Recently, a curriculum reform took shape in Flanders, a Dutch speaking region in Belgium, which is gradually being introduced into secondary education (12-18 years old). It is part of a new framework consisting of sixteen key competences and is based on and derived from the eight key competences proposed and adopted by the European Commission (2006). In September 2019, almost simultaneously with the deployment of this curriculum renewal in the first stage of secondary education, a new Flemish Government was formed. During the negotiations, the Flemish nationalists claimed the policy areas of ‘culture’ and ‘education’. In their plans, they referred to the development and introduction of a historical canon intended for education (Flemish Government, 2019), following the example of the Dutch model that was released roughly ten years earlier and underwent a process of renewal in 2020.

The introduction of the historical canon can be seen as a rather political decision. Much ink has been spilled related to the question of whether or not a government may interfere in the curriculum. Moreover, this decision seems to be at odds with the recent curriculum renewal of history education and its emphasis on the concept of historical thinking, which is more and more finding its way into the history curricula of countries in the Western world (Luis & Rapanta, 2020). For this reason, the committee that elaborated the new key competence has kept its hands off the development process of this canonical body of nation-oriented knowledge of the past. By the end of 2022, fifty historical anchor points that define the region’s identity should come to the surface. Although the canon committee is pluriform, composed of a wide range of relevant experts, and it emphasised it could sail an autonomous course free from political influences and demands, this chain of events led to a situation where an extensive list of anchor points is being developed, specifically intended for formal and non-formal educational purposes, without the input and expertise of the relevant stakeholders that designed the key competence on historical consciousness and citizenship in the first place. In the end, it seems a fragmented outcome will emerge. It is this field of tension that acts as the main premise of this contribution.

In an attempt to meet the needs of the upcoming educational reality of the canon, this contribution first turns to the conceptual. Here, the notion of historical thinking is outlined, and some more light is shed on how the ambiguous heritage concept is understood. Second, over the course of the past decade, the educational opportunities of heritage and historical thinking have been progressively studied. Therefore, the didactical relationship between both concepts is explicated. The last step explores how both relate to the introduction of the canon. Here, following the cultural and educational approach of Wilschut (2009), a distinction is made between the selection process of relevant curriculum content on the one hand and the didactical methods to engage with a canon on the other hand. In doing so, this contribution builds further on the reflections and feedback first received during the Conference of the International Society for History Didactics (ISHD) in September 2021, which explicated the field of tension in the curriculum between a bottom-up and participative process and a top-down approach (Van Doorsselaere, 2021). The theoretical reflections in this contribution hope to serve as a starting point for the subsequent empirical investigations in classroom practice.

The concept of a canon in itself and how it relates to the teaching of history has been the topic of many theoretical deliberations. Although most of these critical reflections came about in the context of the Dutch canon, they still seem applicable to the introduction of a canon roughly a decade later in Flanders. Wilschut (2009), in an attempt to tackle the problem of what and how to teach in history education, distinguishes two approaches: a cultural one, about the content and aim, and an educational, which relates to the method of execution in classroom practice. Although both approaches are closely connected, the cultural perspective does not seem to provide a solution. From a postmodernist perspective, different historical accounts can be valid at the same time, so Wilschut argues that it is very hard or even impossible to make a top-down selection of historical content. Therefore, he shifts his attention towards the educational approach and proposes teaching students ‘historical thinking’. He advocates for an historical framework and, in this respect, differentiates between an orientational framework that serves the educational purpose of learning students to think in time, and a canonical framework, which is indebted to foster certain thoughts and attitudes. The former, he believes, should be furnished with recognisable and familiar content, including nation-oriented knowledge, mainly for associative reasons, and not, as is usually the case in a nationalistic framework, in order to raise nationalist sentiments or to influence students to accept fixed moral judgments. Although unmistakenly, much more has been written about the canonisation of history, this contribution mainly draws on the theoretical reflections of Wilschut (2009), as they served as one of the reference texts when developing the new key competence on historical consciousness in Flanders (Van Nieuwenhuyse, 2020). Rather than presenting a comprehensive overview of the pros and cons concerning the concept from various perspectives, the canon needs to be approached as an upcoming educational reality in Flanders, which most likely will be implemented into or be used in close relationship with history education. Moreover, it serves goals outside formal education as well, as it will be used as a tool for the integration of newcomers. In this respect, this contribution relies on the educational opportunities of a more social-constructivist and dynamic idea of the notion of heritage, which is mostly situated in the field of critical heritage studies (Graham, 2002; Harrison, 2013; Smith, 2006).

It can be stated that heritage is ubiquitous in present-day society. Ideally, the purpose of learning historical thinking skills lies beyond school contexts (Grever, Van Boxtel & Klein, 2015). The dichotomy between history and heritage has been taken down and pushed usted into a more dialectic direction (Barton, 2016; Seixas, 2016). A social-constructivist approach of heritage can be effective when trying to comprehend in what way individuals, groups, or communities may or may not attribute meaning to the past. This seems to be in line with the claims that history education should focus on learning to partake in modern, pluralist, and democratic societies. In this respect, teachers seem to have no reason to completely steer away from the canonised content, as familiarity and recognisability are key when orienting oneself in time (Wilschut, 2009). The last thing history teachers should do is to shield their students from initiatives and events outside the school context. However, next to this top-down model that attributes meaning to the past through the lens of the nation-state, this contribution proposes to shift the responsibility of making curricular choices primordially towards the interaction between schools, teachers, and students, in order to pursue sociocultural relevance and participation in society. When discussing the question of how teachers can engage with a canon (didactical methods), students need to gain insight into the notion of heritage using the didactic concept of ‘present significance’, so they can begin to understand why people in the present may or may not attribute meaning to certain aspects of the past (Savenije, Van Boxtel & Grever, 2014). In doing so, endeavors such as the development of a canon of the historical and cultural heritage of Flanders can in itself become a topic to discuss in the history classroom.

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