According to diverse research, historical thinking and historical accounts or narratives contain different dimensions. At least three such dimensions can be found: historical methods, rhetorical forms and ethical statements. The ethical dimension means that historical narratives contain ethical agendas; the rhetorical dimension implies that historical narratives consist of certain stylistic figures; the dimension of historical methods signifies that history is a science with certain methods that must be considered when constructing historical narratives. Although research on history teaching and assessment has made great progress in recent years, it almost exclusively deals with the dimension of historical methods. This is problematic as students' historical narratives, test responses or essays, contain all three dimensions, and all three dimensions seem to be taken into account when the students' narratives are assessed. This study problematizes what happens when teachers in Sweden are only required to assess the dimension of historical methods. The research is based on an empirical investigation where teachers, using the knowledge requirements from the syllabus in history, assessed four historical narratives with focuses on different dimensions of the three. The results suggest that teachers find it difficult to accept a historical narrative that, on the one hand, corresponds to the dimension of historical methods but, on the other hand, contains ethical statements that do not correspond with the assessor's own ethical understanding.

Most of the history education research that addresses controversial issues suggests that disputes arising in the history classroom are rooted in students’ diverse identities that relate differently to history. Therefore, a history education that wants to ease tensions must try both to make these different identities and their relations to history visible and to enable an understanding of different relations to history based on identity. Starting with Gadamer’s concept of historically effected consciousness, this article outlines a model consisting of ontological third-order concepts and historical empathy in the history education as a suggestion to enable and corroborate constructive deliberative discussions in the history classroom. 

Förintelsen är viktig i svensk historieundervisning. Men när elever fokuserar på medborgerligt ställningstagande i svar på provfrågor om Förintelsen, underkänns deras svar ofta. Fredrik Alvén beskriver problemet med historieämnets dubbla uppdrag (red).

Because Swedish teenagers bring with them a cultural background that affects their perception of history, this, in turn, affects how they understand and receive the history taught in school. For some decades now, the students´ historical consciousness should be the starting point to their history education in compulsory school in Sweden, that is, their understanding of their own lives in a temporal perspective. Consequently, educators should be interested in how the students understand societal issues through time, as this influences how they will understand history. This study explores the students’ understanding of gender equality in a temporal perspective. As the method is quantitative, the results must therefore be interpreted with caution. Nonetheless, there are some interesting results that should be taken into account before teaching gender equality in history. The girls understand the theme as mostly a conflict in the past, while the boys worry about the future. Moreover, the girls more easily imagine perspectives where women are the victims, while the boys more easily understand perspectives where men are the victims. These results call for a nuanced history teaching to reach both boys and girls.

In Sweden, immigrant students with a non-European background perform worse in school than students from the majority group. Research has so far focused on language problems, and political investments have been concentrated around developing immigrant student’s language because it is hard to manage school without a functional language. However, social science in school also rests on cultural understanding, which is difficult if you are not a part of the culture. This is certainly true for the subject of history, which has a strong tradition of fostering a historical nationalistic canon. By analyzing the items in the national test in history relative to how the immigrant students perform, this study investigates whether there are certain types of items that, on the one hand, discriminate against them and, on the other hand, work to their advantage. This is important knowledge if we want to be able to make fair and just assessments.

History teaching in Sweden is, among other things, supposed to create democratic citizens appreciating certain values. These goals are described in the first chapter in the curriculum, “Fundamental values and tasks of the school”, as cross-curricular goals that every teacher should foster. At the same time the history teacher is supposed to develop the students´ historical consciousness by developing certain cognitive abilities that allow the students to interpret history on their own. These abilities are described in the history syllabus. The abilities do not, however, address any particular values to be developed. The history teachers´ assignments can therefore be in conflict. In the article I analyze the Swedish history teachers´ mission by comparing the goals for the citizenship education in the curriculum´s first chapter, with the theoretical construction of how to develop the students´ historical consciousness, found in the syllabus in history. At the end there is a discussion and a tentative suggestion how to process the tension between making democrats and at the same time develop the students´ cognitive abilities to understand and use history of their own.

In this article, I introduce third-order concepts in the history teaching as a way to reachpowerful knowledge. If we understand powerful knowledge as a means to give students a competenceto understand the contemporary world, to help them to engage in society ́s conversations and debatesabout itself, and to understand the grounds for accepting or rejecting knowledge claims, we must thenhelp them to understand what ontology the discipline of history rests upon. Consequently, third-orderconcepts can help students as these concepts shed a light on what perception of reality the historicalnarratives and the first-order concepts build upon in the history classroom. However, at the end of theday, I have my doubts – what if we provide arguments for groups that have an anti-liberal and anti-democratic agenda?

En nyligen utförd enkätstudie visar att många pojkar anser att männen kommer bli förlorare i framtidens samhälle, och att denna utveckling inte går att förändra även om man kämpar. Hur kan skolan möta dessa pojkar? Fredrik Alvén diskuterar detta med utgångspunkt i begreppet historiemedvetenhet.

This doctoral thesis describes the subject of history as being filled with suspense. On the one hand, that is, in the syllabus and the teaching plan, the subject of history seeks to create students who affirm a certain culture and a certain way of understanding the past. On the other hand, students are supposed to learn to think independently and critically. This tension has consequences for the way in which students use history in school, and the way in which history teachers interpret their assignment. Students have difficulties in distancing themselves from their own approach to culture, and to comprehend that history consists of interpretations and constructions. Instead, they perceive historical narratives as either true or false. This makes it difficult to deal with questions regarding the past that challenge their view on history and are difficult to handle ethically. The dissertation also shows that the students’ use of history is limited to that which is called the school’s value system, and a view of the past that results from this value system. In those cases in which historical narratives correspond with the students’ own views and opinions, often in harmony with those voiced by the school, they tend to believe in and affirm them. In those cases in which the narratives do not correspond with the students’ views, they do not believe in them and reject them. At the same time, teachers have difficulties with handling students’ use of history in those cases in which it differs from the value system’s premises, as well as from a version of history that can be regarded as established at the school in question. This became apparent in the teachers’ evaluations, in which they systematically gave student responses that were located outside of this framework poorer evaluations and tougher scrutiny. The findings of this thesis can be considered as important from a number of different perspectives. The instructions for teaching and learning history in school are inconsistent and therefore difficult to understand for both teachers and students. To be sure, this applies primarily to those who find themselves outside of the life-world defined within the framework of the school in question. Assessing the use of history in school, in particular in a formative way, may therefore become difficult for teachers. How are teachers, who dismiss certain uses of history based on ethical reasons that can be found in the value system, but not in the knowledge requirements, supposed to be able to argue for their dismissal based on the knowledge claims of the syllabus? Students whose work is dismissed based on invisible criteria can perceive themselves as misunderstood and unwelcome in discussions regarding history at school. They can also come to perceive that their historical narratives are not allowed to exist in this context. Therefore, this dissertation suggests the creation of evaluation criteria for the subject of history that take into account ethical aspects in regard to students’ use of history. With the syllabus as starting point, this can serve to provide a basis for more precise evaluations and more equal conversations between students and teachers. A fertile ground for a vibrant democracy, in which students are taught to take responsibility for their use of history.

This article presents a study of how the purpose of school in general and the civic education in particular has been told at the formal curricula. The used material are governmental documents about the compulsory school. The method used emanates from the concept of historical consciousness. It is however the concept´s narrative and temporal content that is the starting point, when David Carr´s theory of lived stories is used to understand temporal perceptions behind the formal curricula. Two time periods with different purposes for the school and the civic education, emanating from different temporal orientations, have been found, namely 1969-1980 and 1994-2011. During the first time period the temporal orientation was rather short in time, and the future vision clear. The purpose of school and civic education were told to prepare the citizens to cooperate in labour intensive workingplaces. Cooperation and willingness to defer to the collective, were the most important abilities. During the second time period the temporal orientation becomes more prolonged, a distant past was used to meet an uncertain future. The purpose of school and civic education were now told to foster a western moral cultural heritage together with a new creative entrepreneurial spirit.

De epokala tendenserna i dansk historieundervisning – deocentrism, antropocentrism och polycentrism – kan i viss mån sägas känneteckna också svensk historieunder-visning. En än mer träffande beskrivning av svensk historieundervisning skulle dock vara Gud och nytta, nationen samt demokrati och medborgarfostran. Svenska historie-läroböcker tycks mer kännetecknas av kontinuitet än av förändring (Gustafsson, 2017).

The scholarly question and the moral answer: The Holocaust in the knowledge and perception of students

All over the world, the Holocaust occupies a prominent position in historical culture, the area in which a society evaluates and communicates the history considered the most valuable and useful. Sweden is no exception. Since the 1990s, the Nazi genocide of the Jews has attracted an enormous amount of attention, first in the political and educational spheres, gradually also in Swedish cultural life and historical scholarship. In the Swedish school history curriculum, the Holocaust has been singled out as the only mandatory content. Based on this multifaceted interest in genocide, this article analyzes student responses to a question in the national examinations in history for the final year of Swedish compulsory school regarding the causes of the Holocaust. The answers are analyzed based on two different templates, one focusing on a traditional historical understanding of the Holocaust as linked to a specific historical setting, the other being a “civic” interpretation, viewing the genocide as a time-transcending phenomenon with a clear moral message for the present. This is a distinction with international resonance in historical culture related to Holocaust history. One result of the analysis is that one of four students is incapable of giving a satisfactory answer to the question. Another result is related to quality and grades. Many weaker answers are not primarily morally oriented. Rather, they focus on perpetrators - Hitler, the Nazis and Germans – often simplistically depicted as exchangeable and driven by the same genocidal intentions but in want of a historical context. The best answers are based on historical aspects, such as Germany’s defeat in the First World War, as well as on more complex, functionally oriented explanations, even if the figure of Hitler remains a key explanatory factor. The conclusion is that history and morals must be understood and made operative as two reciprocally linked dimensions. From a scholarly perspective, it is certainly necessary to do justice to the Holocaust in its own, contemporary right. However, it is just as imperative to realize that the Holocaust belongs to those “borderline” events that cannot be enclosed into themselves but must be made to transcend their temporal boundaries, as lessons of history. How this is to be done is an urgent scholarly and didactical task.

The main objective of the study was to analyze how Swedish and Spanish pre-service teachers’ temporal orientation influences their narratives and moral conceptions about gender inequality. 55 Spanish students and 76 Swedish students participated. The narratives were analyzed through a separate process of coding by both authors and the subsequence crossing of information in order to achieve agreement and reliability for the codes used. The analysis shows differences depending on cultural context, which may reflect the learning of narrative templates in History Education instead of a reflexive and critical learning. Mainly Spanish students described time under the concepts of change and continuity while Swedish students oftener saw time more as abrupt changes when describing the differences of current gender inequality regarding past times. Likewise, in almost all the narratives there is a naive way of understanding the sense of change over time. In the narratives there are no calls for individual action or descriptions of what possible actions there are for us to fight for a better future probably because history education does not provide examples in the past which mirror current social issues. These reflections make us to question why we teach history and how we do it. 

Over the past three years, the Western world has seen many conflicts aroundhistory. Statues have been torn down, anniversaries have been debated, historical figureshave been re-evaluated, and many have begun to question or defend their own nationalhistorical narrative. Social media has heightened the debate, with antagonists engaging infierce and usually not very nuanced debates on Twitter and Facebook. In this text, we try tobuild a digital historical didactic framework for how teachers can work with controversialhistory in the multi-cultural classroom by using social media as a resource. Through ananalysis of second order concepts such as significance, historical perspective, and historicalempathy based on a historical cultural perspective and with the use of history in focus, wehope that teachers in the classroom will be able to contribute to increased interculturalcompetence. In a final example, we analyze how people with different backgrounds anddifferent purposes in a thread on Twitter debate the history behind the celebration ofColumbus Day in a city in the USA.

Alltsedan amerikanska frihetskriget har så kallade Minute Men varit högt skattade, då deras insatser bidrog till seger över de brittiska kolonialtrupperna. Framför allt har orterna Corcorde och Lexington varit centrala i minnesceremonier. I artikeln analyseras olika historiebruk i anslutning till monument över och ceremonier till minne av The Minute Man.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the validity of using multiple-choice (MC) items as a complement to constructed-response (CR) items when making decisions about student performance on reasoning tasks. CR items from a national test in physics have been reformulated into MC items and students’ reasoning skills have been analyzed in two substudies. In the first study, 12 students answered the MC items and were asked to explain their answers orally. In the second study, 102 students from five randomly chosen schools answered the same items. Their answers were scored, and the frequency of correct answers was calculated for each of the items. The scores were then compared to a sample of student performance on the original CR items from the national test. Findings suggest that results from MC items might be misleading when making decisions about student performance on reasoning tasks, since students use other skills when answering the items than is intended. Results from MC items may also contribute to an overestimation of students’ knowledge in science.

The goal of this study is to compare the presence of concepts for historical and geographical thinking in the national curricula for Primary Education in Spain and Sweden in order to analyze if these thinking concepts can enable new active learning methodologies in the Social Science classroom. The comparative study is based on a qualitative investigation using a horizontal evaluation instrument (international compared analysis). Compared items were divided in four dimensions: 1. curriculum structure—subjects, timetable, compulsory, ratio, etc.-, 2. educational methodologies—project-based learning, research, practical lessons-, 3. Objectives and evaluation—aims, evaluation criteria, standards-, and 4. Contents—con- ceptual, procedural, and attitudinal. The results show that, despite a different structure for the history and geography subjects in Primary Education, neither of the two curricula present historical and geographical thinking concepts as a fundamental aim for Primary Education and, at the same time, the low presence of these thinking concepts is linked to traditional teaching models still based on positivism and memorization.

The main target of this study is to make a comparative analysis between the presence or absence of historical thinking competencies in the official curricula of Gymnasieskola (Sweden) and Bachillerato (Spain). To reach this goal, a mixed instrument was designed, both qualitative and quantitative, to analyze the offical documents. The results show a great presence of “historical consciousness” in the case of Sweden and the use of historical sources and evidences in the case of Spain.

The research is concerned with pre-service teachers’ assumptions about gender inequality and its development across time. In conducting the research 131 narrations of Spanish (n = 55) and Swedish (n = 76) students, enrolled in Primary and Secondary education programs, were analyzed. The research design has been the content analysis of the narratives through a coding process and subsequently identification of co-occurrences, cluster analysis, density of codes and nets of codes with software Nvivo 12 Pro. Although some differences come up regarding the orientantion over time among Swedish and Spanish narratives, in both cases prevail a lack of intentional historical agency (specially of women against the power asymmetries in societies), and a weak analysis of the past from gender perspective that could help to understand current situations.