Arja Virta

Becoming a History Teacher: Observations on the Beliefs and Growth of Student Teachers.

Abstract This article reports on history student teachers’ development and their beliefs about teaching and good teachers. The data consist of several essays of 18 respondents written during their education, and interviews with five students. Most respondents had become interested in the subject very early, and independently of formal school education. Models adopted during early school years, however, did influence their attitudes towards teaching and teachers role. Typically the student teachers’ concentration was self-centred or focused on their own classroom behaviour. They tended to overestimate lesson content and resorted to content expertise and minute lesson plans as a reaction to teaching problems.

Learning to Teach History in Culturally Diverse Classrooms.

This paper examines prospective history teachers’ thinking about ethnic and cultural diversity and their experiences of learning to teach about history in multicultural classrooms. The paper reviews the findings of a follow‐up study of 22 Finnish student teachers during their nine‐month teacher education programme. The data consist of questionnaire data and various written assignments of this sample, plus interviews with nine selected persons. According to the results, signs of continuity and transformation are apparent in the student teachers’ thinking. The informants frequently described problems related to diversity, although most of them did not see diversity as changing their way of teaching history as such.

Whose history should be dealt with in a pluricultural context – immigrant adolescents’ approach

Abstract This study focuses on migrant adolescents’ perspective on history education with special reference to their families’ home country. The data consist of qualitative interviews with 36 students from various migrant groups (aged 14–16 years). The history of the home country seemed to be significant for the students and they would have wanted to hear about it in school; but in most cases, the main source of information had been family or media.

History, Social Science and Geography Education

The article highlights the main characteristics of the humanities, or school subjects having a humanistic orientation, from the point of view of geography, history and social science in comprehensive schools. The educational objectives for these three subjects in the present National Core Curriculum for Basic Education are focused on the development of students’ thinking skills and understanding of the nature of historical, societal or geographical knowledge, and skills of using, for example, historical sources.

Bridging History Education and the Diversity of Historical Cultures

In this chapter, Virta discusses the challenges history teachers can experience in their classrooms when trying to pay attention to the variety of historical cultures that students encounter outside of school, related to both collective memory and multiple forms of historical entertainment. The relationship between historical cultures and history education is far from simple since historical culture is not unified. Minority adolescents do not necessarily espouse mainstream historical culture, but they might not share the historical cultures of their families or communities either. The main conclusion of this discussion is the necessity of training in historical literacy in order to enable students to cope with the variety of versions and forms in which they encounter historical information or disinformation.

History, Social Studies and Geography Education in Finnish Schools and Teacher Education

This chapter highlights the main characteristics of the humanities, or school subjects having a humanistic orientation, from the point of view of geography, history and social studies in comprehensive schools.