Search

History Teaching and the Use of History in a Linguistic Minority Context. Minority Schools in Denmark, Germany and Finland as a Field of Research on Education for Identity Construction Apart from subject knowledge and historical thinking skills, didactical theories generally consider identity as an important issue for history education. The article discusses history teaching and its function in identity construction in schools for language minority groups. It focuses on identity formation processes in three kinds of minority schools: upper secondary schools for the German minority in Southern Denmark, upper secondary schools for the Danish minority in the Northern part of Germany, and upper secondary schools for the Swedish-speaking population in Finland. The content and the educational aims of the school subject history are compared in these minority school systems and conclusions are drawn in relation to a theoretical model of the use of history. It is concluded that history is used in a political-educational and existential way in the Danish minority schools, with a strong focus on minority issues, while the German minority schools have a more neutral and “Danish” approach to German history in Denmark, with some elements of non-use of history (i.e. discreet treatment of the German occupation during the WW II). As Swedish is equal to Finnish as a national language, the Swedish schools in Finland could be expected to have the same approach in history teaching as the Finnish schools – the curriculum has the same content and aims in both cases – but there is an explicit ambition in the Swedish schools to use history in a more existential and ideological way in relation to Finland’s shared history with Sweden. The comparison of history teaching in minority schools turned out to improve the didactical understanding of the use of history in history teaching.

In the reform by the liberal-conservative government of Swedish upper secondary education in 2011, history was recognized as an important part of citizenship education and was introduced into the curriculum for vocational education and training (VET) tracks. Through the concepts of classification and framing, this article explores the process of constructing the history syllabus for VET. The data consist of archived material from the working group responsible for the history curriculum under the Swedish National Agency for Education. The analysis shows that there are competing discourses concerning the relative emphasis on competencies and skills and concerning the emphasis on contemporary and modern history. Although historians, history teachers and other agents are invited to respond to the content of the curriculum, the respondents have no influence on the knowledge structure of the curriculum, which is controlled by agents of the dominant educational ideology. From a critical perspective, this article suggests that the curriculum reflects the instrumental and neoconservative message of the reform through strong classification and framing and through the emphasis on general abilities and a contemporary history that has a more direct explanatory value to contemporary society.

This article examines upper secondary school students’ understanding of historical empathy. The focus is on how and to what degree they displayed in their essays historical contextualisation, perspective taking and affective connection. The study was based on the essays written by 96 students, using resource-material that comprised background information and historical sources. The students reflected on the controversial issue of Finnish children who were sent to Sweden during World War II. All the three dimensions of empathy were expressed at some level, but contextualisation was most often superficial. The dimension the students managed best was perspective taking, which was related to the affective dimension of the topic. They also applied psychological terminology to this historical issue. It could be concluded from the findings that students need instruments for and have interest in dealing with sensitive and affective historical issues

A post-conflict society tends to get locked in a history war. As the practice of history in its broad sense is a moral craft, representations of guilt and victimhood prevail in social memory. The representations are often bolstered by mythical references, wherefore deconstruction of myths is expected from history education for the purposes of post-conflict reconciliation. This article deals with the post-conflict uses of history in Finland, South Africa and Bosnia-Herzegovina. The three cases constitute examples of a class war, a race conflict and an ethno-religious armed clash. The memory politics and history curricula differ between the cases. Their comparison indicates, how far an imposition of one ´truth´, a dialogue of two ´truths´ and segregation of different memory communities are feasible strategies of post-conflict history education. The article suggests that history lessons can be an asset instead of a liability in the pursuit of reconciliation.