Thinking and caring about indigenous peoples’ human rights: Swedish students writing history beyond scholarly debate

Abstract

According to national and international guidelines, schools should promote historical thinking and foster moral values. Scholars have debated, but not analysed in depth in practice, whether history education can and should hold a normative dimension. This study analyses current human rights education in two Swedish senior high school groups, in classes meant to promote what has been described as conflicting ideals of historical thinking and empathy as caring. Content analysis of students’ exam essays shows intertwined relationships between critical thinking and judgements. The results also highlight how students care that people are treated unjustly; can identify different perspectives; link the past to the present and the future; and use corroboration of information to get the best grade. This analysis shows that the students focus on historical empathy as caring rather than sourcing and corroboration. However, all students combine normative judgements with the complicated act of more neutral perspective recognition in their papers. Evidently, students may combine historical thinking and empathy as caring in line with recommendations of international understanding when they write history about indigenous peoples’ human rights. These findings are significant to all researchers, teachers and decision-makers interested in furthering analytical skills or moral values in education.

Keywords:

• Social studies education
• historical thinking and empathy
• human rights education (HRE)
• history education
• indigenous people

Acknowledgements

I wish to thank the teachers and students for participating in this study and my colleagues in CESTA and SHEG for support and useful comments in the research process. Special thanks to: Sam Wineburg and Eckhardt Fuchs for comments in an early stage of the process; Birgitta Nygren and Malin Nygren for support in data management; Erik Steiner and Ryan Hauser for feedback and support in digital data analysis; and last but not least, Zephyr Frank, Brad Fogo, Fredrik Alvén, Brian Johnsrud and Gabriel Wolfenstein for feedback in a final phase.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation.