Teaching about the Holocaust and other genocides is emphasized in Swedish History teaching. In Sweden there is a public authority commisioned to work with issues related to tolerance, democracy and human rights. It is this context and under these conditions, that Swedish History teachers select a variety of topics for their students to learn, as part of the History curriculum. In addition to the Holocaust, they teach about crimes against humanity committed under communist regimes, the genocide of Tutsies in Rwanda, and mass murder and ethnic cleansing in former Yugoslavia. Teachers use a multiplicity of uses of history and teaching methods. They conduct a scientific use of history when focusing on the historical contexts and explaining the background, motives and consequences of genocide. Teachers also stress the students’ personal reflections and standpoints in a moral use of history. The teaching aims at developing understanding and empathy among students.
Students find ethical and moral issues central and interesting when they interpret history. History can offer explanations and references to moral values that are still valid - or not valid - in our time. At the same time moral values provide conceivable contexts that connect students to the past. Views on interrelations between the past and the present seem to interact with the students' moral foundations, questions, interpretations, understanding or repudiation. On a societal level similar phenomena can be identified when groups of people turn to history either to handle challenges or to apologize or heal wrongs from the past. Furthermore National curricula prescribe ethical dimensions in school education, not least for the subject of history.
In this pilot study swedish 9th grade students discuss a text from Christopher Brownings' book Ordinary Men. The students' answers are analysed in a theroetical model including different aspects of historical consciousness and different apsects of moral reasoning. The aim is to study if there are patterns of interrelations and, if so, how these patterns are manifested.
What does it mean to know something about history? If you know “your” history, what is it that you know? For many, it is definitely about being able to provide dates, to state what happened or how people lived in the past; while for others it means being able to conduct genealogical research or being able to navigate in a video game that takes place in an historical environment. In a school context, the issue of knowledge is always central. Pupils and teachers meet in, around and through knowledge, and moreover, knowledge is assessed daily. This article addresses how pupils in the last years of the nine-year period of Swedish compulsory schooling regard knowledge about history. The aim is to investigate how Swedish 15 years old pupils in Grade 9 describe knowledge about history, as well as what type of knowledge about history pupils appear to hold.
This special issue is the result of the workshop, Towards an integrated theory of historical and moral consciousness, supported by Riksbankens Jubileumsfond (The Swedish Foundation for Humanities and Social Sciences) and Suomen kasvatuksen ja koulutuksen historian seura (The Finnish Society for the History of Education) and held at the University of Helsinki, in 2015. History teaching and social studies education are increasingly expected to develop, among other things, students’ historical consciousness. This goal is highly relevant for students’ ability to deal constructively with controversial issues of history which is an important civic competence in the situation where in many societies’ political arguments concerning, for example, citizenship rights, ethnic and cultural diversity, and democracy are only too often fuelled by simplistic narratives of historical change and continuity. However, there is a blank spot in the existing research on historical consciousness in that intersections between historical and moral consciousness remain very much unexplored. This special issue seeks to identify promising theoretical and conceptual points of convergence for future interdisciplinary studies of historical and moral consciousness. Contributors are from the fields of history, educational research, social psychology, and philosophy.
We are at a time in world political history that seems to be on a precipice. Over the past decade, it is difficult to ignore the global growth in popularity for autocratic governments, also in some countries which for decades were either strong democracies or moving towards stable democratic governance. The current Russian attack on Ukraine brings into stark focus the political instability many citizens are facing—historical problems are causing, or used as a pretext for, current conflicts. History educators across many sectors—primary, secondary, university, and in public spaces such as museums and galleries – are curious about how these and other current events and issues can and should be approached. The events raise anew the questions of whether and how we can learn from the past, what we value as good and bad in the past, and how these insights might affect our present and future judgements. In relation to this it becomes vital to ponder how educators and members of the public can communicate the situation in Ukraine and similar events to others, while avoiding the bias that presentism can bring.
This article takes a comparative approach to settler colonial violence in the American Southwestand German Southwest Africa. The Anglo invasion of central Arizona in 1864 and the Germanconflict against the Herero in 1904 highlights the nature of frontier violence and identifiessimilarities and differences across two points in space and time that have seldom been comparedby historians. Those writing of the US-Apache conflicts have failed to look to colonial theatersaround the world, their transnational attention focusing instead on the borderlands of UnitedStates, Mexico, and independent Indians. Similarly, research on the violence in GSWA has notengaged systematically with international parallels and has instead focused on identifyingpossible links between GSWA and the Nazis and the Holocaust. This article seeks to address theseshortcomings by analysing the comparative strands of settler colonial violence.