Historical Bodies and Spaces in Criticality Practices: Revisiting Interview Data from Upper Secondary History Classrooms in Sweden, Russia and Australia

Abstract

This chapter revisits the interview data collected for the transnational study of criticality in the History learning environment in Sweden, Russia and Australia (Ivanov, A transnational study of criticality in the history learning environment. Umea: Umea University, 2016) and examines the historical bodies and spaces (Scollon and Scollon, Nexus analysis: Discourse and the emerging Internet. London & New York: Routledge, 2004; Blommaert and Huang, Historical bodies and historical space. Journal of Applied Linguistics, 6(3), 267–282, 2009) as evidenced in discourses in place (Scollon and Scollon, Nexus analysis: Discourse and the emerging Internet. London & New York: Routledge, 2004). To achieve this, the data are re-analysed by the tools of mediated discourse analysis (Scollon, Mediated discourse: The nexus of practice. London & New York: Routledge, 2001; Scollon and Scollon, Nexus analysis: Discourse and the emerging Internet. London & New York: Routledge, 2004). The collected interview data contain a number of reported practices of criticality in the upper secondary History classrooms that reveal how these practices “fit into the fabric of people’s experience and the cultures in which they live” (Jones, Mediated discourse analysis. In S. Norris & C. D. Maier (Eds.), Interactions, images and texts: A reader in multimodality (pp. 39–51). Boston: De Gruyter, 2014, p. 42). Given that criticality is a crucial educational goal in the selected national contexts, understanding what historical bodies teachers and students are bringing to the classroom might equip the policymakers with an adequate basis for conscious revisions of curriculum.