Abstract

How might teacher education engage pre-service teachers with unfamiliar voices and historical representation in an age of diversity, and view history as a critical project for young citizens? This context is situated in an Aotearoa New Zealand university’s initial teacher education (ITE) secondary programme. As a history educator, I negotiate multiple sites’ cultural practices and legacies of doing and being. I juggle professional, curriculum and assessment discursive practices and teachers’ certainties about their history programmes. This involves history theorising, scholarship and expectations. Tensions exist in relation to ‘sacred’ history contexts and knowledge claims embedded in curriculum and assessment standards that act to lessen possibilities of critical approaches. Critical pedagogy informs my stance that young citizens need to be confident and informed about their identity/ies and lived pasts to question what counts as knowledge and in whose interests this knowledge serves. Problematised history pedagogy (PHP) research aimed to disrupt pre-service teachers’ normative discourses. Emergent findings have subsequently shaped my history programme’s pedagogic approaches and evidence-informed assessment. Recent scholarly and public interest in histories that ‘play out’ in Aotearoa New Zealand’s present, serve to refocus history in ITE and schooling spaces to disrupt pedagogic certainties and exclusive notions of citizenship.

Highlights

  • I reflect on my history pedagogy in a secondary initial teacher education (ITE) programme, and on ways a critical stance reimagined school history’s curriculum intent, pedagogies and outcomes for informed future-oriented young citizens

  • The Problematised history pedagogy (PHP) research design and a Dismantling Analysis (DA) method are introduced as a critical pedagogy approach

  • Complex crossings: history in initial teacher education In Aotearoa, history education is filtered through national curriculum and assessment policies and the teaching profession’s code of standards

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Summary

Introduction

I reflect on my history pedagogy in a secondary ITE programme, and on ways a critical stance reimagined school history’s curriculum intent, pedagogies and outcomes for informed future-oriented young citizens. Māori history is being introduced into the schooling curriculum as a foundational continuity of Aotearoa New Zealand histories. I have sought to disrupt pre-service teachers’ conceptual certainties about the nature and purpose of history and the school history curriculum within my teacher education work. The PHP research design and a Dismantling Analysis (DA) method are introduced as a critical pedagogy approach. Aspects of the PHP findings are glimpsed through the pre-service history teachers as research participants’ voices. The PHP research processes and findings continue to inform my teacher education with pre-service history teachers, and I discuss history pedagogy in relation to young people’s lived citizenships

Backdrop
Complex crossings: history in initial teacher education
Curriculum, policy and disturbance
Critical pedagogy: problematised history pedagogy as research
The PHP research design as a ‘System of Meaning’
The PHP dismantling analysis method
Participants PHP and emergent findings
Private history theorising
Pedagogic identities as pre-service teachers
Threshold experiences with school history curriculum and pedagogy
PHP as public and accountable discursive practice
A continuity of problematised history pedagogy in ITE
Closing thoughts
Full Text
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