Knowing and doing history are two major approaches in teaching history. Although widely recognized as important, the integration of both remains difficult for teachers and students.In this article we propose a conceptual framework for combining the two in a pedagogy focused on the teaching of historical contextualisation. The framework describes the relationship between students' epistemological stance about history and elements involved in knowing and doing history. This relationship shifts from a copier stance looking for one correct copy of the past, in which both knowing and doing history are fixed, into a criterialist stance, where elements of knowing and doing history are both debatable components of the task of establishing a historical context.Based on this framework, three major design principles are identified for combining knowing and doing history in teaching historical contextualisation: challenge historical knowledge by creating a cognitive incongruity; stimulate substantiated considerations and scaffold students' learning. It is argued that these principles, specified in a larger set of sub principles, can help students to develop their epistemic beliefs and the integration of knowing and doing history. Suggestions are made for an on-going design study on a pedagogy of Active Historical Thinking.

This study investigates how a collaborative learning task in history, designed to trigger domainspecific thinking, can stimulate high quality student talk and answers and how the task, student talk and student answers are related. We developed a collaborative task that was tested in two cycles. Students worked in pairs on an odd-one-out task with additional questions in which they had to construct a historical context. Our analysis of the student talk of 65 dyads, focusing on the collaborative nature of the talk and the discussion of multiple perspectives, gave insight in how the students constructed a historical context. Our analysis of the written answers, focusing on the use of domain-related concepts and the construction of relationships, made it possible to describe what kind of historical context the students constructed. Chi-square tests gave insight into the relationships between the task, the talk and the written answers.The results show that specific stimuli in the task can lead to different kind of student talk and can help to construct high quality answers. Results also indicate that students have problems with the specialized language of the domain and that the epistemological stance of the students remains problematic, mainly because students do not seem to be aware of the multiple perspectives needed to construct a historical context.