Exploring historical consciousness with Australian school children

The study explores the development of historical consciousness in Australian school children (from Year 6 to Year 12). Historical consciousness can be seen, in part, as the ability to construct divergent ideas about the past based on evidence that rejects the paradigm of history as a fixed set of events. This research considers how students in Australia learn and construct concepts of historical consciousness and analyses these findings in relation to national survey of historical consciousness. This paper reports on emergent themes from the survey data of Australian school students.