Research in the development of historical understanding in students has demonstrated that the use of primary source documents engages students in a more meaningful way in the study of history (Barton, 1997c; VanSledright, 2002; Wineburg, 2001). To determine if this research was supported in a local context, I conducted a series of lessons with a class of seventh grade students using primary source documents to answer the central research question: To what extent is the development of historical understanding in students enhanced by the use of primary documents? After learning about Louis Riel and engaging with a series of primary source documents, the students used the documents to answer the question: should Louis Riel have been convicted of treason at his trial in 1885? From the class, the responses of ten participants were coded using VanSledright’s (2002) four reading strategies, ranging from comprehension strategies to more sophisticated intertextual evaluations. This case study reveals that while students struggle to work at the higher levels of historical reading, the use of primary source documents enhances student self-efficacy in social studies. This study also accentuated the need for students to be specifically taught the necessary literacy skills to decode and interpret documents in isolation and intertextually.

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This study focus is on pupils historical understanding of the Holocaust. The main purpose and question in this study is to answer what types of work methods and materials pupils used in Holocaust education in historical class. The method used is an survey on 136 high school’s pupils in Sweden for receiving a better understanding of what historical use of Holocaust pupils meet in historical class. The analyze of the material from the survey focused on four out of seven historical uses based on the historian Klas-Göran Karlsson’s typology on the uses of history, those are ideological, moral, political-educational and scientific use. The theory is used for analysing how pupils encounter the holocaust in the historical classroom. Results from the survey show that pupils meet a variation of historical information and facts is used throw how and what pupils work with the Holocaust. All four of the historical use of history could be seen in the results, but above all the scientific use and the ideological use. The scientific use of the Holocaust focuses on factors and relationship between causal factor and outcome. The ideological use of the Holocaust focuses on the understanding of democratic and human values. The study reveals that no historical use is dominant in the different classes, that means the individual meeting whit information about the Holocaust and pupil has an important value in what type of understanding and historical use the pupil have of the Holocaust.

Hermeneutics has always been concerned with understanding, which has led to the development of numerous methods and approaches to assist the interpreter in his own attempt to understand. In text immanent methods, which became very popular over the last century, the final text was analysed and studied on etymological, syntactical and grammatical levels. The interpreter just had to apply the rules of his method objectively in order to expose the truth which was locked up in the text. These approaches were shaken to their core with the bloom of historical criticism. Now, for the first time, the authenticity of the final text of the Bible was openly questioned. This was a major shock to Bible readers. One Old Testament scholar, Gerhard Von Rad, lived in the middle of this whole storm, but instead of rejecting the claims of historical criticism, he used what they offered him to extract meaning from the text. Von Rad used the final text of the Old Testament as a point of departure but then asked how this text developed historically. Through an in-depth study of the text, he discovered sources that stood out as building blocks for the development of the Old Testament - different traditions had come into existence over time and there were drawn together into the final text of the Old Testament. Von Rad discovered the Credo which he identified as the most basic testimony Israel had preserved. He then continued to show how this Credo was interpreted and reinterpreted in every new generation in Israel. With the aid of this Traditionsgeschichte he understood the historical growth of the Old Testament and that help him with his Verstehen of the final text. Hans-Georg Gadamer was a philosopher who lived in the same era. He was also concerned with historical understanding of texts from the past. With his Wirkungsgeschichte he asked about historical interpretations of the text. The constant flow of interpretation and reinterpretation over centuries, helped him understand ancient texts better. He did not see the temporal distance between the original author and the modern interpreter as a threatening abyss but believed that it was rather filled with opportunity. In this dissertation we look at the contributions of Von Rad and Gadamer and how it assists us in understanding Verstehen. Man is a historical being, who exists against the backdrop of history. It is this historical Dasein of man and his Geworfenheit in the world that makes it possible for him to understand texts from the past. Gadamer’s fusion of horizons, rooted in man’s historicity, bridge the gap between the past and the present. Where synchronic text immanent methods reject all subjective influences, Gadamer and Von Rad point to the nature of man’s inescapable historical being – man comes to understand by dealing honestly with his own Geworfenheit in this world. We learn that Verstehen is not concerned with an absolute truth that must be gained as an object, but Verstehen is an on-going historical process involving man’s whole being. The interpreter is part of an on-going process of coming to understanding. / Thesis (PhD)--University of Pretoria, 2012. / Old Testament Studies / unrestricted

Images are used in history education for a variety of reasons, not least to generate interest through a better understanding of historical events and people. The aim of this study was to investigate how historical pictures, either illustrated or documentary/photographic, can be used as a resource for activating and improving pupils' historical empathy, in the way described by Stéphane Lévasque. I conducted a reception study on five different focus groups consisting of pupils from different upper secondary schools in Sweden. The pupils varied with regard to number of credits for admission to upper secondary school. A sixth group of pupils was interviewed as a contrasting control group in order to add perspective to the results. The discussions were based on the pupils' interpretations of 34 selected pictures, all of which were taken from the most common history textbooks. Each pupil was asked to choose the picture he/she felt was the most representative historical image. On the basis of the strategies used by the pupils when interpreting the pictures and discussing them, the material was analysed in accordance with Lévesque's categories: imagination, historical contextualisation and morals. The last category, morals, was further divided into three sub-categories: sense of justice, sympathy and progression. The reflections of the pupils and the degree of contextualisation varied. It appeared that the pupils were less inclined to discuss assumptions about the persons in the pictures; instead they chose to discuss the historical context in question. The pictures in this study did not seem to trigger the pupils to fabricate anachronistic reasoning about history; when they did produce lengthy reasoning, it was contextual, structural and metahistorical. In this context, the pupils who belonged to the group with the highest average of credits showed some signs of reflection on the basis of historical context and some criticism about the historical sources. On no occasion did any of the pupils choose a picture as a concrete expression of injustice. One of the questions this study aimed to explore was whether a lack of historical context affects how pictures trigger emotions and reasoning on the basis of moral aspects. Some of the pupils displayed moral standpoints, primarily the degree of morals concerning injustice. One possible interpretation could be that the feeling of being unfairly treated and subjected to insulting behaviour and social injustice was something the pupils could relate to. The group of pupils who had not yet studied history at upper secondary school, the control group, generally made reflections using this sort of reasoning when they discussed the historical aspects of the pictures.

Images are used in history education for a variety of reasons, not least to generate interest through a better understanding of historical events and people. The aim of this study was to investigate how historical pictures, either illustrated or documentary/photographic, can be used as a resource for activating and improving pupils' historical empathy, in the way described by Stéphane Lévasque. I conducted a reception study on five different focus groups consisting of pupils from different upper secondary schools in Sweden. The pupils varied with regard to number of credits for admission to upper secondary school. A sixth group of pupils was interviewed as a contrasting control group in order to add perspective to the results. The discussions were based on the pupils' interpretations of 34 selected pictures, all of which were taken from the most common history textbooks. Each pupil was asked to choose the picture he/she felt was the most representative historical image. On the basis of the strategies used by the pupils when interpreting the pictures and discussing them, the material was analysed in accordance with Lévesque's categories: imagination, historical contextualisation and morals. The last category, morals, was further divided into three sub-categories: sense of justice, sympathy and progression. The reflections of the pupils and the degree of contextualisation varied. It appeared that the pupils were less inclined to discuss assumptions about the persons in the pictures; instead they chose to discuss the historical context in question. The pictures in this study did not seem to trigger the pupils to fabricate anachronistic reasoning about history; when they did produce lengthy reasoning, it was contextual, structural and metahistorical. In this context, the pupils who belonged to the group with the highest average of credits showed some signs of reflection on the basis of historical context and some criticism about the historical sources. On no occasion did any of the pupils choose a picture as a concrete expression of injustice. One of the questions this study aimed to explore was whether a lack of historical context affects how pictures trigger emotions and reasoning on the basis of moral aspects. Some of the pupils displayed moral standpoints, primarily the degree of morals concerning injustice. One possible interpretation could be that the feeling of being unfairly treated and subjected to insulting behaviour and social injustice was something the pupils could relate to. The group of pupils who had not yet studied history at upper secondary school, the control group, generally made reflections using this sort of reasoning when they discussed the historical aspects of the pictures.

In time, more historical documents have become accessible through various technological modes including the Internet, CD-ROMs, and local databases. Teachers are now able to infuse a rich variety of resources into lessons with relative ease. This study measured expert historian heuristics in secondary students engaged in analysis of technologically-enhanced historical documents relating to women in the early United States republic. Nine 10th grade Advanced Placement world history students from an urban high school in the southeastern United States were assigned randomly to one of three conditions: paper historical documents, HTML historical documents, and HTML historical documents with simulated, limited Internet access. Using a think-aloud protocol developed by Jonassen et al. (1999), the qualities and frequencies of expert historian heuristics were measured. The findings support and enhance previous research related to how secondary students learn history while performing a task using primary and secondary source documents and the effects of hypermedia technology. Most of the time, students engaged in a simplistic read-and-react pattern, except for two participants who recognized greater levels of subtext. The two students account for slightly more than 50% of all heuristics. Moreover, the students in general failed to perceive nuances between the documents, engaged in presentism, and viewed history as a uniform expansion of civil rights and increased opportunities. However, all the participants achieved some level of understanding indicating that women enjoyed fewer rights than their white, male counterparts. In the HTML groups, the participants moved within and between the documents with greater frequency and nonlinearly. While in the Internet group, forays to the simulated Internet invoked a high proportion of expert heuristics and resulted in statements of clear understanding. The results imply that computer technologies promote authenticity and learner control. Furthermore, expert heuristics can help students manage information from the Internet. In addition, the paucity of heuristics exhibited by most subjects suggests a lack of prior knowledge and inexperience with historical documents. This may be a result of the way history is taught in the schools. The results are discussed within the framework of previous research and the cultural wars.

The thesis focuses on how students learn history in the classroom, more precisely on their possibilities and difficulties in developing competence in the school subject of history. There is a particular emphasis on how they explain and understand historical processes and concepts within the subject of history. Participants are students of different grades, 8–19 years old. The purpose of the study is to explore how students learn history in concrete learning situations and my focus is on the types of knowledge students understand, learn, develop and use in comparison with what they are expected to learn.  This is done based on three fundamental and well-established principles of learning. To examine what kinds of knowledge students need I use three main types of knowledge: declarative content knowledge (facts and concepts), procedural knowledge (knowledge about how to do things) and self-regulatory knowledge (knowledge about how to regulate our memory, thought and learning). I also use concepts and insights from systemic functional linguistics (SFL) in order to explain why the students use language and communicate the way they do. The thesis shows that history is challenging for young students. Young students have difficulties with complex and abstract concepts in history as they treat concepts as facts. Older, more competent, students use concepts on a more abstract level and use different kinds of linguistic resources when formulating explanations of higher complexity, more similar to the way explanations in the domain of history are commonly written. The youngest students and some of the older students lacked factual knowledge, concept knowledge, domain specific self-regulatory knowledge and linguistic resources. Declarative content knowledge and facts are more important and more difficult for young students to understand, develop, organize and learn than previous scholars have shown empirically. Students’ abilities to understand facts and ideas in the context of a conceptual framework and to organize and structure facts with the help of concepts at different level of abstraction (conceptual understanding) are crucial. Students also need linguistic resources, both lexical knowledge and knowledge of text structures. Language is crucial both in the process of acquiring knowledge and in the process of communication. In the learning process, teaching is crucial, since individual students’ potential to develop competence depend on the potential of the teacher to discover and engage their preconceptions and arrange for learning in a way that give students the kind of knowledge they need.

The Holocaust is an important part of Swedish history teaching. It tends to exemplify human rights violations and has become a means to educate students to be better citizens. Swedish studies have often focused on students’ historical consciousness. This study aims to examine students’ historical thinking about the Holocaust. Three questions are addressed; how students express substantive knowledge, how students express procedural concepts, and how do students express moral aspects about the Holocaust. The material was created during the authors’ teaching practice (in Swedish VFU) and consists of 28 students’ texts. To analyze the material qualitative content analysis was used. Procedural concepts such as continuity and change, cause and consequence, historical agency and, moral aspects, were also used as tools to interpret students’ texts about what was the cause of the Holocaust. The results show that students made implicit references to different procedural concepts when describing how the Holocaust happened. Students often referred to anti-Semitism, Adolf Hitler, and the developed train system as causes for the Holocaust. They tended to understand Hitler as the founder of anti-Semitism and Nazism. He was described to convince the German people to vote for him. Structures and agency of other actors, therefore, disappeared leading to a shallow understanding of the Holocaust. The author of the study argues for a Holocaust education that uses Alice Pettigrews’ concept of “powerful knowledge” and Gert Biestas’ notion of qualification, socialization, and subjectification, to develop students’ moral and civic understanding.

Showing movies to pupils is hardly a new, innovative teaching method. However, knowledge about how film is used and why, as well as what kind of film is used is scarce. In the present licentiate thesis, eight active teachers have been interviewed on their experiences with and approached to using film as a pedagogic tool in high school history lessons. The purpose of the study is to analyze the respective teachers´ use and understanding of history, based on their opinion of film as a didactic alternative. Why do teachers to use film in class? How do they describe the way in which they work with it in concrete teaching situations? What films do they use and what makes them suitable for classroom viewing? The teachers emphasize five primary ways in which they use movies as teaching tools and the advantages in doing so: to present facts; as an example of multiperspectivism; to promote ethics and empathy; to discuss source criticism; and to arouse interest. The teachers see documentary film as an accurate, reliable form of presenting facts while considering drama more complicated and important to address in class. The study shows that the teachers feel they are left to their own devices to discover film´s potential as creators of meaning but that they rarely have the educational background or time to engage colleagues in didactic reasoning on the subject. The type of films they consider as having the most favorable effect in the classroom generally deal with war and other conflicts from a Western perspective. Most see film as an effective secondary source but a few also see it as a useful primary source. Analyzing their statements as a whole, the informants articulate that while film is widely used in high school history classes, it is done so for very different reasons.