Lokalhistoria : Intervjuundersökning med lärare i Kalmar och Vetlanda

This essay is about local history in history teaching in two cities; Kalmar and Vetlanda. The purpose was to see how teachers in Kalmar and Vetlanda define local history and what kind of local history they teach their students. I have also examined what benefits of didactics the teachers see in teaching local history. In order to find out I interviewed four history teachers at three schools in Kalmar and two history teachers at one school in Vetlanda. Some of the interviews were carried out over the telephone and the rest at the teachers´s schools. The teachers all work in upper secondary schools. What I found was that all the teachers had more or less the same definition of the term local history; it´s about the history in one area. This area could be where their students come from or the area where the school is located. Some teachers taught more local history than others. The teachers taught some different types of local history, for example: city guiding, literature studying, subject days, essays, to search material in archives and source material etc. All the teachers said that some benefits of didactics, when it comes to teach local history, were that it could give the students some more knowledge about their hometown and its surroundings. The students know much about their hometown, but not all the background. The closeness was also an advantage; the local history is just outside the door. Hopefully it could lead to a bigger interest when it comes to history