Introduction

History teachers are today faced with the task of stewarding their students though critical engagement with fake news, historical denial, and rival histories of their nation’s past. The ubiquitous nature of this challenge is arguably a specific characteristic of contemporary postmodern culture, where the line between fact and fiction has been questioned, and is often deliberately blurred in reality television (Hill, 2005), pseudo-scientific documentaries (Wallace, 2019), infotainment (Photiou et al., 2019), and through the necessary but distortive conventions of historical film (Rosenstone, 2006); not to mention the tabloidization of current events (Sparks, 2015), varieties of historical denial (Taylor, 2008), the circulation of conspiracy theories (Peters & Johannesen, 2020), and the deliberate use of post-truth propaganda in political power games over the internet and social media (Fuller, 2018). Likewise, the emergence and recognition of “rival histories” of the nation have become a matter of public debate, and curricular concern, in many contemporary societies (Elmersjö et al., 2017), not the least in my own home environment, Australia (Clark, 2004, 2008; Parkes, 2007, 2009, 2011; Taylor, 2004, 2009). In this challenging context, the development of media literacy in social studies education (Journell, 2017; Manfra & Holmes, 2018), and historical thinking skills (Siebörger, 2017; Wineburg, 2018), have strong advocates. Such advocacy reflects an international consensus around the importance of adopting a disciplinary approach to history teaching that first emerged in the 1970s as part of the social history turn (Mathis & Parkes, 2020; Parkes & Donnelly, 2014), and has since been promoted using notions such as historical thinking (Peck & Seixas, 2008; Seixas & Morton, 2012; Seixas & Peck, 2004), historical understanding (Ashby & Lee, 1987; Lee & Ashby, 2000), historical reasoning (Martin et al., 2021; van Boxtel & van Drie, 2004; Voss & Carretero, 1998), historical competencies (Körber, 2007, 2014; Körber & Meyer-Hamme, 2015), and historical literacy (Virta, 2007). While these various notions are not identical, they do share a relationship to the idea that school history should encourage students to practice and appropriate analogues of the intellectual workings of professional historians (Shemilt, 1987; VanSledright, 1996; Wineburg, 2001), though historical competencies may certainly have a broader agenda around historical sense-making that goes beyond the disciplinary frame (Körber, 2016). Certainly, developing epistemological beliefs that are consistent with an “understanding of history as a disciplinary form of knowledge, with specific procedures for ascertaining the validity of historical claims” has become important to the research field (Stoel et al., 2017, p. 120). Of course, in order to facilitate such development in students, history teachers themselves arguably need to hold sophisticated or “nuanced” epistemological beliefs about the nature of historical knowledge (Maggioni, 2010; Maggioni et al., 2009; Stoel et al., 2017), else be trapped in simply rehearsing and reproducing the knowledge of the powerful (dominant discourses), rather than fostering powerful knowledge (disciplinary thinking) in their students, to use the distinction proposed by the educational theorist, Michael Young (2007).

Studying the epistemological beliefs of history students and teachers has led to a common finding that both students and teachers often “wobble” between epistemic stances (Stoel et al., 2017; VanSledright & Reddy, 2014). VanSledright and Maggioni (2016) suggested that the “wobbling” they observed most likely resulted from a difficulty their participants had in navigating the objective and subjective aspects of history. Elmersjö (2022) has speculated that “epistemic inconsistency” (p. 829), may be the result, not of an inconsistency in teachers’ beliefs about history, but between their thinking about history and how they think the school subject should be taught to particular students (p. 835). This concords with my own suspicion, and suggests the influence of at least two intersecting cultures within which the history teacher must operate: (1) the historical culture that has shaped their epistemological beliefs about history, that includes both the mnemonic communities they have grown up within (Wertsch, 2002), and the epistemic communities they may have been inducted into within their academic education (Holzner, 1972); and (2) the specific pedagogical culture/s within which their curriculum ideologies have been formed. History teachers’ epistemic beliefs about history were originally studied with a view to determining their influence on their classroom practices (Maggioni, 2010), and has continued with a concern focused on teachers’ beliefs about the nature of historical knowledge; the impact these beliefs have upon history teaching; and what the implications of these are for history teacher education (Nitsche et al., 2022). However, it may be more productive to approach the issue of epistemic inconsistency from the perspective that history teachers work within a series of overlapping and intersecting cultural fields, each shaping their beliefs and practices in specific ways. This is where an approach that takes seriously the influence of curriculum ideologies (Schiro, 2013), as pedagogic epistemologies that shape classroom practice, and the concept of historical consciousness as understood within the Germanic tradition, “as a coherent set of mental operations that define the peculiarity of historical thinking and the function it plays in human culture” (Rüsen, 1987, p. 284), may prove particularly useful to this discussion.

Historical Consciousness, Historical Culture, and the Hermeneutic Challenge

The notion of “historical consciousness” was first presented to the Anglophone history education research community through Peter Seixas’ (2004) edited collection Theorizing Historical Consciousness. Inspired by, including, and historically indebted to, the work of German scholar, Jörn Rüsen (1987, 1989), this collection marked the beginning of the serious consideration of historical consciousness in scholarship outside of the German-speaking and Nordic world, where it was already well-established as a concept within the didaktik literature (Ahonen, 2005). My own approach is to understand historical consciousness beyond simply the contents of memory or a form of “disciplinary subject matter” common to some of the Anglophone literature (as also observed by Zanazanian & Nordgren, 2019, p. 773), and instead understand historical consciousness as our sense of temporal orientation and awareness of ourselves as historical beings. In this I take up a position aligned with the distinctions offered by Körber (2016). Despite the definitional challenges, the wide-spread up-take of historical consciousness as a concept within the history education research field is clearly evidenced by two additional edited collections that followed Seixas. Firstly, published the year after Sexias’ collection, Jürgen Straub’s (2005b) Narration, Identity, and Historical Consciousness, adopted a psychological approach to the subject, and drew together work on historical thinking, narrative psychology, moral consciousness, and historical consciousness, with the explicit aim of bringing psychological insights into the study of historical consciousness, and envisioning a research program that comparatively and ethnologically, explores how people “actually think historically, and which acts are or were once guided by such [historical] thought” (Straub, 2005a, p. xiv).

More recently, Metzger and McArthur Harris’ (2018) edited collection The Wiley International Handbook of History Teaching and Learning included several discussions of historical consciousness. Likewise, Anna Clark and Carla L. Peck’s (2019a) Contemplating Historical Consciousness: Notes from the Field, demonstrated just how important the concept of historical consciousness had become to the academic research field, traversing the domains of history education, public history, memory studies, and heritage studies; and shifted the focus to how “peoples and communities engage with and produce history” (Clark & Peck, 2019b, p. 2). Rightly, they announce this research focus as being driven by a concern with “historical culture” or the

histories produced by public institutions, bureaucracies, curriculum developers, governments, and professional and academic historians, as well as quotidian historical discourses of the everyday … public and private histories as well as academic historical scholarship. (Clark & Peck, 2019b, p. 2)

This borrows from the Germanic concept of geschichtskultur (history culture) and its take up in the Nordic didaktik tradition, where as “historical culture” it is understood as the encounters that individuals, groups, institutions, and societies, have with the past in the form of history; and influenced European history education and research, with a shift of focus to the public uses of history (see the discussion in Zanazanian & Nordgren, 2019). As Sjöberg (2011) has argued:

While historical consciousness is better understood along the lines of individual construct, historical culture offers the possibility to move beyond the confines of individual experience, memory, or “consciousness” to the public sphere. (p. 8)

Thorp (2016) notes that historical culture “deals with how history is disseminated and how knowledge, attitudes and values about history provide individuals with meaning” (p. 24), and argues that while we are born into a historical context that precedes us, we never experience history directly, but “it is rather experienced through historical accounts that are disseminated in speech, writing, or through customs and cultural habits” and we thus “never encounter history nakedly but always through a cultural or social environment” (p. 24). For Rüsen (2012) “[t]he work of history didactics cannot be understood or pursued without an awareness of its role in the historical culture of its time” (p. 520). As Lévesque (2016) has argued:

We need to (re)conceptualize the development of students’ historical consciousness, not exclusively as a practice of public memory or a set of scholastic competencies, but as the effective result of the interplay between historical culture, public memory, practical life, schooling, and the practice of disciplinary history.

Thus, the historical narratives we encounter through the historical culture/s of which we are a member, both produce and are produced by historical consciousness, or our awareness and embrace of ourselves as historical beings; and it was this understanding, and the capturing of the zeitgeist it reflected, that led to the establishment, and arguably significance, of Historical Encounters, a journal I founded in 2014 as a venue for scholarship that explored in various ways, the relationships between historical consciousness, historical culture, and history education.

Within the German philosophically oriented hermeneutic tradition from which it emerged, the concept of historical consciousness was described by Gadamer (1975) as “a full awareness of the historicity of everything present” (p. 8). Grever (2019) notes, that Gadamer’s hermeneutics emphasizes “the historicity of human beings”, and understands that “the world is historically effected” and thus “always situated in time” (p. 225, emphasis in the original). Importantly, Grever (2019) clarifies that from within the hermeneutic tradition:

historical consciousness implies an awareness of the fundamental historical character of human behavior, knowledge, institutions, events, and developments in the world, including one’s own position … a temporary outcome of a changing state of mind concerning orientation in time of human beings who are involved in transforming, sometimes overlapping mnemonic communities. (p. 225, emphasis in the original)

Historical consciousness, in a Gadamerian sense, is thus

the realization that all knowledge is incomplete because it is situated in, is a function of, and is therefore made possible by a horizon of historically mediated meanings which constitutes the unavoidable platform from which we, via our interpretative existence, make our way through the world and history. (Van Niekerk, 2005, p. 235)

Gadamer’s understanding of hermeneutical activity represents a reaction against a transcendental notion of reason, “the idea of an unsituated reason” (Van Niekerk, 2005, p. 236), that sits beyond the influence of historical influences. Taken seriously, this understanding of historical consciousness challenges any notion of a history discipline that operates with a set of unchanging methodologies or cognitive operations that somehow sit outside of historical time. Instead, it becomes imperative, especially as teachers and students of history, to always draw attention to “what conventional and methodological practices, whose discourse, whose standards, [and] whose past” are in play, recognizing that the discipline itself is socially constructed (Segall, 2006, p. 138), or as Zanazanian has argued, requires the learner to engage in a self-reflexive move that acknowledges the conceptual frames they are deploying and connects them with the broader social, cultural, and historical context from which they have emerged that he calls history-as-interpretive-filter. Elsewhere, I have argued that it is precisely this kind of turn towards teaching history as historiography—where we are encouraged to adopt a historiographic gaze towards any of our own or others’ historical knowledge claims—that is required if we take history, and ourselves as historically effected beings, seriously (Parkes, 2009). Thus, for Gadamer (1987) historical consciousness is

a reflexive position concerning all that is handed down by tradition. Historical consciousness no longer listens sanctimoniously to the voice that reaches out from the past but, in reflection upon it, replaces it within the context where it took root in order to see the significance and relative value proper to it. (p. 89)

Understood in this way, historical consciousness can be conceived as both a general human capacity or tendency to orient ourselves in time, “giving practical life a temporal frame and matrix” (Rüsen, 2004, p. 67), and the achievement of a certain “psychological competence” (Straub, 2005c, p. 49), or mode of awareness, or a kind of epistemic reflexivity (Mathis & Parkes, 2020), or historical (self) consciousness (Parkes, 2022), in which we appreciate the historicity of ourselves and all forms of human culture and tradition.

No Outside Tradition or the Importance of Epistemic Communities

In my book Interrupting History: Rethinking History Curriculum After “the End of History” (Parkes, 2011), I proposed that the history educator needs to adopt a historiographic perspective that “extends the gaze of the historian to everything, even themselves, revealing the historical specificity of all forms of historical knowledge and practice” (p. 102). In extending the historian’s gaze to themselves, I imagined the historian or history educator as starting to function as a kind of historiographer. My argument was that when the idea of historicity is taken seriously, the gaze of the historian become panoptical, forcing “history into a painful reflexivity that paradoxically provides the possibility for the historian (or history student) to disengage from historical discourse as a result of historicizing historical representation” (p. 130). In Nietzschean fashion, I argued that through its encounter with the historiographic gaze, historical discourse is interrupted, resulting in a type of critical hermeneutic distance that can disrupt the effects of a limiting historical narrative (see Nietzsche, 1874/1983). I concluded by arguing that we needed to “teach history under erasure”, where “the end of history” comes at the hands of the historiographer’s gaze, and where we subsequently conjure a pedagogical situation in which histories, as spectres that haunt our lives, are both presented and deconstructed in the same lesson. The idea of the historiographic gaze placed historical representation at the centre of the curriculum and aimed to provoke an understanding that historical representations emerge from within—feminist, Marxist, social, intellectual, cultural, and many other—historiographic traditions, and hence are marked historically by the methodological biases of those traditions. In Gadamer’s hermeneutics, the act of historical interpretation relies on the prejudices or pre-judgements we develop through participation in one or more historiographic traditions. The concept of the historiographic gaze called upon the history teacher to recognize that our own acts of reading and interpretation are prejudiced by the methodological biases of the historiographic traditions we have been initiated into, and thus alludes to the importance of understand historical thought and narrative, including history teachers’ epistemic beliefs, in the contexts of their use and production.

Two decades ago, Catherine Harris-Hart (2002) found that during a period of syllabus change in New South Wales, the strongest mediating force on history teachers’ practice was the culture of the faculty or subject department. This suggests that rather than an exclusive focus on individual epistemic cognition, it may be useful to engage in the exploration of school-based history departments as epistemic communities. I take two obvious starting points for this suggestion. The first starting point for this line of inquiry is James Wertsch’s (2002) work on “mnemonic communities” and “narrative templates”, already taken up by Zanazanian (2015, 2017, 2019) in various novel and generative forms. According to Wertsch (2012) “the narrative tools we employ to make sense of the past introduce a particular perspective” or “ethnocentrism” that motivates us to view the past in a biased way (p. 11). He claims that our appreciation and comprehension of the past is at least partially formed through our ethnic group identifications; and that these “tribal” affiliations and ethnic commitments, that make us participants in particular mnemonic communities, affecting the way we read the narratives we encounter. He notes that rival “mnemonic communities routinely spar over ‘what really happened’ in crucial events from the past” (Wertsch, 2008, p. 145), and that many of the collective memories shared within the mnemonic community are underpinned by a common “narrative template” (a kind of regularly appearing archetypal storyline) that acts as a cultural tool, shaping perceptions of the past, and is relatively resistant to change (Wertsch, 2002). We only have to think about Donald Trump and his supporters, and the American election in 2020, to see an example of this in practice. As Journell (2017) argues, Trump’s logic leads to the understanding “that any information contradicting one’s ideology is automatically illegitimate, or fake” (p. 8). Likewise, Trump and his administration frequently demonstrated their willingness to promote “alternative facts” whenever reality did not support their political agenda (Journell, 2017, p. 9). This puts in doubt that simply teaching historical thinking skills alone will be sufficient to encourage their universal deployment, and underscores the strength of the mnemonic community’s influence on individual epistemology.

The second point of reference for a concern with the influence of epistemic communities on individual epistemic beliefs is the study conducted by Gottlieb and Wineburg (2012). This study offered a definitive example of “epistemic switching” among religious historians that was dependent on the kind of text (secular or religious) they were given to analyse; which was not evident among the non-religious historians in the study, who applied the same historical thinking mindset to both sets of texts. Nitsche et al. (2022) see this as indicating “that epistemic cognition in history is situated in context” (p. 3). In his seminal work on epistemic communities, Burkhard Holzner (1972) contrasted epistemic communities of specialized workers, with ideologically united communities of the faithful (Holzner, 1972, p. 122). In Gottlieb and Wineburg’s (2012) study the application of different sets of epistemological criteria was mediated precisely by the “the allegiances [to epistemological and ideological communities] triggered by the document under review” (p. 84). Zanazanian (2019) drawing on Wertsch’s (1998, 2002) concept of narrative templates, and Rüsen’s (2005, 2017) anthropocentric approach to historical consciousness, has argued that certain epistemic positions on the nature of history itself work as filters that operate as “a cultural tool that mediates individuals’ historical sense-making process” (p. 865) and cut “across objectivist, subjectivist and nuanced approaches to making sense of social reality” (p. 850).

In the mid-seventies, drawing on Foucault’s (1966/1994) notion of the episteme, “a shared worldview that derives from their mutual socialization and shared knowledge” (Cross, 2013, p. 10), John Gerard Ruggie (1975) argued that epistemic communities share intentions, expectations, symbols, behavioural rules, and points of reference that arise from “bureaucratic position, technocratic training, similarities in scientific outlook and shared disciplinary paradigms” (pp. 569–570). The definitional criteria for what constitutes an epistemic community were presented by Haas (1992) as follows:

[A] network of professionals with recognized expertise and competence in a particular domain or issue-area … [who] have (1) a shared set of normative and principled beliefs, which provide a value-based rationale for social action … (2) shared casual beliefs … derived from their analysis of practices leading or contributing to a central set of problems in their domain … (3) shared notions of validity … in the domain of their expertise; and (4) … a set of common practices associated with a set of problems to which their professional competence is directed. (p. 3)

Haas (1992), distinguished epistemic communities from the professions and disciplines that house them, because

[a]lthough members of a given profession or discipline may share a set of casual approaches or orientations and have a consensual knowledge base, they lack the shared normative commitments of members of an epistemic community. (p. 19)

Haas gives an example to make this clear:

While economists as a whole constitute a profession, members of a particular subgroup of economists—for example, Keynesians …—may constitute an epistemic community of their own and systemically contribute to a concrete set of projects informed by their preferred views, beliefs, and ideas. (Haas, 1992, p. 19)

In the discipline of history, this might lead us to think of reconstructions, constructionists, or deconstructionists (Jenkins & Munslow, 2004), or using a different schema, empiricists, Marxists, feminists, postmodernists, etc. (Green & Troup, 1999); and within the curriculum field, academic-disciplinarians, techno-rationalists, vocationalists, progressivists, developmentalists, reconceptualists, and social reconstructionists (Adamson & Morris, 2007; Aoki, 2005; Kliebard, 1987; Marsh & Willis, 2003; Schiro, 2013).

For Haas (1992) utilizing the concept of epistemic communities is useful for focusing on the “process through which consensus is reached within a given domain of expertise and through which the consensual knowledge is diffused to and carried forward by other actors” (p. 23). Cross (2013) echoes Haas, describing epistemic communities as “networks of experts who persuade others of their shared causal beliefs and policy goals by virtue of their professional knowledge” (p. 5). While Sethard Fisher (1969) added that “[o]nce epistemic communities become established as power structures, they regulate members’ orientations” (p. 562).

As has already been argued, subject departments are a potential shaping force on the practical epistemologies that teachers adopt around history teaching, and may contrast with the formal epistemologies a teacher holds around the nature of history itself (Wilke et al., 2022). Thus, in cases where a consensus around practice emerges in a particular subject department, its members may begin to function as a type of epistemic community; and thus, to understand an individual history teacher’s epistemic cognition it would become advantageous to explore their beliefs in the context of their professional setting. Within the curriculum studies field, it is theorized that various ideologies and epistemologies shape teachers’ pedagogic practices. Schiro’s (2013) work on teachers’ curriculum theories stands out within this literature, not only for the clarity of its framework that proposes four dominant curriculum ideologies, but particularly for its original contribution to the discussion on how teachers navigate conflicting ideologies. For Schiro, an ideology is “a collection of ideas, a comprehensive vision, a way of looking at things, or a worldview that embodies the way a person or group believes the world should be organized and function” (p. 8). He also notes that it is a word that describes “how cultures are structured in ways that enable the group holding power to have the maximum control with the minimum of conflict” (p. 8). Thus, Schiro seems to be saying that ideology is an epistemology that is shared through the exercise of power.

Schiro’s curriculum ideologies each involve particular epistemologies that drive curriculum design, pedagogical practice, the classroom disposition of the teacher, and the purpose and modes of assessment. Schiro firstly identifies the Scholar Academic Ideology, representing a belief that “over the centuries our culture has accumulated important knowledge that has been organized into the academic disciplines found in universities” and that education’s goal should be “to help children learn the accumulated knowledge of our culture: that of the academic disciplines” (p. 4). In this way of thinking, an academic discipline functions as a hierarchical community that is constituted by

inquirers into truth (the scholars at the top of the hierarchy), teachers of the truth (those who disseminate the truth that has been discovered by the scholars), and learners of the truth (students whose job it is to learn so they become proficient members of the discipline). (p. 4)

The ultimate goal of the academic ideology is to transform the learners into scholars, through the mediation of the educators (at both school and university levels). This view is dominant within universities, and has certainly influenced school history. The second curriculum ideology Schiro identifies is the Social Efficiency Advocate, who seeks to find ways of efficiently meeting the needs of contemporary society by a focus on training the youth of society in the specific skills, competencies, activities, and procedures it is anticipated they will need in the adult workplace. Social Efficiency style instruction structures the learning sequence towards clearly defined behavioural objectives, and is built around the achievement of competencies required by the workforce. This is the dominant curriculum ideology of the vocational education and training sector. The third position Schiro identifies is the Learner-Centred Ideology, which privileges “the needs and concerns” of the student over the needs of society or the specificities of the subject matter (p. 5), aiming to assist individuals to achieve their full intellectual, social, emotional, and physical potential. We see this most strongly in the Early Childhood Education and Care sector. The final position that Schiro identifies is the Social Reconstructionist Ideology. According to Schiro, “social reconstructionists are conscious of the problems of our society and the injustices done to certain of its members” on the basis of categories such as race, class, gender, sexuality, or ethnicity (p. 6), and utilizes education as a tool to facilitate and advocate for a new and more just society. Within schools it is most often associated with Humanities and Social Science subjects. Not only are some subject areas, and certain types of institutions, more disposed to certain curriculum ideologies over others, but different ideologies may be found within the same subject area.

Where Schiro’s work may become particularly useful—to borrow an idea from the epistemic cognition literature—is in his exploration of teachers’ ideological switching or wobbling between different curriculum ideologies. Schiro noticed that the teachers he studied demonstrated inconsistencies in the curriculum beliefs they held, both across the span of their career, and even at different points in time during a particular day (Schiro, 2013, p. 256). In his exploration of these inconsistencies, Schiro found teachers adopted one of four different dispositions. The first disposition he noticed was a dualistic attitude found among teachers who “believe, understand and value only one ideology”, and who see “those curriculum beliefs that are in agreement with their own as right … and those that are different as incorrect” (p. 256). The second disposition Schiro identifies as a relativistic attitude, held by teachers who give equal value to each of the curriculum ideologies, holding none as better than any other. The third possibility Schiro calls a contextual attitude, held by teachers who adopt the curriculum approach that “they believe is best for accomplishing certain goals or purposes” (pp. 256–257), switching “their ideology depending on the nature of the curriculum task they are engaged in, or the ideology of the group or individual with whom they are speaking” (p. 257). The final possibility Schiro identified was a hierarchical attitude that differentiates “between a variety of well-defined, viable ideologies while making a personal and thoughtful commitment to only one” (p. 257).

Schiro notes that “educators who take a relativistic or contextual posture toward the existence of different ideologies can believe in more than one simultaneously, and can combine ideologies in unique (and often inconsistent) ways” (p. 257). While educators who take a hierarchical posture are often capable of using different ideologies “in the service of promoting a single ideology” (p. 257). Those who take a dualist position, are the ones who most closely match the singular dispositions Schiro identified in his work, and are the ones who are often involved in curriculum debates over issues like skills versus content. In investigating history teachers’ epistemic beliefs about both history and history pedagogy, it is precisely this type of relational framework that may provide a useful heuristic for thinking through the questions around epistemic switching, epistemic wobbling, or the “epistemic double standard” that has been a concern in the literature (Maggioni, 2010, p. 310). At the very least, this might offer an explanation for mismatches between what Wilke et al. (2022) label an individual history teacher’s formal and practical epistemologies.

Finally, I’d like to us to remember that pedagogical techniques are themselves the product of particular epistemic communities, and arguably operate as forms of embodied epistemology. Like “concepts”, I would argue that “techniques” or “practices” are subject to what Koselleck (2000, 2018) described as Zeitschichten (time strata, the sediments or layers of time). That is, they carry layers of meaning that accumulate like sediments from their utilization within different epistemes. An education example might be something like project based learning, which was originally advocated in the 1930s by John Dewey, and was situated within the epistemic communities of the American pragmatists and progressivists. Today, that same type of pedagogical approach has been recontextualized within a twenty-first-century skills paradigm. Thus, project based learning may be inflected with layers of meaning from both periods. If we were to find this to be the case, then this would be a good example of Zeitschichten at play. In order to determine such sediments of time, Koselleck (2018) encourages us to think in terms of the “repetition of structures” looking “simultaneously [for] both historical change and historical persistence” (p. 18), for both the replication of the old, and the implementation of the truly original and unique. This adds yet another temporal dimension to the study of teachers’ practical epistemologies.

Conclusion: Towards an Epistemic Fluency

I will conclude by noting that, from the perspective of both research and training, it is useful to remember and approach history teachers as always a member of mnemonic communities by virtue of their birth within a particular culture and society; and their membership of one or more epistemic communities by virtue of their academic education within particular historiographic traditions; and as inheritors of epistemically loaded pedagogical practices through their exposure to, and adoption of different curriculum ideologies, during their teacher education program, participation within particular professional associations, and location within specific subject departments. The epistemologies circulating within each of these communities are all likely to have purchase on a teachers’ beliefs and practices. Likewise, history teachers may have varying degrees of loyalty or commitment to specific communities and their epistemological beliefs; and within an educational context, it would certainly be useful to understand if the epistemic beliefs of one form of community out-weigh the other. Certainly, what we might want to note is that the ability to apply the historical thinking competencies of a specific tradition, is undoubtedly a sign of historical literacy (see Mathis & Parkes, 2020, p. 192); and those teachers “who are flexible and adept with respect to different ways of knowing” or in this case different schools of historical thought, might “be said to possess epistemic fluency” (Markauskaite & Goodyear, 2016, p. 1), which has been argued to be “a capacity that underpins knowledgeable professional action and innovation” (back cover). Thus, rather than simply determining a history teacher’s epistemic stances, or their degree of switching and/or wobbling, there may be some promise in assisting them to develop an epistemic fluency, so that the formal and practical epistemologies they adopt are not simply the artefacts of fate, but become resources with which to explore historical discourse in the classroom, with critical insight, and empathy, arising as a result of their historical (self) consciousness.