This article focuses on analysing the relations between expressions of historical consciousness and democracy as featured in the 2020 Norwegian Curriculum for Social Studies. In compulsory school in Norway, History is no longer a subject with a specific syllabus. However, there is a fundamental historical perspective running through the curriculum, intended to support students’ understanding of society in the present and of varying conditions at different times. Historical knowledge and competencies are viewed as tools to understand and to influence society. Students are described as the main agents and the curriculum for Social Studies presents an ideal description of future citizens as participating, engaged and critical members of society. Democracy is expressed as three main themes: a participatory and developing perspective; a perspective expressing knowledge about Democracy; and a perspective stating Democracy as an arena as well as a desired result. Democracy is also underpinned with the citizens’ responsible participation and with societal values such as human rights, equality, and freedom. The analysis problematizes that in the Norwegian curriculum students are presented as a collective, whilst the prescribed and desired perceptions and competencies are mainly individual. This indicates a contradictory and interesting tension between who and what is desired in terms of democracy and citizenship.

 In this session, we will present the results of an international course tailored for history student teachers. This initiative was collaboratively designed, executed, and evaluated by history educators from Germany, Sweden and the Netherlands. The primary objectives of the course were to gain insights into each other's history curricula and pedagogical approaches, enhance skills in crafting and assessing lessons that incorporate national and European heritage, and explore avenues for international cooperation in history education while engaging with multiple perspectives.

This Erasmus Plus Blended Intensive Program (BIP) spanned a semester, comprising online sessions and a week-long university and site visits. Students collaborated on lesson planning, visited educational institutions and museums, and put their lessons into practice or collected feedback. The program concluded with a reflective assessment of the outcomes.

Participants were 32 history teacher education students from the Netherlands, Sweden, Germany, Spain, and Ukraine, showcasing a diverse range of ages and experience levels. Throughout the course, discussions centered around practical, ethical, and inclusive aspects of history education, supplemented by design guidelines for heritage-based teaching (Logtenberg et al. ,2024). We collected students' lesson materials and reflections and employed a questionnaire to assess the learning outcomes of this international collaboration.

In teams, students crafted lessons on topics such as WWI, WWII, the European borders, contested heritage, and Viking culture. In our session, we will share our experiences, analysis of the lessons and the learning outcomes that the student teachers reported. Participants highlighted their enriched understanding gained from exposure to diverse (international) perspectives, insights into student-centered education, and the integration of heritage and ethical and moral perspectives.

Lastly, some of our participating educators will showcase their lesson concepts, demonstrating how they incorporated the outlined design principles and embraced various perspectives—be it moral, inclusive, or heritage-focused—in their history lesson tasks.

 Today history teaching in democratic nations is often expected to develop students’ critical and multilayered thinking and commitment to democratic values and human rights; yet History teaching has also served as an instrument for undemocratic and nationalist ideas (Rüsen, 2004; Karlsson, 2017). While notions of democratic citizenship and associated values can be an aim of history teaching, the subject does not in and of itself guarantee that democracy will be taught—or learnt. There is a need to scientifically explore the interlink between historical consciousness and democratic consciousness from an international perspective in more depth. Democratic consciousness is here understood as ideas about democracy expressed through a complex set of historically loaded values, ideas, and practices expressed through language (Edling et. al. 2022), and analysed through a discourse-historical approach (Wodak, 2015).

The aim of the panel presentation with accompanying discussion is to provide an overview as well as a deeper understanding of intersections of historical and democratic consciousness expressed in school curriculums (especially through official knowledge documents such as syllabuses) focusing on the subject History in a number of countries on four continents—selected for their diverse trajectories of democratic developments and political cultures.

Drawing on comparative education (Kazamias 2009; Kallo 2012; Jokilaetal 2015), curriculum theory (Englund, 1989), and critical discourse analysis (Wodak, 2011) the content in the curriculum documents is approached as texts that are infused with historically tinted ideas that influence present and future orientations and actions. The mode of relating to temporality (that is, historical consciousness), and commitment to democracy as a complex set of historically loaded values, ideas, and practices (democratic consciousness) is explored in-depth, thus providing with a nuanced road-map of democratic ideas in history education as well as their directions for educational practice in a variety of countries.

Usar a aula de história como um espaço para a moral e ética na educação é uma tradição de longa duração, mesmo que com contestações. Recentemente, tem havido uma maior ênfase em como incorporar a ética na educação, como é o caso deste artigo, que busca explorar os espaços da moral e ética na educação na sala de aula de história. Argumenta-se aqui que a compreensão da filosofia moral e das teorias da consciência histórica, assim como a relevante psicologia moral e do estudo das emoções morais, são necessários para perceber o potencial do ensino e aprendizagem da história dar suporte à ética na educação. Seguindo essa linha, são identificados neste artigo três espaços de ética aplicados à educação nas aulas de história, entre eles: o raciocínio sobre a qualidade moral da conduta dos atores históricos; o uso da empatia histórica (tomada de perspectiva); e reflexo do significado moral do passado para o presente e o futuro. Como exemplo de como implementar isso, é apresentado um conjunto de atividades de estímulo projetadas para a sala de aula, junto de uma análise qualitativa da resposta dos alunos, a qual explica expressões de raciocínio moral, tomada de perspectiva e consciência histórica dos alunos.

The project, History and Moral Encounters: exploring theoretical and empirical intersections of historical and moral consciousness from a History didaktik perspective, funded by the Swedish Research Council 2017-2022, was aimed to increase understanding of intersections of historical consciousness and moral consciousness in order to develop new theoretical tools for History teaching and learning that can support education for democratic citizenship. A starting point was that historical consciousness and moral consciousness are intertwined in interpreting and making meaningful the connections between the past, the present, and the future. Prior studies have indicated this is the case, and in the project a set of theoretical and empirical studies were done in Sweden, Finland and Australia, to further theorise and probe the connections empirically. History as a school subject is expected and often also stipulated to address moral questions and values and promote education for democratic citizenship, but the conceptual basis for this has been under-developed. The paper presents some of the key findings of the project and takes the opportunity to discuss further their connection with, and implications for heritage education where moral values and the processing of links between the different layers of time, from the past to the future, are central but often under-theorised questions. 

Moral consciousness can be defined as an ability to perceive that a social situation involves a moral dimension. It is the awareness that the consequence of one’s actions for the concerned parties is a morally pertinent issue, and an ability to think of potential consequences. As will be discussed below, moral consciousness has been given different meanings in different fields of scientific inquiry, and there is no widely established view of the content of the concept.

The term “moral consciousness” has come up also in papers discussing historical consciousness though it usually has not been defined or elaborated in depth in that context. That there are connections, or “intersections” (Ammert et al. 2022), between how people relate to history and morality is evident. This happens, for example, in the encounter with history where reading a historical narrative sets in motion a moral evaluation of the historical event and the people involved in it. In fact, it is difficult to imagine a historical narrative that does not invite, at some level, the reader to a moral response.

Exploring similarities and differences between the moral values and norms of the past and the present stimulates historical consciousness because it invites to reflect on the historical continuities and discontinuities and their implications for the future (Ammert 2015). Such reflections might easily express a presentist view that the current prevailing moral values are transhistorically valid, or relativism where every historical period is thought to have its own perception of morality that cannot be related to each other without it being anachronistic. Neither of these two positions is sensitive to the complexity of continuity and discontinuity between the past, present, and future, as in more elaborate historical consciousness. They are also not sensitive to the question as to what extent moral responses are culturally constructed or embedded in the psychology of the human species.