History education
Learning and concept development in history lessons, and instructional designs that nurture students’ thinking.
Sinop University
Understanding the past,
teaching how to think
Research, publications and free tools for thesis writers, devoted to ways of teaching that help students of history and social studies move from memorization to inquiry, and from information to interpretation.
History is not a matter of repeating the ready-made patterns of official, ideological or popular narratives; it is the discipline of reinterpreting and reconstructing the past by reasoning within the limits of the evidence, understanding different perspectives in their own contexts, and questioning the past with the conceptual tools of historical thinking.
Research areas
Questions raised by teaching practice, answered in the light of theory and research.
Historical imagination
Reconstructing the past through images, iconography and drawing; students’ skills of historical imagination.
Social studies and curriculum
Comparative study of national and international curricula, and a critical analysis of the extra-disciplinary aims embedded in them.
Academic writing
Quotation, citation and thesis-writing conventions for graduate students, following Chicago 18 and APA 7.
Projects
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Kadınlar da Oradaydı (Women Were There Too) ↗
Teaching materials that make women visible as agents of history in history and social studies lessons: games, videos, animations, comics, illustrated biographies and workbooks. A TÜBİTAK 1003 project of Sinop University and Dokuz Eylül University (website in Turkish).
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Council of Europe Observatory on History Teaching: Thematic Report 2022 ↗
The first thematic report of the Observatory on History Teaching in Europe (OHTE): Pandemics and Natural Disasters as Reflected in History Teaching.
Free tool
Thesis Citation Assistant
Upload your thesis and the program marks, directly on the text, the passages that need a citation, flawed references and the relevant quotation rules, and lets you correct them with a single click. No registration is required: your work is stored only in your own browser.
- Chicago 18 (Notes–Bibliography and Author–Date) and APA 7
- Reference builder for books, articles, chapters, theses, conference papers, web pages, newspapers, dictionary entries, films and documentaries, lecture notes and oral history interviews
- Word (.docx) and PDF upload, with warnings and corrections shown on the text
- In-browser similarity (plagiarism) scan and pre-check
- APA and Chicago thesis templates (Word); student lists imported from Excel
- Support for the thesis guide of Sinop University’s Institute of Graduate Studies; interface in English and Turkish
dursundilek.com/tez-kaynak-asistani
Open in a new tab ↗
On a phone, use “Open full screen” for a more comfortable view. The program offers guidance; the final decision rests with the student and the supervisor.
Selected publications
For a complete list of publications: Google Scholar · YÖK Akademik
About
Prof. Dr. Dursun Dilek is a faculty member in the Department of Turkish and Social Studies Education at the Faculty of Education, Sinop University, working on history and social studies education, historical thinking and historical imagination.
The Thesis Citation Assistant was developed by Aymete & Dursun Dilek to help graduate students work more independently on citation and thesis writing.