Teaching practices in transition: Swedish primary teachers as agents of change in reading education in the 1940s.

This article deals with primary teachers’ views on reading and literature teaching, as reflected in an archive consisting of more than 600 accounts of teaching experiences collected in 1946. By a close reading of a directed selection of 52 of these accounts – of which 14 are detailly presented – we can draw three conclusions: 1) We argue that many of the teachers regarded mother tongue as something more than just a “skill subject”; 2) The mate-rial indicates that mother tongue teaching was undergoing changes in a “progressive” direction at a time that previous research has regarded as a decline period for such ideas; 3) The analysis shows that the teachers both identified structural obstacles relating to these changes and used the obstacles as a point of departure for change. Altogether a complex picture emerges that can be highlighted as an example of teachers’ agency with relevance also to the current debate on reading and literature teaching in a democratic society.

How do values transform when history culture change? In addition, is it possible to discern such a development in an ongoing classroom student-teacher discourse? In this presentation, I try to address these questions through two intertwined issues: first as a theoretical concept interpretation and then as a presentation of some empirical findings. The observed classroom data was collected the years around 2010, which I argue, could be seen as a somehow unnoticed turning point in a national history culture development, at least in Sweden. The theoretical part of the presentation consists of an analysis of “third order” concepts in regard to history didactics and with some comparisons with social science didactics. In history education third order concepts has been perceived as distinctive both from “first order” concepts (like Renaissance, 9 th of April or Boston Tea Party) and from “second order” concepts (like cause & consequence, historical evidence or similarity & differences), but there are still some uncertainties regarding in what way. While second order concepts are rather well known in research on history teaching, there are few enquiries on the value loaded third order concepts (like "historical hatred”, “historical identity” or “historical proudness”). Third order concepts correspond furthermore with value aspects in first order concepts like “revolution” or “democracy”. Of these reasons, I claim third order concepts to be an important issue to explore in speech-acts in schools. The empirical data consists of a bulk of utterances on history

Vilka utmaningar finns kring bedömning i historia? Under de senaste åren har förutsättningarna för historieundervisning förändrats som en följd av en dramatiskt förändrad bedömningspraktik. Kapitlen i denna bok diskuterar olika aspekter av bedömning i historieämnet. Sammantaget ger de en fördjupad insikt om bedömningspraktiken i det moderna historieämnet, men därutöver får läsaren indirekt bred kunskap om de villkor som gäller för historieundervisning i svensk skola under tidigt 2020-tal.

How do students use schools´ history education to develop their historical consciousness? In which ways could history education be regarded as a historical-culture expression, i.e. as a part of a society’s interest in the past? This thesis takes its point of departure in these overarching questions. More specifically the research was carried out as a contextualised case study of sixteen history lessons in a Swedish Year 9 class, in the autumn of 2009.

The contextualisation consists of an analysis on historical-culture expressions in Sweden at that time. Despite conflicting opinions, the major finding was the common view of Sweden as a country that solves her problems in a peaceful way, both in the past, the present and the future. The classroom study was conducted with an ethnographical approach with close attention to teacher-student interactions. The research was guided by an analytical model inspired by the historian Jörn Rüsen’s theories on history learning processes.

The results show in detail the complicated learning processes in the classroom but also the connection with the historical-culture expressions in Sweden at that moment. One major finding was the tendency to react to the rise of contemporary islamophobia and nationalism in Sweden by making comparisons with the development in Weimar Germany in the beginning of the 1930s.  This tendency was present both in and outside the classroom.

Hur använder elever skolans historieundervisning för att utveckla sitt historiemedvetande? På vilka sätt kan genomförd historieundervisning betraktas som en ”historiekulturell yttring” i ett samhälle? Den här avhandlingen tar sin utgångspunkt i dessa och andra övergripande frågor som rör unga människors behov av tidslig orientering i början av 2000-talet.

Avhandlingen bygger på en historiedidaktisk fallstudie av en serie lektioner i en åk 9-klass. I centrum för analyserna står lektionernas pågående historiska lärande. Men studien intresserar sig också för förbindelser mellan den analyserade undervisningen och andra historiekulturella yttringar i Sverige utanför klassrumsdörren vid denna tidpunkt, hösten 2009.

Av studien framgår hur eleverna genom undervisningen erbjuds möjligheter att aktivera sitt historiemedvetande, men också hur sammansatta historieämnets lärprocesser kan vara på högstadiet. Samtidigt visar studien att klassrummets berättelser om 1900-talet som ”katastrofernas århundrade” verkar stå i nära förbindelse med en schematisk ”mönsterberättelse” om Sverige som ett land som kan hantera förflutna fasor, en osäker samtid och en hotande framtid.

This article explores and discusses narrative abbreviations in history education at primary and lower secondary schools in Scandinavia, foremost in Sweden. The concept of narrative abbreviations was originally conceived by history theorists in Germany but has until now scarcely been used by scholars in Scandinavia, especially not in a school context. A narrative abbreviation could be understood as a condensed historical narrative, for example “1066”, “Auschwitz” or “I have a Dream”. Such an expression could — if necessary — be prolonged to a full-scale narration but is generally communicated in this summarized way, only alluding to the longer story. A narrative abbreviation might hence be regarded as a special form of a “first order” or “substantive” concept. The article proposes a tentative typology consisting of six discernable categories of narrative abbreviations, from the most abstract type historical time concepts (such as “Stone Age” and “Renaissance”) via historical sites and artefacts (like “Verdun” or “the Berlin Wall”) to the most concrete type, historical events or turning points (such as “Boston Tea Party” or “the Cuban missile crisis”). The typology is used in an attempt to outline some comparisons of the content in national history curriculums at compulsory schools in Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden. The article also examines uses of narrative abbreviations in classroom. According to some of the findings presented, narrative abbreviations could be seen as a powerful force in history education – although probably only if students are trained to understand and discern substantive, symbolic and social dimensions of the concept. A visible learning on narrative abbreviations could thus – at least hypothetically – improve the results of history education and give teachers and students alike assessable goals at a meta-level.

Ur David Ludvigssons förord:

Hans Olofsson behandlar narrativa förkortningar (som ”1789” eller ”Hiroshima”) och hur de används i kommunikation mellan människor, både i och utanför skolan. Begreppet kommer ursprungligen från den tyska historiemedvetandetraditionen, men Olofsson menar att dess betydelse behöver utredas med hjälp av anglo-amerikanska teorier om historiskt tänkande, i synnerhet för att förstå hur det kan användas i en skolkontext. I artikeln utvecklar författaren en typologi för narrativa förkortningar som sedan används i analyser av genomförd historieundervisning på högstadiet. Han argumenterar för att en explicit undervisning om begreppet narrativa förkortningar ökar sannolikheten för att elever genom undervisningen i historia ska kunna utveckla ”såväl kunskaper om historiska sammanhang, som sin historiska bildning och sitt historiemedvetande” (Lgr 11). Artikeln är kritisk till att historiedidaktiken hittills inte har visat ett större intresse för att söka närma historiskt tänkande-traditionen till teorier om historiemedvetande.