Vad för historia? : En kvalitativ undersökning om historieämnetsinnehåll ur ett interkulturellt perspektiv

This essay is called What kind of history? and is about how history teachers think when they chose what to teach about and why. In the curriculum there are no guidelines about what substance you have to teach about. This gives the schools and teachers a big freedom. At the same time there is a kind of informal canon which says that it is the European perspective that is the important one. By doing interviews with ten history teachers in two upper secondary schools I try to see what they teach about and why. One of the schools has a global profile and by making a comparative study of the two schools I can see what is different and what is the same in the two schools. Other scientists have studied this subject about Eurocentric history education but not by asking the teachers themselves. There are several studies about the history textbooks and all of them conclude that the text books have a Eurocentric perspective and that is a problem. There are also studies about the curriculum and other steering documents and that concludes that it says in the documents that the education have to have a intercultural perspective, but at the same time de document talks about a western cultural heritage that we have to protect and nurture. I use the theories that Ross Dunn and Kenneth Nordgren presents about teaching a more including and global history. My conclusions are that the history education can look very different in Swedish schools today. At the same time the history textbooks guides the teachers a lot about what material to use in the history lessons, so if you want to do something else you have to get other teaching materials than the traditional textbooks, as they do in the school whit the global profile