The revolutionary history teacher : A qualitative study on highschool teachers teaching of the american, french and russian revolution

The aim for this study is to discern what Swedish history teachers and a few select text books view on history is and how they work around the planning and teaching surrounding political revolutions. The revolutions that have been studied for this thesis is the American, French and Russian revolutions, which have been picked for their magnitude and significance for Europe and the outside world in their respective time frame. The method chosen for the thesis is a qualitative content analysis, which has been applied onto both interviews that were held with four teachers of history, as well as onto an analysis of three different Swedish school books. The chosen theoretical framework was incorporated into the content analysis and is focused on views of history dependent on different historical perspectives on what has driven history forward. These views consist of: ideological/operator-driven, historical materialism, gender-based, ‘from-below’, ‘from-above’ and structural perspectives. The interviewed teachers claimed to operate after many different historical perspectives, and that their educational methods were mainly concerned with teaching the students to consider what their own perspectives were. The text books showed that they, at most times, operated after an ideological/operator-driven perspective with elements of historical materialism and structural perspectives. Both the teachers and text books spent the most time on the French revolution and the least amount of time on the Russian revolution