Interkulturalitet och historia : Historieundervisningens teori och praktik i en mångkulturell värld

Sammanfattning: The purpose of this thesis is to investigate interculturality in history as an idea and practice. Two overarching research questions are raised, each concerning the theoretical and practical levels: How can history, as a field of knowledge and teaching, be related to intercultural learning as a normative practice? What obstacles and opportunities for teaching and learning emerge when intercultural historical learning is the goal? This thesis comprises four published studies. Through a hermeneutic process, the aspects of interculturality and history are investigated as interplays between theory and empirics and between generic outcomes and specific cases. Cases from three Swedish upper secondary history classrooms provide data. They are analysed narratively, using both analytical tools based on the theories of historical consciousness and historical thinking, as well as the framework of threshold concepts. Utilising the theory of powerful knowledge, interculturality, as a normative and extrinsic goal, is brought together with history as a dynamic body of knowledge. In the thesis, I argue that interculturality in history teaching is best understood as a shift in perspectives, adopting a specific gaze on historical narratives. The identified obstacles relate to the normativity of interculturality, the methodological nationalism of history and the pedagogical risk of fragmentation and deconstruction. A major result is the potential to construct complex, multidirectional narratives centred on cultural encounters and migration processes, which combine temporal and spatial layers to open the past for intercultural connections. There also seem to be specifically productive learning situations and liminal spaces in which students acquire new subject understandings. Finally, in a systematic approach, a didactic model of intercultural historical learning is presented, constituting the final, but still provisional, hermeneutic loop of the research project.