Introduction

Maggioni’s theory of epistemic beliefs in history underlined the rationale and the corresponding evaluation of History+, a large-scale intervention in Czech history education. During the first year of the intervention, we faced several challenges with the theory and the theory-based measurement tools, including inconsistencies in the epistemic beliefs of the participating teachers. The puzzling issue of epistemic wobbling has garnered the attention of many researchers (e.g. VanSledright & Reddy, 2014; Wansink et al., 2017; Miguel-Revilla et al., 2021), including Maggioni herself (VanSledright & Maggioni, 2016, pp. 139–141). Maggioni identifies “objectivist”, “subjectivist”, and “criterialist” types of beliefs (2010, pp. 129–133) and equates them to corresponding dimensions in the Beliefs About History Questionnaire (BHQ). For objectivists, history is a mere copy of the past. Subjectivists see history mainly as a matter of unconstrained accounts of different historians. Criterialists see history as a product of authors who build their accounts of the past following certain procedural principles. An epistemic wobbler, however, may endorse both criterialist and subjectivist or objectivist items.

In this chapter we expand the understanding of epistemic wobbling by rephrasing epistemic beliefs as situational states. We suggest that an individual can hold some epistemic beliefs on a personal level and use others in their professional life and even occasionally shift between beliefs within these domains as the situation in which they are activated changes. To empirically assess how teachers’ epistemic beliefs operate in the context of their work, we also propose construction guidelines for a new measurement tool. As we illustrate in the following sections, a good understanding of the wobbling phenomenon constitutes a crucial prerequisite for drawing valid conclusions from interventions grounded in Maggioni’s theory.

History+ and the Czech Educational System

When seen through the lens of epistemic beliefs, Czech education leans heavily towards epistemic objectivism. History education largely relies on the transmission of facts. Textbooks are an irreplaceable didactic tool, particularly in lower secondary schools (Labischová & Gracová, 2016). There is also a gap between the skill-based character of the general curricula, which teachers embrace only with reservations, and teachers’ practice. This gap exists both on the general level (Janík et al., 2020, p. 151) and specifically in history education (Ripka & Hoření, 2017). Despite these hindering characteristics, the Czech general curriculum covers the development of epistemic cognition. The curriculum comes in the form of guidelines, and the introduction states: “The students are led to realise that history is neither a confinement of past times, nor it is a conglomeration of facts and final answers. History is rather based on posing questions through which the present inquires about the past to learn about its own nature and possible future” (MŠMT, 2017, p. 51). The educational content of the curriculum describes expected outcomes and subject matter. School curricula follow the national general curriculum when specifying school educational programmes. Individual teachers’ teaching plans further specify these. Schools generally enjoy a high degree of autonomy, while teachers’ autonomy depends on the leadership style within the school (Greger & Walterová, 2018; Herbst & Wojciuk, 2014).

Czech experts in history didactics have expressed a consensus for reform towards criterialist, inquiry-based learning and a more active role of students in developing their own historical thinking and inquiry skills. However, despite the demand for change, such reforms have yet to take root. To address this, a consortium of Czech institutionsFootnote 1 developed the first national intervention, History+.

The Organisation of the Intervention

History+ aims to transform history education on a large scale. The trial period started in September 2021 and continues at the time of writing this chapter, in late 2022. The intervention runs for two school years and has two primary goals: to introduce inquiry-based learning methods that foster historical literacy in students and to test a professional learning community framework for facilitating teacher cooperation and innovations.

History+ worked with 208 lower secondary teachers of year nine students.Footnote 2 Additional 50 upper secondary teachers joined on demand. Each teacher brought a participating class. Altogether, 241 mostly lower secondary teacher-class dyads received the complete treatment since 17 teachers left the programme after the first term. Participating teachers formed 40 learning communities (five to eight members), each led by a local coordinator.

The interventionFootnote 3 has built upon the HistoryLab framework by Činátl et al. (2021), who have iteratively developed it for over six years within the related project. HistoryLab builds upon Seixas’ and Morton’s Big Six Historical thinking concepts (2012) with emphasis on evidence and the conceptualisation of inquiry methods by FUER (Körber, 2011) and SHEG (Wineburg et al., 2011). In year nine, history education typically covers post-1918 Czech and world history, with about fifty lessons of 45 minutes. The sample material consisted of seven mandatory lesson plans (six with set content and one elective). The lessons were given once monthly, excluding the months of pre- and post-tests (September and June). Regional and local coordinators disseminated the lessons to the learning communities. The coordinators also planned the lessons and moderated post-lesson feedback sessions. Akin to the German SINUS model of teacher development (Ostermeier et al., 2010), the lesson plans included a designated space for teachers’ adaptation. Each lesson fitted a standard class (45 minutes), but many teachers extended it over two standard classes. On average, each teacher taught slightly fewer than six lessons. Thus, some teachers did not give all the mandatory lessons, and the elective lessons were scarce.

In this chapter, we build upon the selected insights from the project’s first year and propose adaptations to the theory of epistemic beliefs. We first review the literature on the phenomenon of epistemic wobbling. After the discussion of epistemic identity switching, we arrive at the understanding of epistemic beliefs as discrete states that change based on the situational context. We also propose construction principles for an instrument for the study of situational epistemic beliefs and thus give additional leverage to the existing tools to measure the epistemic beliefs of history teachers.

Key Findings about Epistemic Beliefs in History+

The theory of epistemic beliefs in history (EB) has been applied multiple times in the History + project. This section provides a brief example of the theory’s application (see Ripka et al., 2022, for a detailed summary and results of the analyses), together with two critical findings attributed to the epistemic wobbling phenomenon. This phenomenon provides a conceptual basis for the following discussions.

To examine the participating teachers’ epistemic beliefs and assess the project’s progress towards its goals, we used the Czech adaptation of the BHQ questionnaire by Říčan et al. (2022). Our analysis showed that the clustering of the BHQ items did not align with the theory. Subjectivism and Objectivism items were strongly related and intertwined to the point that they could not be considered separate constructs, and this finding was consistent with Říčan et al.’s earlier results. Furthermore, Criterialism items formed a separate cluster that was minimally related to Subjectivism items, implying that some teachers may endorse both Criterialism and Subjectivism at the same time.

The theory was also applied to observe the epistemic cognition of teachers in action by analysing how the teachers adjusted the lesson plans to suit their teaching style and classroom. We monitored how teachers accepted and modified the prepared inquiry-based lessons. A qualitative analysis of the lesson plans revealed a case of a sample lesson plan that teachers extensively modified. The lesson dealt substantively with anti-Soviet uprisings in Poland and Hungary and their suppression by the army of the USSR. Initially, the lesson plan heavily featured an activity where students combined multiple historical sources representing varying perspectives to reconstruct a past event. Some teachers modified the activity so that the students would need to select a single historical account and interpret it as an accurate (“reliable”) depiction of the past event. This shift indicates dualism on the part of the teachers: the tendency towards identification of right or wrong accounts (VanSledright & Reddy, 2014, p. 34).

In the project, we observed teachers that endorsed theoretically incongruent epistemic positions and those who turned a Criterialist historical inquiry exercise into an objectivist, dualist information retrieval. These two key observations motivate the following sections. We first explore the case of multiple epistemic stances and review existing literature on epistemic wobbling (inconsistency in epistemic beliefs). We extend the theory of EB in a way that explains why teachers may endorse both Criterialist and Subjectivist/Objectivist items.

We then explore the proposition that BHQ may fail to capture the situational expression of EB. To capture the distinction between general and situational, the EBs need to be separately operationalised within the context of teacher action, for instance, in terms of preferences in lesson planning. While the personal epistemic beliefs might primarily reflect thoughts about one’s subject as historians or graduates of history (education), EBs in the professional context might reflect the teaching setting, including, but not limited to, the expectations of the (current) students’ capabilities.

The Curious Case of Multiple Epistemic Stances

Understanding the seemingly contradictory BHQ responses requires first assessing the potential causes of this contradiction in the underlying structure of teachers’ true epistemic beliefs. Both general (Hammer & Elby, 2002) and domain-specific literature (Maggioni, 2010, pp. 291–301; Stoel et al., 2022, p. 13) have used the term ‘wobbling’ to refer to epistemic inconsistency. Wobbling translates to holding a set of inconsistent or outright contradictory claims. The literature on epistemic beliefs and cognition frequently uses the term in discussions about the incongruence between theoretical epistemic belief types and sets of beliefs identified in questionnaire data, interviews, or teachers’ statements. Maggioni and VanSledright consider wobbling a norm (2016, p. 141).

Since wobbling often describes an incongruence between theory and observed data, one way to approach it is to dismiss it as an artefact of data collection caused by the limited validity of instruments. Maggioni suggested this may be the case with BHQ, as a modified questionnaire version failed to produce reliable scores for the copier (subjectivist) dimension of epistemic cognition (2009, p. 208). However, she later developed a consistency score to capture the extent of wobbling in the data (2010, pp. 138–139).

Suppose we thus assume the phenomenon to be real. In that case, it can be described and understood primarily in two ways: either as a transitory state between developmental stages or as a set of conflicting beliefs that imply identity and context-related problems. We propose the reduction of this distinction to an underlying assumption about the ontology of epistemic beliefs. The beliefs can either be continuous constructs resembling traits that can be held and combined to a varying degree or discrete qualitative states, and a person can only hold one at a given time in a given situation.

When seen as a continuous trait-like construct, wobbling would emerge as mixed or incoherent beliefs that have risen from an incomplete transition caused by an external force, an impulse that blew the prior, less developed epistemic beliefs off the course (VanSledright & Maggioni, 2016). Miguel-Revilla et al. (2021) offer an example of this perspective. They found that pre-service teachers’ beliefs tend to become more consistently criterialist with more disciplinary training and thus stronger academic background, which hints at the potentially beneficial role of instruction.

More or less developed beliefs imply that different people assume different positions alongside a continuum. Wobbling can then translate to an indeterminate position on this continuum, which is unlikely in people with highly developed beliefs. A fully developed Criterialist is unlikely to display wobbling, and a wobbler should not display fully developed Criterialist thinking.

Seeing epistemic beliefs as discrete states confined to a moment offers a different perspective. Maggioni (2010) suggests that wobbling might stem from unstable coordination between everyday epistemic beliefs and the professional beliefs of historians, which are also predominantly taught to university students. She thus rephrases Carl L. Becker’s “For each of us [professional historians] is Mr. Everyman too” (1932, p. 232). Many other authors tackled the claim that the same person can hold one set of epistemic beliefs in one situation and a very different belief set in another. Elmersjö and Zanazanian (2022) examined possible divergence between teachers’ statements about the principles underlying their teaching practice and their self-perceptions as historians. Similarly, Mierwald and Junius (2022) expressed doubts about simultaneously investigating teachers’ pedagogical and historical beliefs, a step taken by Maggioni in BHQ development (2009). Furthermore, Maggioni has elsewhere provided an illustration of epistemic inconsistency when an otherwise criterialist historian relies on their objectivist fact-based epistemic standard in an educational environment (2010, p. 310). Gottlieb and Wineburg (2012, p. 98) identified “epistemic switching” characterised by two simultaneous commitments. In their work, an academic historian also held a religious identity. A concept of double epistemic standards exists outside history education (see Maggioni & Parkinson, 2008, pp. 352–354 for review).

Some authors have attempted to disentangle the inconsistency following Maggioni’s proposal on testing the nature of wobbling, especially by methodological triangulation (2009). Nitsche’s (2019) study of prospective history teachers employed two different questionnaires to discriminate between history-teaching beliefs and beliefs about history by employing two different questionnaires and found no correlation between these two types of beliefs, which suggests that two clashing identities might cause inconsistency. Gottlieb and Wineburg’s (2012) qualitative exploration of multidimensional identities and their relationship to epistemic cognition revealed that identity-related material might cause switching between a historian and non-historian personal identities. Wansink et al. (2017) administered a document-based questionnaire and open-ended questions to Dutch prospective history teachers and found inconsistencies in epistemic beliefs regarding history education. Wansink et al. see the perceived inconsistency as a result of switching between multiple epistemic standards that correspond to the roles in the school environment—one of the historian and one of the teacher. Gottlieb et al. used divisive, national, or religious identity-related stimuli in their measurement. They expected the switch to occur, especially when confronted with such polarising stimuli.

Since both teachers and experts seem to alternate their beliefs under different circumstances, we find it unlikely that wobblers are merely stuck on a continuum between two clear epistemic positions. We, therefore, advocate approaching wobbling as a transition between states, conditional on the context of an individual. A wobbler can be a discrete criterialist in one situation and a pure objectivist in another. Unlike in the continuous interpretation of EB, wobbling does not preclude a clear epistemic position. Under certain classroom conditions, a wobbling teacher can work in a manner indistinguishable from pure criterialists.

The current form of BHQ does not align with this perspective. The questionnaire does not consider the situational determinants of time and place. If epistemic beliefs can switch between situations, people can base their responses on the performance of multiple identities and contexts. The incongruence in responses may simply result from the multitude of situations imagined by the respondent. An instrument placed in a more concrete situational context and the respondent’s identity might result in more distinct stances. The following section shows that our conceptualisation of wobbling can result in testable hypotheses about the distinction between the continuous and discrete accounts of epistemic beliefs.

The Hypothesised Relationship Between General and Situational Epistemic Beliefs

An operational definition of epistemic beliefs is necessary to test whether a discrete situational account of epistemic beliefs can explain patterns in BHQ that we attribute to wobbling. An important feature of this operationalisation is whether a questionnaire asks about a specific situation. A questionnaire is situation-specific when relevant aspects of the situations are clear to the respondent.

Research on psychological situations might offer some structure for these considerations. For instance, Rauthman et al. (2014) developed an eight-dimensional taxonomy of psychological situations. The eight dimensions represent different situational characteristics an individual might (or might not) see. In such a framework, a teacher might see teaching in a classroom as involving the dimension of duty (“A job needs to be done”, “Being counted on to do something”); discussion with colleagues as high in sociality (“Close personal relationships are present or could develop.”) or adversity (“Being criticized.”) and a debate with professional historians high in intellect (“Situation affords an opportunity to demonstrate intellectual capacity.”).

In a hypothetical scenario, respondents could go through a questionnaire (for instance, BHQ), item by item, and rate the situation they imagine when answering on the dimensions of duty, sociality, adversity, etc. The questionnaire could only be situation-specific if these ratings were similar across both items and respondents.

Specific epistemic beliefs only relate to a particular setting, and their operationalisation should present a particular context. However, we argue that BHQ assesses general (not situation-specific) epistemic beliefs about history. Similarly, the three categories teachers fall into, objectivists, subjectivists, and criterialists reflect general epistemic beliefs. When answering, respondents recall different situations and contexts relevant to the content of the items across space and time, both on an individual level and the level of the whole sample. In the following subsection, we take a brief intermezzo to describe an example instrument more adequate for capturing situation-specific epistemic beliefs:

Testing the Situational Aspect of Epistemic Beliefs

An instrument measuring specific epistemic beliefs needs to constrain the context from which the respondent samples their answers into narrow confines. These constraints leave little room for imagining a wide array of situations. In an example of such an approach below, we set the respondent into the role of a teacher designing a lesson with specific content—the Munich crisis of 1938.

We illustrate the measurement of situational epistemic beliefs on an example where we constrain the context by setting the respondent into a teacher planning an inquiry-based lesson on the Munich crisis of 1938. The international crisis of 1938 is a pivotal moment in Czechoslovak history. It became one of the most important Czech sites of memory and still holds a correspondingly prominent place in the history curriculum. All teachers, we believe, will find the items relevant and have a sufficient understanding of the significance of cases presented in the items.

A set of vignettes introduces the teacher to items that probe their thoughts on three essential components of history education: historical evidence, inquiry, and knowledge. Specifically, we ask the teacher to provide examples of relevant historical evidence, classroom activities that facilitate historical inquiry, and what they see as an apt illustration of historical knowledge. For illustration, we include a vignette and an item about historical evidence:Footnote 4

Imagine you are preparing a lesson about the causes of the Munich crisis. To what extent do you find the following illustrative cases to effectively demonstrate what constitutes historical evidence for students in such a lesson?

1.1 An excerpt from a collection of opinion essays discussing the history of relations between Czechs and Germans, written in Czechoslovakia between World War I and II.

Each item is accompanied by a rationale describing principles that allow for the formulation of similar items in other contexts. These principles follow a series of contrasts between Objectivist-Subjectivist and Criterialist positions listed in Table 17.1. The Objectivist-Subjectivist approach is based on an accurate representation of past events based on reliable information and provides a streamlined account of how things happened. The Criterialist approach analyses and compares different perspectives. It constructs a narrative of the past by considering different sources which are relevant due to their learning content rather than the mere truthfulness of their prima facie content. According to Mierwald (2020, pp. 232–234), multiperspectivity is key to fostering criterialism.

Table 17.1 Principles of epistemic positions
Full size table

Despite the situation-specific context, teachers’ responses may still be biased by classroom circumstances not accounted for in the wording of the vignettes. Teachers might consider an activity or source ill-fitting because it does not align with their students’ current progress, not because it challenges their epistemic beliefs as a teacher (e.g., Is X a good example of historical inquiry activity for such a lesson? instead of Is X a good choice of activity for my students right now?). These concerns might be difficult to capture with simple additions to the vignettes. To control for this inherent threat to validity, we propose to include a measure of teacher expectations about their pupils as a covariate. For instance, the first application of this questionnaire in the project also included questions on the proportion of students the teacher considers capable of such things as formulating an evidence-based argument.

Specific Hypotheses about the Nature of Epistemic Beliefs and Situational Factors in Wobbling

With both instruments at hand, the consistency—or lack thereof—between teachers’ responses to the general BHQ and a situational-specific instrument can help us decide between a continuous-trait and discrete-state accounts. We present two hypotheses that make specific predictions about the Wobblers, whom we define as teachers who score high on both criterialism and subjectivism-objectivism. The first hypothesis predicts the distribution of Wobblers’ responses. The second one draws expectations about the role of situational context in wobbling. We hope that testing these hypotheses can become one of the next steps to disentangle the long-lived debate about the nature of epistemic beliefs.

H1: The Distribution of Wobbler’s Responses

The first hypothesis tests whether epistemic beliefs in a given situation are discrete or continuous. Suppose the continuous account is true; the beliefs of Wobblers lie between Criterialism and Objectivism. In that case, the scores in both general and specific epistemic beliefs contexts should reflect the same observation: Criterialists score on average the highest on Criterialism, Objectivist-Subjectivists the lowest, and Wobblers fill the space in-between.

However, if the discrete account is true, we would expect a different outcome for Wobblers. Instead of one neat average on the situation-specific measure between Criterialists and Subjectivist-Objectivists, we would expect a bi-modal distribution with one group of Wobblers scoring very close to Criterialists and another very close to Subjectivist-Objectivists.

H2: The Role of Situational Factors in Wobbling

The second hypothesis tests the role of situational factors in wobbling. We predict an interaction between situational context and the general epistemic belief group membership. Criterialists and Subjectivist-Objectivists should be consistent across situations and show little effect of varying contexts on their situational-specific epistemic belief scores. Conversely, Wobblers should show much greater differences in situation-specific epistemic beliefs based on the differences in the provided context.

While the continuous trait conceptualisation of epistemic beliefs does not preclude contextual effects, we believe this effect would be uniform across general epistemic belief groups if the continuous account were true.

Discussion

In this essay, we have discussed the phenomenon of epistemic wobbling and its consequences for Maggioni’s theory of epistemic beliefs in history. We argue that if certain assumptions hold, the ontology of wobbling reduces to a question about the underlying nature of epistemic beliefs. If epistemic beliefs are discrete situational states, then wobbling is merely the reflection of varying contexts under which the people express them. Therefore, we focus on whether this account of epistemic beliefs is tenable.

While the literature has not reached a consensus, the evidence seems to lean towards the discrete account of epistemic beliefs. The discrete account of epistemic beliefs can work in an analogy to human motor development. At a certain developmental phase, a child transitions from only being able to sit to walking. While there can be unsuccessful walking attempts during the learning process, the transition is rather binary—at one point, there is a crawler, and at another, a walker. However, the breaking point precludes neither the underlying continuous development of pre-requisite capabilities, such as muscle strength or spatial orientation, nor the ability to revert to sitting or crawling under certain conditions. In line with the analogy, people may first need to acquire and develop underlying capabilities before thinking as criterialists. Once able to do so, people either “walk” like criterialists or “sit” like subjectivist-objectivists, as there is not much between the two. Nevertheless, while there are times to walk briskly, there are times to sit down calmly. The ability to be criterialists may go hand in hand with being something else whenever we deem it appropriate.

Understanding epistemic beliefs is essential for both theory and practice of teaching history. It emphasises future research and synthesis directions for theoretical purposes, such as prerequisites to develop criterialist abilities. We should treat the emotional, cognitive, and social precursors of criterialism as necessary but not sufficient conditions to develop the criterialist capability. Suppose the discrete account of epistemic beliefs is true. In that case, it is equally important to study contexts that make an individual “sit” or “walk” at any given moment—what triggers the existing capacity for criterialism and what suppresses it. Such contexts may include psychosocial factors like identity or tolerance for uncertainty and selected practical factors in the teacher’s decision-making, like classroom settings, students’ abilities or the school climate and culture.

For practical purposes, understanding epistemic beliefs has major implications for designing interventions and teaching materials that promote inquiry-based teaching approaches. A key takeaway of our proposed approach is that wobblers might not necessarily be unreliable in-betweens. Wobblers could be indistinguishable in their practice from full Criterialists in certain conditions. Thus, instead of educating wobblers towards criterialist thinking, we should create such proper conditions so they start teaching as Criterialists. Seeing the teaching context as a trigger for full criterialist thinking might lead to carefully designing lesson plans and teaching materials geared towards students’ needs and cultural backgrounds of specific communities.

While our perspective might present opportunities, it also warns that a wrongly conceived lesson might make a criterialist teacher switch to a pure subjectivist-objectivist. Earlier in the text, we introduced a situation where teachers adapted a criterialist lesson plan about the Soviet interventions in Poland and Hungary into a subjectivist-objectivist exercise about identifying the right resources. Certain factors might have led the teachers to abandon their otherwise criterialist thinking. They might have felt the task’s difficulty not matching their students’ skills. Alternatively, they might have felt a connection between the lesson content and the Warsaw Pact intervention during the Prague Spring in 1968, which made them switch a teacher’s perspective to that of a national site of memory almost as prominent as the Munich crisis. Either way, the lesson in question might have had an undesirable effect that a less intense, yet still criterialist, lesson plan would not have.

It might be tempting to avoid topics with increased potential to trigger subjectivist-objectivist (in our analogy sitting) beliefs both in measuring instruments and in the field. As our experience with the anti-communist uprising and its depiction of topical media messages and the previous research of Gottlieb and Wineburg (2012) and Wansink et al. (2017) suggest, collective identity issues such as religion or migration might make criterialist, interpretive historical thinking suppressed and overridden by an objectivist drive. However, can (and should) history education easily dismiss collective identity issues and objectives? The current general Czech curriculum sets critical reconceptualisation of collective identity as one of its goals. It thus seems neither feasible to call for narrowing down history education to safer, less identity-laden content more prone to criterialist, inquiry-based methods, nor is it reasonable to avoid identity-laden topics in training and testing, as they might become an essential part of the history-related post-schooling life. We assume a sensible solution lies in two principles: sequencing identity-related training material and acknowledging the borderline character of culturally specific, collective identity topics in the interpretive frame for the analytical results.

From a research perspective, identifying such shift-inducing boundary conditions could be key to understanding the situational nature of epistemic beliefs. The comparison of answers to the questionnaire about a Munich crisis lesson and answers to a similar questionnaire based in, say, local history unrelated to grand national narratives could show teachers who are more or less persistent in their situational criterialism than others.

Another implication we draw in the context of History+ is that a one-size-fits-all approach to designing similar interventions is better accomplished when the intervention targets a homogenous population of teachers and students. In the Introduction, we outlined the decentralised system of Czech education with many schools that enjoy extensive autonomy in implementing the national curriculum (Herbst & Wojciuk, 2014). Given this variability in school culture and leadership styles (as well as major inequalities in socio-economic settings, Greger, 2015), it is important to consider whether the materials that trigger proactive criterialism in some might activate defensive subjectivism-objectivism in others.

In this chapter, we shared selected highlights from a national intervention into inquiry-based learning of history framed by the theory of epistemic beliefs. Based on our experience, we suggested a specification of the theory’s assumptions that may open new directions in research on epistemic beliefs and topics in discussing the design and future of our and similar interventions. To facilitate these changes in thinking, we proposed two hypotheses whose testing may deepen our understanding of the nature of epistemic beliefs.