Shaping historical consciousness: young people, social remembering and identity dynamics outside the classroom

Abstract

This article explores how young people’s engagement with history outside the classroom shapes the development of their historical consciousness. The findings are drawn from a two-year doctoral research project investigating the social remembering of young people from England during the 100-year commemoration of the First World War. Building on recent work by Peck and Zanazanian, and foundational insights from Hall and Epstein, the article explores how young people’s historical consciousness is shaped through their self-positioning within national, racialised and cultural frameworks. Complementing this, I draw on Samuel and Wertsch to conceptualise history and memory as socially embedded practices, often located in vernacular, familial and community spaces outside formal education. These perspectives come together in the concept of social remembering, which captures how young people actively construct historical meaning through relational, affective and culturally situated engagements with the past. As Thelen argues, such remembering is not fixed but dynamic, constantly worked and reworked. This research draws on ethnographic work with a small group of students to address the research question: how are young people’s historical understandings constructed outside the classroom? The analysis shows how historical consciousness is shaped beyond the classroom. These processes are not supplementary to formal learning but constitute critical sites where students construct and negotiate meaning – affirming, resisting or reconfiguring dominant historical narratives in relation to their evolving identities.