Epistemic Fluency and the Pedagogical Challenge of Fake News, Historical Denial, and Rival Histories

Abstract

Epistemic wobbling is an identified problem among history teachers who today steward their students through critical engagement with fake news, historical denial, and rival histories. This chapter explores epistemic wobbling from the perspective that history teachers are simultaneously members of mnemonic communities because of their ethnic upbringing, and epistemic communities by virtue of their academic education within historiographic and pedagogical traditions, and professional life inside school subject departments. The chapter proposes a research agenda that explores the influence of each of these communities upon teachers’ formal (historical) and practical (didaktik) epistemologies. It theorizes that fostering epistemic fluency, a special form of epistemic reflexivity, or historical consciousness, has the potential to encourage transparency around the epistemic stance and methodological tools being adopted and deployed, arguably critical when dealing with controversial pasts.