History teaching as a designed meaning-making process: Teacher facilitation of student–subject relationships

Heidi Eskelund Knudsen

doi:10.18546/herj.17.1.04

Abstract

This article is an empirical analysis of history teaching as a communicative process. Dialogic history teaching develops as a designed meaning-making process that depends on thorough pedagogical strategies and decisions, and requires cohesion in teacher expectations, introductions and interventions. A micro-dialogic study is presented in this article to document a paradoxical teaching situation where history as subject-related content all but disappeared from a group of students' meaning-making processes because they were preoccupied with figuring out their teacher's intentions. History teaching thus turned into 'just teaching' without the teacher or the students being aware of it. A strong emphasis on history teaching as a communicative process and dialogue as a key pedagogical tool have potential with regard to pedagogical decision-making and strategies on the one hand, and for relationships between students and history as subject-related content on the other. The analysis presented in this article contributes to a growing field of studies on dialogic history teaching, of which the focus on students as an important part of classroom dialogues is central.

Highlights

IntroductionA fundamental aim of history teaching is the development of students’ meaningmaking processes related to aspects of history
A fundamental aim of history teaching is the development of students’ meaningmaking processes related to aspects of history. Opening up this relationship between students and history subject concerns explicit and well-communicated pedagogical strategies and decisions made by the history teacher
Danish history teachers often describe a sense of a lack of coherence between students’ meaning-making processes and history as subject content (Knudsen and Ebbensgaard, 2017; Poulsen and Knudsen, 2016)

Summary

Introduction

A fundamental aim of history teaching is the development of students’ meaningmaking processes related to aspects of history. Opening up this relationship between students and history subject concerns explicit and well-communicated pedagogical strategies and decisions made by the history teacher. Danish history teachers often describe a sense of a lack of coherence between students’ meaning-making processes and history as subject content (Knudsen and Ebbensgaard, 2017; Poulsen and Knudsen, 2016). They see history taught as a school subject as a bildung-oriented matter in a contemporary educational discourse of competence, skills and knowledge. The reasons for this have yet to be fully explicated

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Conclusion