Historical consciousness, national-conservatism and progressivism in primary and lower secondary education in Denmark

Since the 1990s, theoretical debates about the Danish history curriculum for primary and secondary education have revolved around the concept of historical consciousness and the idea that the history curriculum should be relevant to the students’ lifeworlds.

An important figure in defining the learning objectives of the curriculum, Bernard Eric Jensen, was influenced by Jörn Rüsen’s understanding of historical consciousness as the process by which we interpret the past for the sake of understanding the present and anticipating the future. Jensen’s objective was to empower students and teachers as “users” of history, and to diminish the specialized knowledge of academic elites and the political influence of governing parties. Recently, Andreas Körber’s FUER-model has influenced the curriculum, placing more emphasis students’ abilities to analyze historical culture and develop intercultural skills. Thus, the integration of historical consciousness in the history curriculum has been based on progressive notions of user influence and of nurturing the students’ critical and intercultural skills as well as their ability to participate in public life.

Despite these progressive intentions, data from my recent research study suggests that the concept of historical consciousness often prompts teachers in primary and lower secondary education to reproduce standard national identities. This suggests that the concept of historical consciousness can have a nationalist bias, which impedes the development of intercultural understanding and critical skills. In this paper I use six focus group interviews from the research study to reflect critically on the limitations of the concept of historical consciousness, but also to point to some of its potentials for developing the students’ intercultural competencies.

The interviews were conducted with eighth-grade students and their history teachers from schools representing different segments of Danish society. The students were asked to identify important, historical events and where they had encountered them. The history teachers were subsequently confronted with the student responses and asked about their didactic priorities, including using historical consciousness as a didactic tool. The purpose of this line of questioning was to gauge the relationship between the informal development of the students’ historical consciousness and the formal development in the school.

The data was subsequently coded using Jan Assmann’s conceptual framework of communicative memory, cultural memory and knowledge. This framework was an appropriate heuristic tool for analyzing the interplay between formal and informal ways of forming the historical consciousness of the students and for understanding whether the concept enhanced the students’ critical capacities and intercultural skills.

References:
Assmann, Jan. 2008. ”Communicative memory and cultural memory,” in Companion to Cultural Memory Studies, Astrid Erll (ed.). De Gruyter.
Jensen, Bernard Eric. 2003. Historie som livsverden og historie som fag. Copenhagen: Gyldendal.
Rüsen, Andreas et.al. 2006. Historisches Denkens: En Kompetenz-Strukturmodell. Ars Una.