Genre Positions and Epistemic Cognition : Swedish Upper Secondary School History Teachers and the Nature of History

Over the last 50 years, the school subject of history has increasingly been described as a subject about interpretation and multi-perspectivism. Discussing the subject this way might require a specific view of the subject’s nature. This study investigates the genre position and epistemic cognition of Swedish upper secondary school history teachers. The study uses a questionnaire to which 375 teachers responded and the results show that in relation to the theoretical framework, more than one half of the teachers demonstrate epistemic inconsistency, putting teachers’ ability to voice their epistemic views and/or theoretical assumptions into question. The age of teachers is the only studied structural category that appear to impact the teachers’ views of the subject, with older teachers being more optimistic about a true correspondence between the past and history, than younger teachers. The study also shows that there is not a straightforward relationship between genre position and epistemic cognition.