Historia på högstadiet : Historiekulturella yttringar i och utanför ett klassrum i Sverige hösten 2009

Sammanfattning: How do students use schools´ history education to develop their historical consciousness? In which ways could history education be regarded as a historical-culture expression, i.e. as a part of a society’s interest in the past? This thesis takes its point of departure in these overarching questions. More specifically the research was carried out as a contextualised case study of sixteen history lessons in a Swedish Year 9 class, in the autumn of 2009. The contextualisation consists of an analysis on historical-culture expressions in Sweden at that time. Despite conflicting opinions, the major finding was the common view of Sweden as a country that solves her problems in a peaceful way, both in the past, the present and the future. The classroom study was conducted with an ethnographical approach with close attention to teacher-student interactions. The research was guided by an analytical model inspired by the historian Jörn Rüsen’s theories on history learning processes.The results show in detail the complicated learning processes in the classroom but also the connection with the historical-culture expressions in Sweden at that moment. One major finding was the tendency to react to the rise of contemporary islamophobia and nationalism in Sweden by making comparisons with the development in Weimar Germany in the beginning of the 1930s.  This tendency was present both in and outside the classroom.