Enacting historical thinking in the history curriculum: Textbook representation and teacher mediation in Turkish secondary education

Abstract

This study examines how historical thinking is translated from curriculum policy into classroom‐oriented curricular practice in Turkish secondary history education. Focusing on ninth‐grade history textbooks published in 2009 and 2018 by the Ministry of National Education and on teachers' perspectives, the study explores how historical thinking skills are represented, interpreted and enacted across different curricular layers. The revised conceptual framework defines historical thinking as a multidimensional form of disciplinary reasoning involving chronology, evidence, contextualisation, perspective taking, interpretation, inquiry and judgement. A qualitative design was employed, combining structured qualitative document analysis of textbooks with a phenomenologically informed teacher‐response strand based on an online semi‐structured interview form completed by 23 history teachers. The findings show that the 2018 textbook includes more explicit references to historical thinking skills than the 2009 edition; however, this increase remains uneven and concentrated in selected skill domains, particularly chronological thinking, while inquiry, empathy and decision‐making remain weakly represented. Teachers strongly endorsed the importance of historical thinking, especially for causality, interpretation and analytical reasoning, yet their self‐reported accounts suggest that actual enactment is constrained by textbook design, dense curricular content, limited professional preparation and exam‐oriented educational structures. The study argues that the challenge of integrating historical thinking lies not only in curriculum design but also in the curricular mediation performed by textbooks and teachers. By highlighting the gap between curriculum‐as‐policy and curriculum‐as‐practice, the article contributes to curriculum studies debates on reform enactment, textbook mediation and teacher agency.