Identifying aspects of temporal orientation in students’ moral reflections

Abstract

History education comprises moral issues and moral aspects, often perceived as an important and meaning-making foundation that makes learning relevant and interesting. The interrelationship between time layers fuels historical interpretations and facilitates perceptions of moral issues. This article focuses on a study investigating how secondary school students express inter-temporal relationships in encounters with a morally challenging historical event, which for the participants would have been a moral dilemma. Using historical consciousness as the theoretical framework, a matrix linking two prominent theoretical models – Jörn Rüsen’s (2004) types of narratives and Ann Chinnery’s (2013) strands of historical consciousness – was developed to analyse and categorize secondary school students’ expressions of temporal orientation. To carry out the research, 15-year-old Finnish and Swedish students read an excerpt from Christopher Browning’s (2017) book Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (originally published in 1992). The students answered and discussed open-ended questions regarding the relevance of the text to their lives and others’ lives, and the applicability of this historical situation to Europe now and in the future. Using this empirical material, the analysis provides a tentative overarching depiction of students’ expressions of temporal orientation, and reports on findings of how temporal orientations relate to moral reflection.

Mapping moral consciousness in research on historical consciousness and education - a summative content analysis of 512 research articles published between 1980 and 2020

“…This can in the future be used as an analytical tool to study, for instance, young people's moral reasoning in history education. We know today, for example, that it is mainly existential approaches to morality that engage students, which does not necessarily mean that they stop working with factual knowledge (Ammert et al, 2020). Chinnery (2014) highlights four strands of historical consciousness, namely the existential strand that takes interest in how people reflect on themselves when encountering history, the cognitive (knowledge-based) strand that argues that moral character building takes form through (rational) knowledge about the past, a narrative strand that involves stimulating a moral awareness through interpreting and using narratives from the past to guide the present, and a caring strand that aims at developing caring relationship (ibid).…”

Integrating historical and moral consciousness in history teaching

“…Rüsen believes that there is a moral element in historical consciousness, because according to his empirical observations, people are predisposed to give history moral meanings. Ammert, Sharp, Löfström, and Edling (2020) suggest that in the context of history teaching, addressing issues connected to moral values can deepen knowledge and stimulate students' historical consciousness, which in turn can contribute to students' moral development. They showed in their empirical analysis that more than a third of their sample of 15-year-old high school students from Finland and Sweden were able to reflect the interrelations between the past, the present, and the future, when they were given a task concerning morally relevant historical events.…”

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“…Historians study what has already happened and so must have a mechanism to reconstruct the past in the present. The past is revived via the historian's imagination and perspective, as Parfitt (2001, p. 7) asserts, "to imagine something is to make that thing present Sharp, H. (2020). Historical empathy activities in Australian History textbooks: An assessment tool to examine disciplinary and cognitive domains.…”