This article was written by Robbert-Jan Adriaansen and is part of a series of articles by the OHTE Scientific Advisory Council. It was originally published on the website of the Council of Europe; access it via this link. The Scientific Advisory Council ensures the academic, scholarly, and methodological quality of the Observatory’s work. It is composed of renowned persons in the field of history teaching and learning.

These words belong to James1, a retired British history teacher reflecting on a training seminar he facilitated in Bosnia and Herzegovina. A Bosnian colleague – formerly a Yugoslav diplomat who had retrained as a history teacher after the breakup of Yugoslavia – had approached him during a break. The colleague explained his dilemma: in his class of 17-year-olds sat one of his best students ever, a bright and sensitive young woman. The problem was that she was sitting alongside three boys, each of whom was the son of one of the men who had murdered her father.

James, who had been presenting strategies for teaching history across conflict divides with confidence, was stopped in his tracks. “I couldn’t think of anything reassuring or particularly helpful to say,” he recalls. “The wheels came off my expert presentation.”

This incident, one of 15 studied in this article, represents a fundamental issue in history education today. History teaching has become contested across Europe and beyond, with curriculum debates, political pressures and competing narratives making it one of the most challenging school subjects (OHTE 2024). Teachers navigate controversies, difficult histories, and trauma whilst facing scrutiny from multiple directions – students, parents, colleagues, administrators, media and politicians (Goldberg and Savenije 2018; Wansink et al. 2024). At a time when Europe is witnessing a resurgence of conflicts and historical manipulation threatens democratic values, the Observatory on History Teaching in Europe (OHTE) rightly emphasises that “high-quality history teaching must help to build bridges and facilitate understanding between our societies” (OHTE 2024, 5).

Yet despite the central role teachers play in this endeavour, research on how these challenges shape their professional identities and pedagogical decision-making remains limited. Significantly, the research field of historical consciousness that studies the temporal orientations through which people understand their relationship to past, present and future (Grever and Adriaansen 2019; Adriaansen 2022; Popa 2022), has focused primarily on students – missing the opportunity to understand how teachers’ own historical consciousness shapes their practice and develops through the challenges they encounter.

This article aims to address this gap. Drawing on interviews with fifteen history educators from across Europe, conducted as part of a pilot project carried out with EuroClio, the European Association of History Educators, it explores how critical incidents – unanticipated moments in a teacher’s daily practice that interrupt their “autopilot” and challenge existing values and interpretative frameworks (Tripp 2012, 22) – function as windows into teachers’ historical consciousness in practice. The analysis shows that from the teacher’s perspective, historical consciousness is more than a cognitive framework: it is embodied, relational and situationally contingent. Teachers mobilise their frameworks of meaning, temporality and ethics not in abstract ways, but in response to real friction points with students, curricula, and the institutional contexts they work in. Using teachers’ narrated critical incidents, this article argues that teachers’ historical consciousness becomes most visible in moments of disruption, where temporal orientation, ethical judgment and relational positioning become most urgent.

1. Historical consciousness and critical incidents

Historical consciousness, as theorised by Jörn Rüsen, refers to the mental operations through which people experience time and construct meaning from the relationship between past, present and future (Rüsen 2004). Unlike historical thinking – which models competencies after academic historians’ practices – historical consciousness encompasses broader meaning-making essential to temporal orientation in everyday life, including identity formation, moral reasoning, and practical decision-making (Grever and Adriaansen 2019; Seixas 2017; Zanazanian 2025). Historical consciousness thus “fulfills a crucial temporal orientative function in practical life and thus guides human action” (Popa 2022, 187). This implies for both educators and students that historical consciousness is not simply a skillset for understanding the past in context, but also the capacity to leverage such understanding for temporal orientation in the present. This includes the reflexive awareness that one is not a neutral observer, but an actor within a historical tradition of interpretation (Grever and Adriaansen 2019). Teachers bring all kinds of assumptions about what history is, how it is to be taught and understood, and how and why it matters to their classroom. This is a necessary consequence of their position within an interpretive tradition, and historical consciousness involves not just teaching from that position, but understanding and adapting it in light of new positions encountered. Understanding how teachers’ historical consciousness functions in practice therefore requires attention to the moments when teachers see challenges to what they believe history is and how it matters. It is the educational challenges that they encounter that reveal their own historical consciousness at work.

The concept of critical incidents offers a methodological approach to understanding teacher historical consciousness as situated practice. Originally developed by Flanagan (1954) for aviation psychology and adapted for educational research by Tripp, critical incidents are not dramatic crises but commonplace events that disrupt routine practice and demand reflection (Tripp 2012, 7, 22–24). In teaching, they are experienced as “turning points” with significant personal meaning that “force teachers to rethink” their approach (Kelchtermans 2011, 67). Since “a critical incident is an interpretation of the significance of an event” (Tripp 2012, 8), they are key to how teachers construct their professional identities through narratives that integrate personal values with professional expectations (Beijaard et al. 2004, 108).

For history teachers, critical incidents often occur at the intersection of historical content, contemporary politics, and student identities – when the past becomes controversially present (Kello 2016; Wansink et al. 2021). These moments reveal historical consciousness as not just cognition but also as embodied response, demanding that teachers draw on temporal orientations, ethical commitments and relational awareness simultaneously. This article proposes that critical incidents offer unique windows into how historical consciousness functions in practice – not as some abstract competency but as lived, situated orientation.

2. Interviews

This article draws on 15 semi-structured interviews with history educators from 14 European countries, conducted as part of a EuroClio pilot project between November 2023 and April 2024. Interviews were recorded in three locations – Bergamo (Italy), The Hague (Netherlands) and Sofia (Bulgaria) – during EuroClio events that brought together educators from the organisation’s network. Because participants were recruited through EuroClio events, the sample could over-represent teachers already oriented toward dialogic, multiperspectival practice. This pilot nonetheless illuminates the dilemmas these educators identify as critical and the professional judgments they describe making in response.

The sample included five female and 10 male participants with diverse experience levels: from teachers starting their careers to those with over 40 years in the profession. Participants taught at various levels, including secondary schools, pre-university tracks, vocational schools, and universities. Countries represented were Bulgaria, Finland, Germany, Greece, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Slovakia, Spain, Ukraine and the United Kingdom.

The interviews were conducted in a semi-structured way, and asked teachers to narrate a critical incident from their professional experience, including the context and situation, the challenge they faced, their reaction and course of action, the effect and impact and their reflections on what they might have done differently – essentially an invitation to configure the incident in a broader professional identity narrative. The participants were informed of the scope and questions in advance and had the opportunity to prepare their narratives.

The analysis was conducted thematically and focused on how teachers constructed meaning around their experiences, attending particularly to dimensions of temporal orientation, ethical reasoning, affective responses and relational dynamics. Because interviews were conducted in English – often not participants’ first language – some accounts may be less detailed or differently phrased than they would be in participants’ native languages.

3. Dimensions of teachers’ historical consciousness in practice

The analysis identified four interconnected dimensions through which teachers’ historical consciousness operates under pressure – navigating value conflicts, confronting disjunctures between curriculum and student experience, managing affect and trauma, and negotiating narrative authority – as well as a distinct concern: the relational conditions that make historical dialogue possible in the first place.

3.1 Navigating value conflicts and ideological challenges

Several teachers described incidents that involved students expressing right-wing, nationalist or extremist views in classroom settings. Their responses show how they leverage historical knowledge and democratic values when being confronted ideologically.

Marco, a retired Italian history teacher, recounted an incident during a student assembly celebrating Italy’s 150th anniversary of unification. A student challenged him: “Don’t you think that Italy, after unification, was not really a great nation and only fascism made Italy a very strong power?” Marco recognised this as both provocation and genuine ideological position:

“I tried to make him aware that the question raised other questions. So what do you mean with ‘great’? What do you mean with how you compare greatness? How do you compare one period to another? And why do you think that fascism was making Italy a great power? So I tried to react with questions and paved by my knowledge.”

Marco’s strategy – questioning assumptions through questions – exemplifies what Rüsen (2004, 74–76) calls the critical mode of historical consciousness: using historical reasoning to “call morality into question by pointing to cultural relativity in values” (Rüsen 2004, 76). His approach neither dismissed the student nor accepted fascist premises, but used disciplinary methods to unsettle ideological certainties.

Willem, a Dutch teacher with 40 years’ experience, gave a book about fascism to a student involved with a right-wing political party. When the student posted it online and a conservative newspaper framed it as left-wing indoctrination, Willem faced media pressure and calls for dismissal. His response: “Multiperspectivity and reading about fascism is for anybody who is politically interested a good advice.” His commitment to multiperspectivity, even when it brought personal risk, reflects his self-identification as a “broker of multiperspectivity” (Abbey and Wansink 2022).

Sari, a Finnish teacher, described a student who was “fascinated by dictators”, gave Nazi salutes in class, and wore a t-shirt depicting “Adolf Hitler on European tour”. Her approach was deliberate restraint: “I sort of decided that I’m not going to get provoked.” The student eventually deradicalised and built “a nice career”. Yet Sari acknowledged that with social media today, she would be less tolerant – though she would still avoid public confrontation: “Sometimes when somebody tries to provoke, it’s not a good thing to go into that provocation.”

These three cases show how teachers simultaneously mobilise disciplinary methods, ethical commitments and situational judgment to maintain both pedagogical authority and democratic values. The variation in their strategies – from direct questioning to deliberate restraint – shows that historical consciousness in practice is inherently relational and context-dependent. Such conflicts need not originate with students: Darijus, a Lithuanian teacher, described a multi-year crisis when implementing a sexual education curriculum demanded by the state, which involved clashes among teachers, parents, and the broader school community over contested values. Whether the challenge comes from individual students, institutions or the government, teachers use historical reasoning itself as a means to question rather than confirm inherited certainties.

3.2 Confronting disjunctures: History lessons meeting present prejudice

Teachers also described critical incidents involving a sharp disjuncture between curriculum and students’ beliefs or realities – with both moral and epistemological dimensions.

Katarína, a Slovak teacher, described piloting Anne Frank House materials about antisemitism. After lessons on the Holocaust, students discussed minorities facing discrimination in Slovakia. Some students suggested deporting the Roma minority – “the same solution that we actually just studied about Jewish people.” Katarína was shocked to find that the students suggested “to get rid of them and to deport them to another country.” She responded by asking students to think through the practical and ethical implications, yet regretted not returning to the topic in subsequent lessons.

This incident illustrates the gap between what Tribukait (2021, 547) calls “methodical knowledge” – facts learned about the past – and the “motivational-emotional knowledge” of contemporary prejudice. Katarína’s students processed the Holocaust as a “settled” issue, yet their “social identity bias” against the Roma remained untouched (Tribukait 2021, 246). The OHTE General Report notes persistent concerns about how Roma history is taught across Europe (OHTE 2024, 44–45).2

Eleni, a Greek teacher at a multicultural school where almost all students are migrants and refugees, encountered a different kind of disjuncture – between curriculum assumptions and student realities. Planning a lesson on the Roman Empire using the Mediterranean Sea as a “common element”, she was confronted by a 17-year-old Afghan student: “Teacher, Mediterranean, what? Where?”

“Suddenly, I realised that he knew nothing about [the] Mediterranean. And it was just the sea he had crossed a few months before.”

Eleni completely reoriented her curriculum, beginning instead with the emergence of Islam and Arabic conquests – content familiar to her Muslim students – before building toward the Roman Empire. “History teaching can help students bring to light pieces of their identity,” she reflected. “And it can also help them construct their double identity, and the one they are in the process of building, living in Europe.”

Both incidents exemplify teachers confronting gaps between historical content and student experience – moral in Katarína’s case, epistemic in Eleni’s. In each case, the teacher was forced to abandon their “autopilot” routine (Tripp 2012, 22) and confront how their prior assumptions failed to account for students’ experiences and perspectives.

3.3 Managing affect, trauma, and psychological triggers

Teachers also described incidents where historical content evoked powerful emotional responses – whether from lived trauma, unexpected psychological reactions or the weight of difficult histories – which requires finding ways of carefully dealing with students’ affective experiences.

James’s incident in Bosnia and Herzegovina – described in the introduction – illustrates how teachers can be confronted with trauma that exceeds their professional capacity. His response was not to retreat but to become “more watchful” whilst maintaining his core conviction:

“You have to address painful issues [or] somebody else will do it usually in a very bad way. So you have to try, even though you know it’s very difficult and very sensitive.”

James’s critical incident forced a reckoning with the limits of expertise, yet his response was not to retreat from difficult content but to engage more carefully. As Stoddard (2022, 393) argues, teachers need to develop classrooms “where emotion is not negated or repressed but made part of the difficulty of engaging with difficult history.” James’s philosophy that teachers have to “be brave” to “address painful issues” can be read as the acknowledgment that trauma exceeds professional frameworks whilst insisting on the teacher’s responsibility not to look away.

Tomasz, a Polish teacher, described an incident where a lesson on Hans Memling’s 15th-century painting The Last Judgment triggered a severe reaction from a student with autism who became fixated on imagery of hell. The situation escalated dramatically – emergency services were called; the student never returned to school. Tomasz’s reflection centres on awareness: “Everything, in fact, can be this spark that may start real fire in the class.” When challenged that such awareness might lead to excessive self-censorship, he reframed it as professional care: “We should be self-censored when we come to the classroom. […] We have to be aware [of] what words we use.” Tomasz’s awareness of the potential impact of teaching materials underlines the observation that educators need “flexible approaches that respect both the integrity of historical education and the varied emotional responses of students” (Mocnik 2025, 225).

Miguel, a Portuguese teacher, described a critical incident that turned a moment of vulnerability into a shared project. When a Senegalese refugee student’s scars from his Saharan crossing became known to classmates, Miguel reframed the moment as pedagogical opportunity: “I told the other kids, […] ‘this young man came here to have school because it’s the first school for him.’” The students responded: “Hey, teacher, let’s make a movie.” The resulting animated film project won international awards and changed students’ relationship to education.

These cases highlight the affective dimension of historical consciousness. James’s insistence on confronting painful histories, Tomasz’s argument for self-regulation around triggering content, and Miguel’s transformation of trauma into creation represent different positions on managing affect in teaching – yet all recognise that teaching difficult histories demands that teachers find ways to work with the emotions those histories provoke. Not all situations have productive solutions: Desislava, a Bulgarian teacher, described feeling “helpless” when institutional constraints limited her response to escalating student aggression – a reminder that teachers’ capacity to respond to affect operates within structural realities they do not control.

The question of affect connects to a broader challenge: how teachers position themselves in relation to the narratives they teach when those narratives are themselves contested.

3.4 Challenging narrative authority

In Central and Eastern European contexts shaped by state-socialist pasts, teachers face particular challenges negotiating between official narratives, family memories and disciplinary history.

Māris, a Latvian teacher with 20 years’ experience, described teaching about the Soviet occupation of Latvia in 1940 – a highly politicised topic – as a “frontal lecture” delivered to students. A student from a Russian-speaking background stormed out.

“That shook me,” Māris reflected. “I was having the feeling that I may cross some borders.”

The incident prompted him to abandon lecturing as an omniscient “oracle”, shifting to inquiry-based multiperspectivity: the “same message is still there. But the how students should get to that message, that’s up to them based on evidence, historical source.” Yet he acknowledged the limits of multiperspectivity, since he “cannot compete with the grandmother’s stories.”

Oksana, a Ukrainian teacher, described a 2009 conference in Russia where new textbooks embodying Putin’s ideology were presented. When she asked how critical thinking could develop from ready-made conclusions, the authors responded: “We will press, students press, and the critical thinking will appear.” For Oksana, this incident shaped a commitment to democratic history education: “From this point I understood how very important it is to introduce critical thinking.”

Both teachers challenge narrative authority, but in opposite directions. Māris challenged his own when claiming the “right” version ruptured his relationship with a student. Oksana challenged others’, refusing ideological pressure and building alternatives: democratic teacher networks, new textbooks, and spaces for more sincere historical dialogue.

3.5 The relational conditions for dialogue

The four preceding sections have examined how teachers’ historical consciousness and professional identity were activated under pressure – critical incidents when value conflicts, disjunctures between curriculum and experience, affect or narrative contestation demanded responses. But these incidents presuppose something prior: the relational conditions that make pedagogical dialogue possible at all.

Good teaching in any field requires trust, attunement to students and relational care (Savenije et al. 2022). Yet these conditions take on particular significance for history education because historical consciousness operates through dialogue – the negotiation of meaning between interpreter and subject matter, between students and historical content, between teacher and student. In its Gadamerian sense, dialogue presupposes that the prejudices – the fore-understandings – we bring to any encounter with or about the past are not obstacles to understanding but its necessary starting point (Grever and Adriaansen 2019, 825). Dialogue requires mutual awareness of the interpretive frameworks actually present in the room. Without this awareness, meaningful historical learning cannot get off the ground. Several teachers described incidents that revealed exactly this need to establish the conditions for dialogue before substantive historical work could begin.

Matthias, a German teacher beginning his teaching career whilst also training future teachers at university, confronted a contrast between theoretical ideals and classroom realities:

“When I open the history books […] none of the goals that I teach on Thursdays and Fridays to my university students I can actually meet teaching history to the eighth, ninth, and tenth graders. Because […] the history textbooks and the curricula, they don’t account for the subject positions of my students.”

What Matthias identifies is not merely a curriculum gap but a recognition that historical dialogue requires knowing which frameworks are actually in the room. His students bring temporal orientations shaped by migration, family memory and present conflicts: “they look at the conflict in the Middle East right now with a very sharp focus.” The curriculum addresses a student who does not exist. His response – “my first goal is to get to know them a little bit better, their histories, what their historical contexts are that they bring with them” – shows a teacher whose critical incident is precisely this mismatch: the moment he recognised that the curriculum’s assumptions about students’ fore-understandings were wrong.

Rūta, a Lithuanian teacher with 10 years’ experience, described a formative incident from her first weeks of teaching. Two disengaged seventh graders challenged her to a test: they would quiz her on Lithuanian history dates, and if she failed, they could opt out. She accepted:

“After 10 minutes, they just lie down their heads and just do their work. And after that, I teach them for years.”

Rūta’s critical incident is the moment two students tested whether she was worth listening to. What she demonstrated in response was not simply competence but a personal relationship to history – one that was affective and rooted in experience. “I share with them a lot of examples from my school time, from my experience, from my point of view why I love history,” she explained. “I want an environment in which we could discuss historical themes… not to hate history.” Rūta’s willingness to share her own experiences indicates the role of historical consciousness as an intersubjective bridge: by relating to students through her own positionality and experience, she creates the ‘threshold situation’ (Edling et al. 2020, 338) necessary for a classroom to become a community of inquiry.

These critical incidents differ from the preceding ones. Matthias and Rūta were not responding to crises triggered by historical content; their formative moments centred on establishing the relational ground without which such content could not be engaged at all. Their work is not less historical for being preparatory – it is historical consciousness directed at the conditions of its own possibility.

4. Conclusion

This exploratory pilot study suggests that teachers’ historical consciousness is far more than a cognitive background for lesson planning; it is a dynamic, “historically effected” awareness (Grever and Adriaansen 2019) that is constantly tested and reshaped in the heat of the classroom. These moments where the “wheels come off” – whether through a student’s ideological provocation or the intrusion of personal trauma – show that history education is an inherently relational and ethical act. When a teacher’s routine is disrupted, they are forced to confront their own temporal orientation and the limits of their professional authority. In this sense, historical consciousness is not an abstract skill that teachers simply transmit to students, but a lived performance of judgement that bridges the distance between the academic discipline, contemporary politics, and the diverse subject positions present in the classroom.

For history teachers, the most important insight may be that critical incidents should not be dismissed as failures of classroom management or a lack of pedagogical expertise. On the contrary, they are where the most significant historical work takes place. When a student’s held assumptions about the past clash with the curriculum – such as when Eleni’s Afghan student did not know what the Mediterranean was, or when Katarína’s students proposed deporting the Roma – the past is no longer a distant object of study but a living force. To admit, as James did in Bosnia and Hezegovina, that one does not have a reassuring answer in the face of inherited trauma is not a professional shortcoming, but an honest acknowledgment of the gravity of what history education asks of those who practice it.

This honesty matters for policy because it hints at a structural problem. Across these incidents, what teachers consistently do is hold open a space for complexity when the pressure – from students, parents, media, governments – is to close it down. Willem defended multiperspectivity at a personal cost. Oksana refused ready-made conclusions from state-backed textbooks. Māris abandoned his own authoritative lecture when he saw it had ruptured dialogue. These responses could be seen as acts of democratic practice themselves: they insist that the relationship between past and present must remain open to contestation rather than fixed by authority. Yet several incidents – James in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Tomasz’s student who never returned to school – show that there are situations that no amount of pedagogical skill could resolve. When societies leave the maintenance of open historical dialogue to the individual courage of teachers, when schools treat critical incidents as personal failures in classroom management, and when governments assume that the ambitious goals they set for history education – democratic citizenship, social cohesion, mutual understanding across divides – can be achieved through curriculum design alone, they are collectively outsourcing a structural responsibility to people who often lack the training, institutional backing and collegial support to bear it alone.

The article began with James’s story – a moment when the wheels came off. What these 15 incidents collectively suggest is that the wheels coming off is not the exception but the condition. Teachers navigate this not with protocols alone but with a historically informed, ethically committed, relationally attuned orientation that deserves recognition as central to democratic life. Supporting that orientation is a structural responsibility, not just an individual virtue.

  1. All names have been pseudonymised for privacy reasons.
  2. The term “Roma and Travellers” is used at the Council of Europe to encompass the wide diversity of the groups covered by the work of the Council of Europe in this field: on the one hand a) Roma, Sinti/Manush, Calé, Kaale, Romanichals, Boyash/Rudari; b) Balkan Egyptians (Egyptians and Ashkali); c) Eastern groups (Dom, Lom and Abdal); and, on the other hand, groups such as Travellers, Yenish, and the populations designated under the administrative term “Gens du voyage”, as well as persons who identify themselves as Gypsies. The present is an explanatory footnote, not a definition of the terms Roma and/or Travellers.

About the Author:

Robbert-Jan Adriaansen is a EuroClio Endowed Professor of Historical Culture in Transition at the History Department of Ghent University (Belgium) and Associate Professor at the History Department of Erasmus University Rotterdam (EUR, the Netherlands). At EUR, he co-ordinates the Heritage & Identity research cluster and serves as Executive Director of the Center for Historical Culture. He obtained his PhD Cum Laude from EUR in 2013.  More here.

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