This study is based on one of the changes introduced by the Swedish curriculum in 2011, namely that middle school students should be given the opportunity to develop their ability to reason historically. The overall purpose of the study is to contribute knowledge about the relationship between teachers’ planning for and middle school students’ development of historical reasoning and disciplinary literacy with examples from a subject area about Swedish Middle Ages. The study examines the opportunities that students in grade 5 are offered to develop the ability to reason historically and to develop disciplinary literacy in history teaching.
Epistemologically, the study is based on the assumption that knowledge is socially situated, which is common to the theories used. Historical reasoning takes place in a social context and demands both the ability to think historically and the ability to express oneself in history. The study therefore combines history didactic theories about historical thinking and reasoning with history-specific literacy.
The research questions originate from problems and difficulties that history teachers in middle school experience in their teaching. To get answers to these questions, the practice-based research approach Educational design research has been used. Through participant observation, two teachers were followed in the planning and implementation of history teaching in a class in grade 5 for 12 weeks. The empirical material consists of audio recordings and field notes from planning sessions and whole class lessons, audio recordings of group works and collection of student texts, both individual and collective.
The licentiate thesis consists of two peer-reviewed articles, both published, and a commentary:
Article 1 sheds light on middle school teachers’ conceptions of what historical reasoning entails specifically in writing and how teachers plan their lessons based on this. Seven planning sessions and one concluding conversation were followed through participant observation. A phenomenographic and a thematic analysis was made to answer the research questions. The results show that the teachers conceive of written reasoning in history as a) understanding the historical content, b) the active use of content concepts, c) shifting between time and space perspectives and d) perceiving text qualities. The results also show that teaching, according to the teachers, needs to include the use of teaching materials, be visually supportive, collaborative, reflective and attentive to text structure and linguistic patterns.
Article 2 contributes knowledge about the opportunities that history teaching offers 5th grade students regarding historical reasoning, focusing on both historical thinking and history-specific literacy. The empirical material was collected during 15 lessons and analysed based on a model of historical reasoning and on theory of history-specific texts. The analysis is supported by a grammatical focus on temporality and causality. The result shows that middle school students use simple text activities such as retelling in historical reasoning about continuity and change. To a lesser extent, more complex textual activities, such as explanation and argumentation, which are important for historical reasoning about causes and consequences. However, oral processing of historical material offers opportunities to try more complex forms of historical reasoning and text activities.
In the commentary the articles are related to each other through a synthesising analysis. The result of this analysis shows that middle school students are able to engage in simple forms of historical reasoning. The tasks and the scaffolding offered to students in the classroom are the tools that enable them to develop this ability and to develop history-specific literacy. The tasks in the study are predominantly open-ended and encourage students to be active and collaborative, but the organising concepts and forms of reasoning are often implicit. The planned scaffolding is characterised by moving from joint work on tasks in whole class, to small groups and finally to individual work. In other words, students are given ample opportunities for interaction, which is an important scaffolding in developing historical reasoning, but the organising concepts and history-specific writing could be made more explicit. One of the reasons why this is not already done may be that middle school teachers are often qualified in several subjects and thus may not have acquired sufficient knowledge of history, history didactics, and disciplinary literacy during their university education. In addition, the design of the history syllabus seems to have been influenced by history didactic research that has been carried out mainly in relation to older students. This also means that the middle school teachers do not have much scientific research to refer to, which means that they try out by themselves. With this study, I want to contribute to filling the research gap in Swedish context when it comes to historical reasoning in the middle school.