This paper discusses the nature of argument and its role and importance in historical learning. The paper describes pedagogic strategies developed to help school pupils understand what argument is, model how arguments work and think about how arguments can be evaluated. These strategies are explained as generic critical thinking strategies and the article then demonstrates how these strategies can be applied in history education contexts. The strategies that the article describes aim to make the logical relationships that are embodied in arguments clear to students through the use of analogies and active learning strategies that seek, first, to enable students to represent logical relationships in concrete ways and, second, to help students manipulate and explore these relationships.
history education; historical learning; argument
