Historielärares syn på historisk kunskap och undervisning om historiebruk

This article analyses Swedish upper secondary school history teachers’ views regarding teaching the ‘uses of history’ and the potential connections between those views and views regarding the epistemological nature of history in general. In the Swedish syllabus for history, in both compulsory schools and upper secondary schools, ‘uses of history’ is a more or less integrated topic. However, the constructionist view of history that can be seen as at least implicitly embedded in the concept of ‘uses of history’ is perhaps not shared by all teachers. Therefore, this article explores teachers’ views on teaching uses of history in connection to general assumptions about the nature of history. Primarily utilising qualitative content analysis of free-text answers in a questionnaire answered by 375 history teachers in Swedish upper secondary schools, this analysis shows that when discussing uses of history in history teaching many of the arguments are in fact based in epistemological conceptualisations of the subject. Most of the teachers find uses of history interesting, especially ‘misuse’ of history, but they often see it as an add on, as a domain of its own, detached from ‘historical facts’, and they sometimes do not prioritise it. Some teachers, however, see uses of history as the very core of the subject, offering an opportunity to really show their students how history is always an interpretational endeavour and how historical knowledge is always detached from past reality. There was also a smaller group of teachers who turned their back on teaching uses of history on more explicit epistemological grounds because they argue that it takes away from ‘real’ history, which they saw as ‘historical facts’ about what ‘really happened’.