Elementary School Teachers’ Perspectives on History, 1920–1946

In this chapter Samuelsson looks at types of epistemic perspectives of history taught in Swedish elementary schools in 1920–1946. The material used consists of a large collection of 600 teachers’ descriptive accounts of teaching, as collected in 1946. The material provides a unique insight into teaching in the period, in part granting new perspectives on teaching. Even if the teachers had an objectivist perspective on history, Samuelsson argues that they also used a more constructivist perspective: Pupils worked with statistical yearbooks, collected historical artefacts and worked independently on various tasks. Samuelsson then relates these results to, among others, Klafki’s theory on teaching.