Research group Education of prospective teachers and veteran teachers

Education of prospective teachers and veteran teachers - understanding the multi-dimensional "new history"

The epistemology of teaching and learning history in curricula in the western world has developed significantly during the last decades. The "codified" knowledge of the discipline has been formulated in many sophisticated and abstract concepts - about not memorizing "the History" but "thinking history" and "historical consciousness". The curriculum of history in schools has become multi-dimensional and an important part of civic education.

At the same time it is possible to observe an increased gap between this "codified" knowledge versus the "cultural" knowledge in schools - the epistemic beliefs of teachers and pupils. The school-subject has internationally a long history of memorizing data - not of a qualified deconstruction or reconstruction of data. Not of reflections upon the use of history in history and the critical use of history for present and future.

Purpose of the project is to address this problem in education of prospective history-teachers: How to prepare teacher candidates to teach history in a complex epistemological context?

The aim of the project is to investigate the epistemic beliefs of history-teachers, their pupils and of teacher candidates. The hypothesis is that teaching and learning and epistemic beliefs interact and develop together. Epistemic stances enable or hinder understanding of "codified" knowledge. Another hypothesis is that learning trajectory-based instruction is an efficient tool for making this process visible, possible to assess and enable development of epistemic beliefs.