by the recent publication of a new book by a British historian to design an assignment that would allow his students to think about how history can be interpreted in different ways, that historical knowledge is never “complete” and that new insights can always come about. The assignment in itself was well-designed and indeed encouraged students to think about the interpretive nature of historical knowledge, while also stressing the importance of weighing evidence and arguments when comparing various historical representations. The teacher, however, also pointed out that this assignment was not an accurate reflection of his teaching practice, as he offered such assignments only rarely. In reality, he explained, he mainly aspired to reach other goals through his teaching, such as providing students with a historical frame of reference, generating interest in the past and allowing students to orient themselves in the present world. The reasoning exhibited by this teacher was not uncommon. In fact, we encountered multiple cases of teachers who had advanced epistemological beliefs but did not consider it their task to introduce students to the interpretive and constructed nature of history and therefore did not design their practice in such a way. These teachers often pursued other goals in their teaching practice, similar to the ones mentioned above. This illustrates how teachers’ practices are determined not only by their epistemological beliefs, but also by other considerations.

Overall, three main factors shaping teachers’ instructional practices can be derived from the existing research (e.g. Barton & Levstik, 2003; Hicks et al., 2004; Van Hover & Yeager, 2003; VanSledright & Limón, 2006; Voet & De Wever, 2016, 2019; Wansink et al., 2016). One influential factor consists of a number of teachers’ beliefs. These include epistemological beliefs, but also educational ones, for instance related to students’ abilities. Teachers are reported to have different perceptions of their students’ cognitive abilities (e.g. Voet & De Wever, 2019). Some consider it too difficult for their students to understand the interpretive nature of historical knowledge, and therefore ignore the issue. Other educational goals that impact teachers’ practices include their beliefs about the goals of history: to what extent do they consider it important to pay attention to the nature of historical knowledge. Beliefs about the teaching and learning of history also play a role: teachers have different views on how students learn and progress in history, and on the most appropriate teaching styles. For instance, some teachers favour a directive approach, focusing mostly on the transmission of knowledge, while others prefer to design instructional activities encouraging students to gain knowledge and skills in a more self-guided manner (e.g. McCrum, 2013; Voet & De Wever, 2016). Contextual factors also play a role. Aspects such as the available time, access to didactic resources, curricular requirements and the presence of standardised tests influence the shape of teachers’ practice (e.g. Hicks et al., 2004; VanSledright & Limón, 2006; Voet & De Wever, 2016). These beliefs and contextual aspects should not be seen as separate elements each influencing teachers’ practice in an isolated manner, but rather as a complex web of connected elements interacting with each other. In our research, for instance, we encountered a teacher who barely addressed the interpretive nature of historical knowledge due to a complex interplay between several of these factors (Wilke & Depaepe, 2019). Although this teacher acknowledged the importance of teaching students about the interpretive nature of history, he had very distinct ideas about how to do this. He believed that this could only be achieved via extensive group work based on inquiry activities which he considered to be completely unfeasible for his students within the available time. Moreover, he strongly disliked organising group work as he liked to maintain control over the classroom. Therefore, he pragmatically chose not to pursue this goal, but to focus on offering his students a historical frame of reference.

This example illustrates how various teachers’ beliefs, as well as the contextual factors, all need to be aligned in favour of designing instructional practices presenting history as interpretive and constructed. Even when this is the case, however, teachers still do not always manage to put this into practice. A final important factor in shaping teachers’ instructional practices is related to teachers’ ability to design instructional materials that accurately reflect the nature of the discipline. In our qualitative study, we noted remarkable differences between teachers’ reported learning goals for particular instructional materials, and what materials actually allowed students to learn. Such differences were most prominent in instructional materials containing source work. Teachers sometimes reported designing instructional materials centred around critical source analysis, specifically with the aim of introducing students to the practice of historians. Questions accompanying the sources, however, then only aimed at the content of the sources or presented critical source analysis as a mechanical process whereby students were invited to look for straightforward “true” versus “false” information, to be discerned based on a fixed set of questions. Hence, instead of promoting advanced epistemological beliefs, as these teachers intended to do, these materials were more likely to strengthen students’ naïve beliefs about history. In another qualitative research, Voet and De Wever (2016) similarly found that teachers’ practices misrepresented the practice of historians to such an extent that they gave their students “the false impression that historical reasoning is mainly a matter of looking up information, or mechanistically assessing the reliability of sources” (p. 65). This contrast between teachers’ intended and actual practice shows that, regardless of teachers’ beliefs and contextual factors, teachers also need to have a profound understanding of the notion of historical thinking and of how to foster it among students, in order to be able to design high-quality teaching materials.

For researchers, the interconnectedness between these different factors makes it very difficult to isolate the distinct, individual influence of a single element, such as that of teachers’ epistemological beliefs. Although the development of advanced epistemological beliefs evidently plays an important role in teachers’ understanding of historical thinking, understanding why teachers do or do not reflect this in their practice, becomes all the more complex.

Issue 3: How Do We Measure Epistemological Beliefs? Challenges Related to Methodology

The issues presented above showed that mapping teachers’ epistemological beliefs is not an easy endeavour. They revealed that teachers’ epistemological beliefs are complex and therefore difficult to capture, and that different measurement instruments can yield different results. In our research, we therefore chose to include more than one measure of epistemological beliefs and to discuss the results with the participants. We asked teachers to complete a questionnaire, containing statements intended to capture their formal epistemological beliefs (Stoel et al., 2017). Subsequently, we presented them with a case study as a means to capture their practical epistemologies and discussed the results of both instruments with the respondents in an interview. This allowed us to compare the different instruments but also to obtain a comprehensive view of the participating teachers’ epistemological beliefs as well as their influence on teachers’ practices, besides that of other beliefs and factors.

If we assume, as we have argued earlier, that teachers’ epistemological beliefs are sometimes inherently inconsistent, then we need measurement instruments that allow us to capture these beliefs in all their complexity in order to draw meaningful conclusions. Doing so requires additional insight into the respondents’ thoughts, which can be acquired, for instance, via interviews. All of this calls into question whether we can expect to capture the complexity of epistemological beliefs in a single, straightforward instrument. In our study, the interviews brought forward much more variation in respondents’ epistemological beliefs than appeared to be present based on the initial measurement instruments. They therefore offered a much more accurate view of these beliefs. It hence seems that epistemological beliefs are not easily captured by relatively simple instruments, which might explain why some studies did not find a clear connection between teachers’ beliefs and practices. Although time-consuming, interview data can provide a much richer picture of the full complexity of an individual’s epistemology.

Another difficulty which has already been touched upon briefly is related to the question of what exactly we are measuring. In discussing the measurement instruments in our study with the participants, we noticed that teachers often answered statements differently from the way they were intended. In particular, they answered these statements through a didactical lens, not as historians, but as history teachers. For instance, when clarifying why she agreed with the statement that “You cannot write well about the past when sources contradict each other”, a teacher explained that she mainly found it difficult to teach history when sources contradict each other, because this was hard for her students to understand in the limited time available for history education. This teacher’s answer can be seen as an expression of a double epistemic standard, but it urges us to question the validity of this type of measurement instrument. Rather than measuring teachers’ epistemological beliefs about the nature of disciplinary knowledge, we might instead be measuring their epistemological beliefs about the nature of school knowledge. If we want to draw meaningful and valid conclusions about (the role of) teachers’ epistemological beliefs, it is important to carefully distinguish between the two. However, the existing measurement instruments do not yet allow for this.

Conclusion and Discussion

Recent shifts in history education curricula, towards historical thinking as a main goal, have made it even more important for teachers to develop instructional practices that allow their students to understand the interpretive and constructed nature of historical knowledge. It seems self-evident that teachers who have nuanced epistemological beliefs will be more likely to do so. In reality, however, studies often report that teachers’ epistemological beliefs do not always align with the way that they present the nature of the historical discipline in their practice. This chapter set out to explore various explanations for this inconsistency. It discussed how the complexity of teachers’ epistemological beliefs as well as the influence of other factors make it difficult to establish a clear connection between teachers’ epistemological beliefs and their practice. The chapter also explored the role of methodological issues in capturing teachers’ epistemological beliefs.

How can these considerations inform future studies into teachers’ epistemological beliefs and practices? First of all, the findings discussed in this chapter by no means intend to disregard the importance of teachers’ epistemological beliefs and of the need to strive for the development of advanced epistemological beliefs among (future) history teachers. They should, however, encourage a reassessment of the importance of these beliefs in shaping teachers’ practice. While they do play a role, they are not the sole or even best predictors of how teachers will present historical knowledge in their practice. Not only do other factors have an important impact in this regard, they also directly affect the relationship between teachers’ epistemological beliefs and their practice. Therefore, we recommend that future studies looking to comprehend, explain and potentially even alter teachers’ instructional practices should take into account a wide range of aspects. These include teachers’ educational beliefs, the role of contextual factors and teachers’ didactic expertise related to cultivating students’ historical thinking.

Mapping teachers’ epistemological beliefs in an accurate way remains challenging as epistemological beliefs are complex and sometimes inconsistent. Although this chapter offers no clear-cut solution to these challenges, it does suggest that a rich data collection is required in order to get a complete picture of teachers’ epistemological beliefs. It is also important for future researchers to think of and be explicit about which epistemological beliefs they want to study. Our research findings suggest that mapping practical epistemologies provides a more varied and hence a more accurate depiction of teachers’ beliefs, that is more closely related to the epistemological beliefs that are reflected in their practice. Moreover, considering that teachers, deliberately or not, sometimes make a distinction between their epistemological beliefs about disciplinary and school knowledge, it might be beneficial for future researchers to try to capture precisely those epistemological beliefs about the nature of school knowledge. These beliefs may already integrate some of the educational beliefs that are known to be influential in teachers’ practices, such as those about students’ abilities or about the goals of history education. As these beliefs reflect how teachers think about the nature of the historical knowledge that they are presenting to students, it is quite plausible that they will be far more impactful in their instructional practice, compared to their beliefs about disciplinary knowledge.

Besides offering suggestions for future studies, this chapter’s findings are also of relevance for pre- and in-service teacher training programs. Considering the various factors that inform teachers’ instructional practices, they suggest that these programs should aim to provide teachers with a profound understanding of the nature of historical knowledge and knowledge construction, but should also address other beliefs that might otherwise impede teachers from designing instructional practices that foster historical thinking. By doing so, they can ensure that teachers’ epistemological beliefs about school knowledge are aligned with their epistemological beliefs about disciplinary knowledge, and hence, with history education’s goal of fostering historical thinking. Moreover, teachers will benefit from concrete instruction and support on how to translate these nuanced epistemological beliefs into educational practices. In order to overcome a disconnect between teachers’ intended learning goals and the instructional materials that they design, teachers will have to be supported in developing the necessary skills to design instructional practices that actually foster a thorough understanding of the nature of history and historical knowledge among their students.