Att lära historia i mellanstadiet : Undervisningsresurser och elevtexter i ett medeltidstema

The aim of this thesis is to study the conditions surrounding young students’ text production in the subject of History. The study, which was performed within a class in grade 4, describes a project where the students produced individual books about the Middle Ages. The study analyzes the educational resources that the students were offered to produce a chapter on the Black Death and how nine students made use of these resources in their texts. Three resourses were analyzed: the teachers’ oral storytelling, the instructions and the designated chapter in the textbook. The material, which was collected through an ethnographic approach with participant observation and interviews, consists of field notes, films, photographs, student texts and teaching materials. The resources were analyzed through sociocultural and socio­semiotic methods. The results show that the oral communication is dominated by the teachers’ storytelling which is perceived as interes­ting and engaging by the students. This is especially true for the dramatized parts that seem to have a potential for providing a deep contextualization of the content. However, the students opportunities to formulate and discuss the content before producing their own texts are limited. The history textbook provides subject-specific knowledge as well as typical features of school history texts, but as the text is mainly processed individually the students are not made aware of this. The results indicate that both the students and the teacher perceive the project as an exercise in writing and that the content subsequently appears to be secondary. This is likely due to the fact that the instructions are general writing instructions rather than content-based or subject-specific. The texts produced by the students show a variation in length, number of headlines, images, and use of resources (written and oral, or just written). The instructions urge the students to retell the designated text ”in their own words" and explicit