The Voice of History and the Message of the National Curriculum: Recontextualising History to a Pedagogic Discourse for Upper Secondary VET

In the reform by the liberal-conservative government of Swedish upper secondary education in 2011, history was recognized as an important part of citizenship education and was introduced into the curriculum for vocational education and training (VET) tracks. Through the concepts of classification and framing, this article explores the process of constructing the history syllabus for VET. The data consist of archived material from the working group responsible for the history curriculum under the Swedish National Agency for Education. The analysis shows that there are competing discourses concerning the relative emphasis on competencies and skills and concerning the emphasis on contemporary and modern history. Although historians, history teachers and other agents are invited to respond to the content of the curriculum, the respondents have no influence on the knowledge structure of the curriculum, which is controlled by agents of the dominant educational ideology. From a critical perspective, this article suggests that the curriculum reflects the instrumental and neoconservative message of the reform through strong classification and framing and through the emphasis on general abilities and a contemporary history that has a more direct explanatory value to contemporary society.

Review of The young language learner: Research-based insights into teaching and learning

Introduction For a long time, language learning research focusing on young learners was a neglected field of research. Most empirical studies within the broad area of second/foreign language acquisition were instead carried out among adults in tertiary education and it was not until in the 1990s that the scope of research broadened to include also young learners, then loosely defined as children in primary and/or secondary education (see, for example, Hasselgreen & Drew, 2012; McKay, 2006; Nikolov, 2009a). In fact, some agreement upon how to define ‘young learners’ was not properly discussed until in 2013, when Gail Ellis (2013) provided some useful clarifications as regards how to label learners within the broad age-span that encompasses both primary and secondary school. In short, based on a literature overview, she concludes that the term young learners is most often used for children between the ages of five and eleven/twelve, which in most countries would be equivalent to learners in primary school.   Thus, since young learners did not catch much scholarly attention until fairly recently, research volumes on the topic have been scarce. However, with a rapidly growing interest in examining how small children learn foreign languages, there has been a sudden increase in terms of the number of books available targeting young language learners. A first, major contribution was Nikolov’s (2009b) Early learning of modern foreign languages, in which 16 studies of young language learners from different countries are accounted for. Another important contribution is the edited book that will be reviewed here, which specifically targets studies about various aspects of second/foreign language learning among young (mainly Norwegian) learners. Bearing in mind that Norway and Sweden are very similar countries in terms of schooling, language background, and demographics – only to give three examples of similarities between these two nations – it is particularly relevant for Swedish scholars within the fields of education and second language acquisition to become familiar with research findings from the neighboring country.   In this review, the editors and the outline of the book are first described, then brief summaries of each chapter are provided, before the text closes with an evaluation of the volume. 

Significant history and historical orientation : Ugandan students narrate their historical pasts

In 2012, Uganda celebrated 50 years of independence. The postcolonial era in the country has been marked by political turmoil and civil wars. Uganda, like many other postcolonial states in Africa, cannot be described as an ethnically or culturally homogenous state. However, history education has globally been seen as a platform for constructing national identities in contemporary societies. At the same time, it is assumed that specific historical experiences of countries influence historical understanding. This study takes its starting point in the theories of historical consciousness and narrativity. A narrative could be viewed as a site where mobilization of ideas of the past to envisage the present and possible futures is made and hence the narrative expresses historical orientation. Through the concept of historical orientation historical consciousness can be explored, i.e. what history is viewed as significant and meaningful. The aim in the study is to explore in what ways students connect to their historical pasts.   The study explores 219 narratives of 73 Ugandan upper secondary students. Narratives elicited through written responses to three assignments. Designed to capture different approaches to history: either to start from the beginning and narrate history prospectively or to depart from the present narrating retrospectively. The colonial experience of Uganda affected the sampling in the way that students were chosen from two different regions, Central and Northern Uganda. The comparison was a way to handle the concept of ‘nation’ as a presupposed category. Narrative analysis has been used as a method to explore what the students regarded as historically significant and what patterns among the narratives that point towards particular historical orientations.   The empirical results show how different approaches to history, a prospective or a retrospective approach, influence the student narratives. For instance, valued judgments on past developments were more common with the retrospective approach. The results also show differences in evaluating past developments according to regional origin. Students from northern Uganda were generally more inclined to tell a story of decline. Also, it is argued that the student narratives were informed by a meta-narrative of Africa. It was as common to identify oneself as African as it was to identify as Ugandan.