“Our present is soon our past” : An explorative study on the possibility to develop historical counciousness through history teaching

The purpose of this study is to illustrate how history teaching with the intention of developing pupils historical consciousness can be designed, based on the structure of teachers' teaching strategies. In order to empirically access history consciousness, historical perspectives (procedural concepts) are being used to show how perspectives of time are structured and linked together. The historical perspectives are understood in the context of “multichronology”, which describes how time perspectives past, present, and future and how they appear simultaneously in a context. This is conducted in order to be able to discern how history consciousness can emerge in the context of history teaching more clearly. The empirical data was gathered with semi-structured interviews from four history teachers who state that they work and build teaching on developing history consciousness as a theme. The result shows that teaching strategies where time perspectives past, present and future is made concurrent and linked with each other through structures based on historical perspectives. The historical perspectives are managed to some extent from one another, but always based on historical significance. Historical significance is what links the historical perspectives together and enables the possibility of developing a history consciousness. In most cases multicronology occur when future as a perspective of time is handled. The future perspective is used to access and link past, present and future simultaneously, creating an opportunity to develop historical awareness through a multichronology. Furthermore, this happens implicitly / explicitly, as well as directly or as in sequences in the teaching