Effects of a teacher training programme on historical awareness skills, controversial issues and gender in secondary education

Abstract

This research analyses the impact of a teaching intervention aimed at the development of historical awareness skills in future secondary school social science teachers (n = 19), and its relationship with the curricular inclusion of controversial issues, gender and its diversity in history education. From a quasi-experimental design, the Epistemology, Methodology and Gender in taught history (EMG) scale was adapted as a data collection instrument. The main results obtained report a statistically significant impact of the intervention on the curricular need for didactic treatment of social problems and controversial issues, and for addressing education for participatory democracy in the social science curriculum; making visible individuals, social groups/collectives and plural identities (including gender); recognizing the relative nature of social-historical knowledge; and redirecting historical knowledge towards purposes oriented towards social transformation and education for the future. Likewise, after the programme, the representations of future teachers tend to weaken the perception of historical knowledge as an interpretative reconstruction of the past, its limited impact on the historicity of the present and its absence in the configuration of desirable futures, and to strengthen the need to understand the historical method in the teaching of social sciences.