Abstract

This essay examines the points of elementary teachers use in their history in the multicultural classroom. A further aim is to examine how teachers perceive historical consciousness and how they work to develop students' historical consciousness. I have immersed in previous research, to find out what is meant by multicultural and definition of historical consciousness. In order to find answers to my purpose, I conducted interviews with six teachers working in multicultural schools. The previous research shows that the Western cultural heritage is the norm in the Swedish history lessons, despite that the Swedish curriculum writes that the individual should be in focus.

The results of the survey show that Swedish history dominates in history teaching and according to some of the teachers, this is based on it's Swedish and Nordic history as part of the knowledge that students must achieve in middle school. Despite this, there are some teachers through various approaches involving all students and adjust instruction based on the multicultural perspective. Some of the teachers are editing texts to make them easier to read and some teachers connect to students' home countries and make different comparisons. To develop a sense of history, teachers let students imagine what it looked like 100 years ago and also how it might look in the future, how traditions could be linked to the past could take place. In some cases, the teachers were native speakers in parallel with the regular teaching, helping the students with their own native history.

Keywords: Historical consciousness, multicultural, intercultural education, history teaching