Historielärares ämnesförståelse. Centrala begrepp i historielärares förståelse av skolämnet historia

This thesis focuses on four different aspects of history teachers’ comprehensive understanding of the school subject history. More specifically, the aim is to study the comprehension of the subject as perceived by individual history teachers. Special emphasis is placed on identifying the concepts of the field of history that are central to the teachers’ understanding of the school subject history. The first aspect studied is the teachers’ biographical changes. In a life history perspective it seems as if the teachers’ subject conception changes from an unproblematic and tentative approach to a more complex and confident understanding of the subject. The second aspect treated is the rationale behind their grasp of the purpose and content of the subject. Three major positions are identified, namely educational (bildung) orientation, critical orientation, and identity orientation. The third aspect studied is the teachers’ interpretation of a curriculum new to them. The teachers placed the curriculum in the field of tension between an education policy position, emphasizing more precise knowledge, on the one hand, and a history science position, emphasizing concepts of historical consciousness. The fourth aspect studied is five different conceptual tools displayed in the teachers’ remarks on having completed the teaching of a new course. These are termed ‘history as narrative’, ‘history as time-space’, ‘history as explanation’, ‘history as perspective taking’, and ‘history as skills’ At the general level the study shows not only that subject conception is of importance to the teachers’ understanding of their obligation as teachers of history but also how it is formed and constantly transformed by many different factors. In this process it is clear that the concepts used by the teachers, although variously defined, can be seen as specific to the school subject history and essential to the construction of history as a school subject.