Source criticism in school: History teachers’ comprehensions of source criticism as disciplinary, experimental and contextual knowledge in a progression perspective

Abstract

For more than a decade, there has been a growing interest in the particular requirements for disciplinary teaching within international and Swedish research in history didactics. Less interest has been directed at the broader issue of progression and the method­ological skill of source criticism. Against this background, the purpose of this article is to examine the relationship between progression and the selection of content in the context of teaching source criticism. The results are based on focus group interviews with Swedish history teachers where three overall comprehensions of their work with source criticism were identified. First, teachers displayed a disciplinary comprehension of source criticism that stressed academic concepts such as proximity and tendency. From a progression perspective, this comprehension emphasizes a starting point in common and accessible concepts. Second, teachers adopted an experimental compre­hension of source criticism that stressed students’ own hypothesizing and perspective-taking. Progression in this comprehension begins with students’ own questions and experiences. Third, teachers expressed a contextual comprehension of source criticism. Here, considerable emphasis was placed on students’ engagement with historical content knowledge. In this comprehension, progression starts from students’ inter­pretations of the historical material presented to them. In this way, the different com­prehensions that teachers display about their work with source criticism reflect the different ways they relate to the subject of history and, thus, their selection of teachable content. It is therefore possible to argue for the importance of paying attention to the relationship between progression and content knowledge in order to better understand the ideological decisions behind the selection of content in school history courses. Keywords: teaching profession, subject didactics, history didactics, sources, source criticism