Gadamer’s attitude to Collingwood was marked by ambivalence: while promoting the Englishman on the one hand, Gadamer claimed on the other that the fundamental dimension of “hermeneutical mediation” had simply escaped him. In this paper, I aim both to assess Gadamer’s debt to Collingwood and the prima facie strength of his objections. First, I reconstruct steps by which ideas of Collingwood found their place in Gadamer’s hermeneutics in the 1950s, including the central “axiom of all hermeneutics”: the thesis that “we can understand a text only when we have understood the question to which it is an answer.” Second, I examine Gadamer’s main objections to Collingwood, the first one being based on a misunderstanding of Collingwood’s stance, while the second one hits home, and I argue in the final section that at issue here is Collingwood’s claim that it is possible to rethink exactly the same thought as that of, say, an historical agent, while Gadamer holds precisely the opposite view, that this is never possible.

Classroom teaching has changed dramatically over the last 100 years. If you were to ask your grandparents what they remember about learning history in school, there is a good chance they will describe a scene where emphasis was placed on memorising facts, figures and dates, and not the student-centred, collaborative approaches, such as inquiry or source analysis, that are common in twenty-first-century classrooms. It would seem we have come a long way in our thinking about what makes for good teaching and learning in history, but why is that? Using educational psychology as a lens, this chapter shows how changing ideas about learning led to changing practices in history teaching, and examines how constructivism, social constructivism, developmental models and even neuroscience have influenced the teaching of history. It will be shown that we are best served by not relying overly on one approach alone, but that we should be utilising the best of all that came before, diversifying our teaching to meet diverse student needs.