How Meaning Making Cultivates Historical Consciousness: Identifying a Learning Trajectory and Pedagogical Guidelines to Promote It

Abstract The aim of this article is to present a pedagogical approach for history education. This approach is called Meaningful History and it outlines the process by which upper-level secondary history students can cultivate historical consciousness. Based on the notion of learning as meaning making and historical consciousness as a disposition to engage with history so as to make meaning of past human experience for oneself, the author describes a possible learning trajectory. Additionally, to show how this trajectory could apply to the classroom, the author offers three guidelines for educators to design and support such learning. These guidelines are: (1) negotiate the presence of the past, (2) inquire into the past with the help of habits of mind, (3) and build a sense of historical being. The guidelines are illuminated by examples that have been extracted from a design-inspired classroom experiment. In conclusion, the author suggests that future history education research investigate Meaningful History’s relevance and practicality in various settings.