This essay engages with the ongoing debate on historical consciousness, drawing on the intercultural discussion initiated by Peter Seixas, and in particular Andreas Körber’s (2016) distinction between narrow (disciplinary, critical) and broad (existential, cultural) understandings (Zanazanian/Nordgren 2019). I explore the nuances within these perspectives and argue for the importance of synthesising them without disregarding their inherent tensions. Inspired by Ernst Bloch’s (1977) concept of non-synchronous development and grounded in aesthetic examples, I examine how myths, traditions, and symbolic expressions coexist and interact with both dominant ideologies and a plurality of counter-narratives. Through these interactions, they carry a ‘utopian surplus’ of unfulfilled desires and anticipations. These dynamics serve as central forces in the formation of historical consciousness and the ongoing process of Bildung.

This paper compares the history curricula in Sweden, England and Finland from the perspective of curricular aims and content. Three approaches to the recontextualisation of knowledge in the curricula were employed. First, a comparative analysis of the aims of the three curricula was carried out using a simple binary contrast between history for its own sake and history for other purposes. Second, the curricula were re-examined by drawing on the articulation of history-education-specific aims, using a range of concepts organized into eight categories. Third, a three-term articulation of educational goals, namely qualification, socialisation, and subjectification, was applied to the curricula. Following the analyses of curricular aims, a comparative analysis of curriculum content is presented. The results show that while there were similarities regarding the curricular aims, there were also clear differences between the documents. The Swedish curriculum adopts a multifaceted approach with an emphasis on historical consciousness. The English document conveys a coherent national narrative, while simultaneously engaging in historical inquiry. The Finnish aims focus on interpreting history and apprenticing towards active citizenship. The findings also suggest that history may not have an entirely weak grammar. Finally, the results are discussed in terms of powerful knowledge and its 'power to' aspect.

Historical synthesis in the age of the Anthropocene: Or how I learned to love the monster

How should we tell the story about the Anthropocene? Latour’s (2014) question is crucial for anyone interested in historical Bildung. In this paper, the possibilities of synthesis are discussed against the background of the ongoing repositioning of historical orientation.

Rüsen (2017) locates the narrative essence of orientation in humans’ desire to bridge the gap between ‘the irritating experiences of contingency and the ensuing push towards interpretation’. When interpretations produce a surplus of meaning, which extends beyond the given circumstances, it becomes useful for orientation. This surplus is the fabric of master narratives, which McLean and Syed (2015) define as ‘culturally shared stories that guide thoughts, beliefs, values, and behaviours’. 

If history education aims to improve students’ narrative competence, engaging in synthesised content is as influential as learning historical thinking. From a psychological perspective, Syed et al. (2020) insist that master narratives are not only about dominance but also ethics, as it sets the agenda of what makes a good life. Nonetheless, history educators are more inclined to make associations to nationalistic cannons and tend therefor to shy away from discussing principles of content selection (Nordgren, 2023). This creates a ‘vacuum’ around the formation of historical consciousness, which is moulded by competing narratives. 

The presumption in Latour’s question is that modernity can no longer guide us. But is it sensible to search for a new plot forty year after Lyotard declared the end of grand narratives?  Latour (2011) draws an analogy to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein from 1818: the scientist prevails over nature but abandons his creation disgusted with the result. Latour sees the greatest sin of Frankenstein as well as modern science not in the ‘wish to have dominion over Nature, but to believe that this dominion means emancipation and not attachment’. 

Frankenstein can also be a parable to the responsibility of historians and educators to face the ‘monsters’ they create. In the late 19th century, Nietzsche described the potential monstrosity within the public use of history, as it balances on the edge of serving life and destroying it. He accused the rising guild of historians of being ‘spoiled idler[s] in the garden of knowledge’ and forsaking those syntheses that brought hope, familiarity or change to life. However, the split between specialised knowledge and the surplus of meaning was never total; on the contrary, history played a fundamental part in shaping the notion of modernity (Bhambra, 2011). Although research, education and lifeworld are driven by different logics, they nevertheless overlap (Nordgren, 2021). The sum of inquiries, deconstructions and multiperspectivity are also clustering in narrative patterns, and like assembled monsters, they seek belonging in master- or counter-narratives.

How should educators answer Latour’s question? Chakrabarty (2021) suggests we think planetarily and challenge the borders of historiography. Some scholars have been experimenting with new syntheses, while many critical and post-humanists have ironically abandoned the monster. A history education that is not satisfied with apologetic add-ons needs to face its monster and find alternative master narratives that can nourish ethical orientations in the Anthropocene.  

Bhambra, G. K. (2011). Historical Sociology, Modernity, and Postcolonial Critique. The American Historical Review, 116(3), 653-662. https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr.116.3.653 

Chakrabarty, D. (2021). The climate of history in a planetary age. University of Chicago Press. 

Latour, B. (2011). Love your monsters. Breakthrough Journal, 2(11), 21-28. 

Latour, B. (2014). Agency at the Time of the Anthropocene. New literary history, 45(1), 1-18. 

Lyotard, J.-F. (1984). The postmodern condition: A report on knowledge (Vol. 10). U of Minnesota Press. 

McLean, K. C., & Syed, M. (2015). Personal, master, and alternative narratives: An integrative framework for understanding identity development in context. Human development, 58(6), 318-349. 

Nietzsche, F. (2005). The use and abuse of history. Cosimo. (1873)

Nordgren, K. (2021). Powerful knowledge for what? History education and 45-degree discourse. In A. Chapman (Ed.), Knowing History in Schools (pp. 177-201). UCL Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv14t477t.13 

Nordgren, K. (2023). History curriculum in the Anthropocene: how should we tell the story. International Encyclopedia of Education, 296-307. 

Rüsen, J. (2017). Evidence and Meaning: A Theory of Historical Studies (Vol. 28). Berghahn Books. 

Syed, M., Pasupathi, M., & McLean, K. C. (2020). Master narratives, ethics, and morality. 

The interview with Kenneth Nordgren from Karlstad University, Sweden, addresses key questions about transcultural dialogue, the role of historical thinking, and the challenges of teaching history. The starting point is the question of how transcultural dialogue and historical thinking have changed in recent years from the perspective of the interviewee. The interview also discusses how transcultural academic exchange can be promoted, taking into account different educational contexts and social values. It further considers how to ensure that the academic debate is not dominated only by socially or economically privileged groups. Other topics include the role of digitalisation and online communities in history education, and the benefits of cross-disciplinary approaches. The extent to which current global challenges such as pandemics, wars and climate change underline the need for increased transcultural exchange …

The term epistemology is a conjunction of the Greek words episteme (knowledge) and logos (reason). Hence, epistemology is about how we conceptualize and justify our beliefs about the nature of knowledge. Consider this analogy from the thirteenth-century Dominican friar and philosopher St.Thomas Aquinas, where his thoughts on salvation can be read as an epistemological relation: salvation, he argued, requires knowledge of three things—what one ought to believe, what one ought to desire, and what one ought to do. Aquinas’s topic was theology, discussed in a time profoundly different from ours; however, his line of argument illustrates quite well the three basic features of epistemic thinking in education. A teacher must have perceptions about the object of teaching (what), the goal or purpose of teaching (why), and how to promote learning (how). Worth noting is that Aquinas places agency as an epistemic relationship with an external goal—the ultimate goal of reaching salvation. Teaching, we can argue, is in itself an epistemic craft with the goal to impart knowledge and growth.

This paper reports on a project aiming to develop empirical and theoretical knowledge about teachers' planning and preparations (PaP) of lessons as a didactical collegial practice and how this shapes and is shaped by the local school organization. One goal is to explore and theoretically describe PaP as a collegial practice by contrasting different subjects over time. Another is to analytically explore how these settings affect and enable teachers' ability to make strategic decisions for students' learning. Finally, the aim is to examine local school improvement efforts. The project is based on longitudinal case studies wherein teachers of different school subjects had time to plan and prepare lessons. The collegial setting was organized to facilitate teachers' focus on student learning, primarily subject-oriented and sometimes cross-curricular, but always oriented to a learning object. This design allowed us to study teachers' transformational competence over time and between subjects by following their decisions about content, learning goals and objects, sequencing, and adjusting to students' needs and interests. This design opened up for comparative analyses to better understand similarities and differences between and across subjects. Further, the schools have different management cultures, one more individual and one more collegial. How PaP is implemented and refigured in regard to the local school organization is also examined in the project. We will be asking three research questions: 

• RQ1: How do teachers' PaP appear as a transformational competence when scheduled as collegial collaboration? 
• RQ2: How does the collegial teaching setting affect teachers' ability to make strategic decisions in relation to students' learning? 
• RQ3: How is school leading prefigured in the implementation process of scheduled collegial PaP at participating schools, and what are the implications for the local school organizations? 

What motivates this focus on PaP? In short, we know little about how collegial planning affects teachers' transformational competence and how this may be context-bound to different subjects, nor about its infrastructural function in the local school organization (Hirsh, & Lindberg, 2015; Yuan, & Zhang, 2016). Such evidence-informed knowledge is needed as PaP involves complex strategic decisions that have been shown to benefit from adequate collegial cooperation (Nordgren et al., 2019; 2022). As teachers can make a difference in student learning beyond socio-economic restraints (Hattie, 2008), school authorities and research communities alike have invested in enhancing teachers' professionalism both through collegial and individual strategies (Chetty et al., 2014; Lefstein et al., 2020). Consequently, it is a paradox that planning is largely overlooked as a fundamental activity for generating qualitative teaching. Boeskens and Nusche (2021) note that student learning does not correlate with lesson time as such, but with 'the time students spend engaged with tasks that are of adequate difficulty' (p. 12). To improve teaching quality, teachers have to canalize their knowledge through their PaP. If PaP is compromised due to organizational or ability restrictions, teaching quality will also be compromised. Yet, the role of teachers' planning is seldom distinguished in political reforms nor as a salient practice in school improvement research. In subject-didactical research, the planning–teaching–reflecting cycle is acknowledged as core to teachers' professionalism (Carlson & Daehler, 2019), yet it is seldom targeted for study (Boeskens & Nusche, 2021). Evidence indicates that whether the school improvement efforts target collegial cooperation or teacher leadership, a necessary condition for enduring improvements is teachers' ability to think strategically and autonomously about students’ learning processes (Kennedy, 2016). 

Methodology

Selection: The project was carried out in cooperation with one upper secondary school and one lower secondary school in Sweden. Voluntary schools were selected based on interest and size. In addition, the school leaders had to participate actively, and the teachers had to be allotted joint weekly planning time. The upper secondary school is in a mid-sized city. There are six planning teams organized based on teaching content: history, mathematics (three on three levels), technology, and physics. Each team consists of two to four participants. The whole management team (two directors and six principals) is participating in the project. The lower secondary school is in a municipality. The teachers are divided into six planning teams in one subject, Swedish, each with two teachers. One principal represents the lower secondary school. In total, the project monitors around 25 teachers, nine school leaders, and 600 students. Implementation: Planning teams (PTs) were set up to meet weekly at a scheduled time. Each PT plans and prepares teaching sequences. Each PT had one contact in the research group with subject-didactical expertise. A specific focus was on to what extent the collegial setting supports teachers' formative strategies. School leaders were actively involved in implementing the project. The school leaders met regularly to discuss the project's implications with experts in school development research.

Data: Audio-recorded PT group meetings, audio-recorded interviews with school leaders, and additional planning documents. Analysis procedure: Audio recordings from the PTs has been analyzed thematically. We have developed a framework for categorizing the data. Categories developed a priori (previous research and theory) were combined with categories a posteriori (deductive and inductive steps in the analytical procedure) (e.g. Österholm et al., 2016). The framework makes it possible to navigate the extensive data and analyze singular themes (e.g. teachers' choice of activity), correlation (choice of activity and formative teaching), or the whole iterative process of how teachers transform content plays out over time and in different subjects. Legitimation Code Theory (LCT) and particularly the dimension of Specialization is used to analyze teachers’ transformational competence as they take strategic decisions on students' learning (Maton, 2014). The NVivo coding enables us to search the extensive data to make comparative analyses overtime on what themes different PTs decide to focus. The coded PT meetings are also influential in searching for and unpacking the collegial setting and the complexity of strategic decisions. 

Conclusion

As already mentioned, we have comprehensive data. Our analytical results are preliminary and most of the material has not yet been analyzed. The initial findings can briefly be summarised: Collegial PaP as practice: After a negotiating period, a collegial PaP practice was developed. The teams started targeting specific areas that they wanted to explore. After a while, teachers began to implement research-based models to develop their teaching. PaP as transformation: Teachers do have formative ambitions but struggle to find effective and functional methods. A comparative perspective: Planning teams approach the PaP process differently, which seems to be related to subject-specific causes. For example, the planning team in History spent 36% on specifying objectives and knowledge whereas the planning team in Mathematics spent 5% on that theme. In a closer analysis of the teachers’ interactions, different beliefs about knowledge and knowers appeared where a hierarchical knowledge structure and a horizontal knower structure were identified in Mathematics and a horizontal knowledge structure and a hierarchical knower structure were identified in History (Jakobsson et al., 2022). PaP Implementation: It seems to take a rather limited amount of time for teachers to take PaP ownership. The local management culture seems to be of importance but in a complex way. The results show how methods that support dialogue, intersubjectivity, and unforced consensus enable the progress of an equivalent collaboration (Forssten Seiser, & Portfelt, 2022). In addition, the results reveal how a lack of shared agreements regarding the purpose of collaboration constraints, or even prevents, co-ownership. Hence, PaP is a complex and strategic decision; schools need to consider how to organize this activity adequately. We suggest that this calls for a balance between teachers' time for individual planning and marking and time with colleagues as a supportive setting for joint planning and strategic decisions. 

References

Boeskens, L., & Nusche, D. (2021). "Not enough hours in the day: Policies that shape teachers' use of time". OECD Education Working Papers, No. 245, OECD Publishing.

Carlson, J., & Daehler, K. R. (2019). The refined consensus model of pedagogical content knowledge in science education. In: Hume A., Cooper R., Borowski A. (Eds.), Repositioning pedagogical content knowledge in teachers' knowledge for teaching science (pp. 77-92). Springer.

Chetty, R., Friedman, J. N., & Rockoff, J. E. (2014). Measuring the impacts of teachers I: Evaluating bias in teacher value-added estimates. American Economic Review, 104(9), 2593-2632.

Forssten Seiser, A., & Portfelt, I. (2022). Critical aspects to consider when establishing collaboration between school leaders and researchers: two cases from Sweden. Educational action research, 1-16.

Hattie, J. (2008). Visible learning: A synthesis of over 800 meta-analyses relating to achievement: Routledge.

Hirsh, Å., & Lindberg, V. (2015). Formativ bedömning på 2000-talet–en översikt av svensk och internationell forskning. Vetenskapsrådet

Jakobsson, M., Randahl, A. C., & Nordgren, K. (2022). Planification et préparation collégiale des cours en Suède. Revue internationale d’éducation de Sèvres, (90), 127-137.

Kennedy, M. (2016), "How does professional development improve teaching?", Review of Educational Research, Vol. 86/4, pp. 945-980

Lefstein, A., Vedder-Weiss, D., & Segal, A. (2020). Relocating research on teacher learning: Toward pedagogically productive talk. Educational researcher, 49, 0013189X2092299.

Maton, K. (2014). Building powerful knowledge: The significance of semantic waves. In: B. Barrett & E. Rata (Eds.), Knowledge and the future of the curriculum (pp 181-197). Palgrave studies in excellence and equity in global education. Palgrave Macmillan

Merritt, E. G. (2016). Time for teacher learning, planning critical for school reform. Phi delta kappan, 98(4), 31-36.

Nordgren, K., Bergh, D., Duek, S., Liljekvist, Y., & Jakobsson, M. (2022). Rektorers uppfattningar om undervisningens villkor och en skola på vetenskaplig grund: En uppföljande enkätstudie till undersökningen Lärares planering och efterarbete av lektioner: Infrastrukturer för kollegialt samarbete och forskningssamverkan. Karlstads universitet.

Nordgren, K., Kristiansson, M., Liljekvist, Y., & Bergh, D. (2019). Lärares planering och efterarbete av lektioner: Infrastrukturer för kollegialt samarbete och forskningssamverkan. KUP

Nordgren, K. (2019). Boundaries of historical consciousness: a Western cultural achievement or an anthropological universal? Journal of Curriculum Studies, 51(6), 779-797. Y

uan, R., & Zhang, J. (2016). Promoting teacher collaboration through joint lesson planning: Challenges and coping strategies. The Asia-Pacific Education Researcher, 25(5), 817–

Österholm, M., Bergqvist, T., Liljekvist, Y., & van Bommel, J. (2016). Utvärdering av Matematiklyftets resultat: slutrapport.Umeå Universitet. 

Planning and preparation (PaP) are vital for high-quality teaching and thus for student learning. Nevertheless, the infrastructure to support teachers' PaP is often poorly developed. This project brings together the fields of subject didactic and school development in order to investigate PaP as part of an organised infrastructure and as qualified activity. We focus how infrastructure can be organised to support PaP in sustainable ways for professional development, efficient for transforming knowledge into relevant teaching activities, and is systematic and dialogic in its formative approach. The aim is to develop knowledge about a didactical collegial practice as well as about its role in the local school infrastructure. Our research-based hypothesis is that teachers PaP benefit from a collegial collaboration (Darling-Hammond et al., 2017) and that the implementation of such a designated work needs the local school management's active support (Jarl et al., 2017). We have followed the commencement and implementation of twelve subject-based planning teams (audio recorded meetings; documents). A modified version of the Tyler-model (Tyler, 1950), and tools from legitimation code theory (Maton, 2014) frames the analysis. The contribution to the fields of subject didactics bridge the knowledge gap about PaP qualities and competencies. It is likewise important for school improvement, as there is a parallel gap about leading PaP as a strategy for improvement. This knowledge is vital for improving school-reform programs, and teacher education. 

This chapter aims to discuss history curricula as educational projects in the Anthropocene epoch. Human activity significantly influences the Earth's climate and ecosystem. A lively discussion has debated how this insight should affect school and teaching, often focusing on sustainable development and interdisciplinary projects. In this article, I discuss the conditions of a history curriculum in the Anthropocene era. As a school subject, history is formed around a specialized body of procedural and conceptual knowledge. Possibly, history teaching could contribute a historical gaze on the Anthropocene—as a predicament that is complex but possible to understand. However, such an educational ambition would challenge the subject's traditional epistemology. A historical outlook from the Anthropocene points toward new temporal divisions and new ways of understanding historical significance. From a curricular perspective, the question of how to story the Anthropocene is related to teaching strategies and historical master narratives.