Along their path towards expertise, historians undergo conceptual
changes. The purpose of this theoretical paper is to argue that
conceptual change in history involves, first, a fundamental shift from
an understanding of history as the past to an understanding of history as human production.
And second, expert conceptual change involves understanding multiple
approaches to the production of history. Each approach is associated
with constraints on historical concepts and meta-concepts. We outline
differences and similarities between these broad approaches through a
framework that merges epistemic cognition and historical theory.
Currently, there exists no singular conception of history to set as an
unproblematic aim of epistemic education, and conceptual change must
therefore embrace the aim of understanding of multiple conceptions.