"It is evil, that's how it was. It was just all evil". Controversial aspects in teachers' and students' narratives in lower secondary schools (7th to 9th grade)

Abstract

This article examines how teachers and students perceive aspects of controversial historical narratives and how this is expressed in their narratives in the classroom. The assumption is that these narratives are important signs of students' understanding in history education, as well as of the teachers' didactic choices. The article is based on classroom observations of three history teachers and their five classes in Danish lower secondary schools (7th to 9th grade). The article is based on an understanding that controversial aspects of history are constructed through the narratives in the classroom when teachers and students interpret and create meaning from historical events when viewing them from a contemporary perspective. Based on theories of narratives as sociocultural tools, important questions are raised about how we can understand students' contemporary understandings in relation to their understandings of the past when they interpret aspects of historical narratives as controversial. An important result of the study indicates that the moral appeal in the discussions leads to historical actor perspectives receding into the background, while the historical events are perceived as controversial, actualised through teachers' and students' contemporary and moral reflections. This points to a didactic goal in which students' values and moral judgments are highlighted as important for their understanding of history-an understanding that has a decisive influence on the students' historical consciousness, regardless of whether it is understood as a narrative competence that connects past, present and future, and/or it is understood as an ethical relationship to the past.