Commoning history education: Developing in-curriculum and beyond-curriculum thinking skills

• Commoning in history education fosters collaboration, care and shared governance • Expanding curricular space turns history class into a participatory learning process • History tasks fostered students’ critical thinking, problem-solving, and creativity • Care-based practices enhanced trust, empathy, and collective responsibility in class • The flipped classroom advanced balancing core knowledge with student inquiry. This study examines the integration of thinking skills into history education through commoning and the expansion of curricular space. Drawing on a year-long action research project in a sixth-grade classroom in Greece, it analyzes how collaborative missions, flipped-classroom structures, and participatory projects reconfigured learning. In-curriculum practices fostered creativity by enabling originality, flexibility, and elaboration, while beyond-curriculum dynamics cultivated care, solidarity, and democratic decision-making. Yet these gains were persistently negotiated against the “schoolized mind,” expressed through students’ reliance on memorisation, dependence on teacher authority, and the belief that struggle validates learning. The findings highlight that thinking skills develop most robustly when cognitive work is embedded in commons-like relations where knowledge, time, and authority are collectively negotiated. The study contributes a participatory model of history education that strengthens historical inquiry while cultivating democratic capacities, offering a framework with implications for broader debates on educational reform and citizenship formation.