Introduction

Ever since the end of the Second World War, Sweden has been gradually changing from a relatively ethnically homogenous society into an increasingly multicultural one.Footnote 1 Compared to other EU member states, Sweden had one of the highest percentage of its population born outside the European Union (15,2 per cent) in 2023 (Eurostat, 2024), and in the same year, 20 per cent of people living in Sweden were born abroad (SCB, 2024). In my research about what multicultural contexts mean for history teaching, teachers’ epistemic expressions have come forth as an important dimension in understanding teachers’ visualisation of specific context-bound meanings. Earlier research has emphasised that the Swedish curriculum for upper-secondary school (Lgy11, 2011) includes tensions between mono-culturalism and interculturalismFootnote 2 and observes that the history syllabi contain underlying tensions between objectivistic and (de)constructivist approaches. The constructivist approach, with its demands for multiperspectivity, dominates the history syllabi, but the Swedish curriculum never makes its epistemic ground explicit, and different perspectives are intertwined, which makes it possible to read passages in line with differing epistemic stances (Elmersjö, 2021; Nordgren, 2006; Samuelsson, 2017). Despite the notion of the importance of multiperspectivity and intercultural history teaching (Nordgren & Johansson, 2015; Wansink et al., 2018), the steering documents do not provide an unambiguous answer to the normative question “How should the subject of history be taught in today’s multicultural society?”

This chapter is based on interviews with history teachers who have a shared experience of teaching in multi-ethnic classrooms.Footnote 3 Based on the teachers’ experience and the epistemic concepts “objectivist expressions” and “critical expressions”, my overarching aim is to explore teachers’ perceptions of a multi-ethnic context’s meaning for their history teaching. In this chapter, I elaborate on the potential correlation between teachers’ epistemic expressions and the way they identify and describe the meaning and consequences that a multi-ethnic classroom has for their teaching.

Earlier Research

The literature concerning the epistemic ideas of teachers includes examples of teachers as learners, whereas other research has examined how epistemic beliefs relate to various dimensions of teaching (Buehl & Helenrose, 2016). This chapter relates to the latter field. Drawing on the ideas of Barbara Hofer, the term “epistemic” refers to beliefs about knowledge and knowing (Hofer, 2016). In research on history education, there has been a growing interest in the epistemic cognition of teachers and its significance for history teaching (Stoel et al., 2022; VanSledright & Maggioni, 2016). Studies conducted in the 1970s viewed a person’s epistemic development as a context-independent process. With time, however, this idea has been nuanced in different ways, for example, through Gottlieb and Winesburg’s ideas about teachers’ “epistemic switching” and other studies that have addressed the influence that contextual and learning environments have on teaching beliefs (Gottlieb & Wineburg, 2012; see also Buehl & Helenrose, 2016; Voet & De Wever, 2016). Various studies in various national contexts have discussed the tendency of teachers to engage in “epistemic wobbling” (Elmersjö & Zanazanian, 2022; VanSledright & Reddy, 2014). One suggested explanation for this widespread phenomenon has been teachers’ lack of knowledge and education about the history subject’s epistemic basis (VanSledright & Maggioni, 2016). Other researchers have suggested that there is not necessarily a clear-cut relationship between an expressed epistemic stance and a given approach to teaching, because unlike historians, teachers are dependent on what works in the classroom; teachers think of history not as historians, but as teachers of history taking pedagogical realities into consideration, where their epistemic stances might interfere with their pedagogical beliefs, didactic perspectives, or other contextual factors (Elmersjö, 2022; Wansink et al., 2018; Wilke et al., 2022). This pattern has been described as teachers holding a “double epistemic standard”, which refers to situations where teachers are aware of a subject’s interpretative nature, but still take a single narrative approach (Maggioni & Parkinson, 2008). One such pedagogical reality is teaching history in a multi-ethnic classroom. History teaching in a multicultural society is a vital subfield of its own, including such topics as the role that ethnicity plays in the perception of historical significance, history teaching in ethnically diverse societies/classroom and models for developing an intercultural history teaching. My intention in this chapter is to contribute knowledge about how epistemic stances and wobbling connect to ideas about the multi-ethnic classroom.

Various Ways of Talking About Epistemic Beliefs

Both generic and domain-specific models have been developed to capture progression in epistemic beliefs, often in three or four stages (Stoel et al., 2017).Footnote 4 Models of epistemic beliefs in history have often focused on ideas about how historical knowledge is constructed, although it is possible to talk about teachers’ epistemic stances without focusing on either conceptualising the construction of historical knowledge or epistemic progression by focusing on teachers’ different expressions concerning the relationship between the past and the history of the past. Maggioni et al.’s (2009) commonly used, three-stage model is useful for analysing epistemic progression, but a weakness is that the most developed level in the progression scheme—called a “criterialist stance”—risks to some degree downplaying the relationship between the past and the history of the past, or, in the words of Elmersjö and Zanazanian, a criterialist “might hold the belief that history, when done right, actually takes you to the past itself” (Elmersjö & Zanazanian, 2022, p. 183)..Another possible outcome is that a criterialist might conclude that a historical account, as understood by Hayden White (1999), is logical and coherent, but is still only one story among others. In other words, it is possible for the criterialist to accommodate both modern and postmodern conceptions about the relationship between history and the past.

My focus on teachers’ expressions of epistemic beliefs looks at the implicit or explicit views that teachers have about the relationship between the past and the history of the past. Teachers’ views about whether it is necessary to deconstruct their own understandings of complex developments (an ability Robert Parkes (2011) has called a historiographic gaze) could be said to constitute an epistemological line of demarcation between the positions (Jenkins & Munslow, 2004), although it is not always easy for the researcher to detect this line, especially when taking into consideration that teachers often are unaware of their beliefs and therefore may find it difficult to articulate them (Voet & De Wever, 2016). For that reason, in similarity to Elmersjö (2021), I primarily base my analytical framework on two categories: first, an objectivist position expressing the view that “history can tell us the truth about the past”; and second, a critical position highlighting the complexity of the relationship between the past and narratives about the past, a complexity that might even make it impossible to bridge the gap between history and the past itself in any meaningful way.

Method and Material

This chapter is based on semi-structured interviews with 15 lower secondary school (students aged 13–15) and upper-secondary school (students aged 16–19) teachers with experience of teaching history in multi-ethnic contexts. The participating teachers had at least three years of experience working in schools where 30–96 per cent of the students have a foreign background. The lower limit of three years teaching experience guaranteed that the participants had had the opportunity to reflect and act upon their teaching beliefs in relation to classroom experiences. In the interviews, where the teachers elaborated on what an ethnically and culturally diverse context meant for their teaching, epistemic expressions among the teachers could be identified. Earlier research has shown that teachers are often unaware of their implicit beliefs, which might make it difficult for them to express their ideas in a direct way (Stoel et al., 2017; Voet & De Wever, 2016); this is a backdrop to the approach taken here, thus the epistemic beliefs must often be inferred. The presence of epistemic reasoning among a few teachers—without the interviewer directly asking for it—can be seen as a sign of its importance for their teaching, as they do not just provide “school-book-answers” to questions that have little impact on their thinking regarding a multi-ethnic context’s impact on their teaching. On the other hand, not having deliberately asked the teachers to develop their epistemic approaches has its limitations. One limitation is that it can be even more difficult to separate epistemic beliefs from other beliefs, resulting in the omission of many participants. From the 15 interviews, I selected excerpts from four interviews with upper-secondary teachers where epistemic beliefs were clearly identified. Two of these teachers expressed objectivistic beliefs, while two expressed critical beliefs. Two of the teachers were contacted for a shorter follow up interview regarding some clarifying questions. The requirement for relatively clear epistemic expressions means that teachers who expressed their epistemic beliefs less clearly in their description of teaching have been excluded. Assuring the participants that the data would be kept confidential and pseudonymised was one way to create an environment in which the teachers could feel safe to talk freely about their teaching; hence, the names I use are not the teachers’ real names (Table 6.1).

Table 6.1 Teachers in the study
Full size table

Objectivistic Expressions

The teacher I call Nils expressed an objectivistic epistemic approach in his description of the importance of focusing on analytical tools, source criticism and explanations of how the past has shaped today’s reality. A major aim for his teaching was to develop his students’ ability to conduct unbiased analyses, making them independent and analytical thinkers. He underlined the importance of providing students with perspectives to challenge them and help eliminate close-minded and biased historical understandings. His emphasis on perspectives should probably not be taken for a critical position—about an unbridgeable gap between the past and history—but could be better described as a pedagogical strategy making his students better prepared to receive or be open towards “the most likely truth”. In several statements, he outlines a view that history done right can tell the truth about the past: “It is the most likely truth—what we talk about in history is the most likely truth or most credible facts which have to be accepted […]. It is really what has happened, our common history and it cannot be changed […]” (Nils, interview, September 21, 2021). Nils describes that his teaching is not about memorising dates and simple facts, but rather about questions concerning historical processes, like “Why is the West richer than Africa?” and “Why did the industrial revolution happen in Great Britain and not somewhere else?” (Nils, interview, September 2, 2021). An idea about national cohesion—fostering an “inclusive nationalism” and a “sense of belonging to the Swedish welfare system”—made content about Swedish emigration and the development of the welfare state important for his teaching in an ethnically diverse context. His historical explanations about the development of Sweden from a poor country to a welfare state seem to be in line with his explicit aim of getting his students to support the ideas behind the welfare system, namely: “Hard work is rewarding”. His fostering attempts are explicit; however, at the same time, he regards content within the frame of his fostering attempts as important and possible to treat in an “objective” way (Nils, interview, September 21, 2021).

The teacher Gustav describes rather different aims for his teaching, and his objectivistic expression is embedded differently in comparison to Nils. Gustav sees the development of his students’ historical consciousness and their understanding of the present as the history subject’s major aims.Footnote 5 For Gustav, history is about enabling his students to explain the present and today’s society through a logical, historical chain of events. He defines historical consciousness as an understanding of how everything is connected through history and your own place in it. His objectivistic expression can be illustrated by his description of a final course exam, in which the students were given the task of establishing a chain of logical understanding leading from events in thirteenth century Europe to Donald Trump’s election in 2016. Taking this approach implies that the chains of events, in his mind, are there to reconstruct the past, rather than to construct it. He expresses these ideas by omitting questions of a constructivist nature: the chain of events seems to be something that can be found in a direct encounter with the past. Another important aim where the epistemic expression is visible comes to the fore in Gustav’s description of an attempt to foster students’ tolerance of other students’ views. This is described as important in his multi-ethnic classes where students might belong to, or identify with, rival sides in historical and ongoing conflicts. He mentions the risk of accentuated conflict-ridden relations among Kurdish and Turkish students, students from Iran and Iraq and differing “groups” of Afghan nationals while addressing certain historical content in class. Gustav strives to convey the understanding to his students that they are like “dominoes” placed in the general flow of historical events, which form their attitudes (Gustav, interview, April 14, 2021). Gustav’s ideas exemplify how aims of fostering can be carried out in line with an objectivistic expression. His emphasis on giving space to students’ different perspectives could easily have been seen as an expression of a critical rather than objectivistic approach. However, according to him, the students’ present values, and different groups’ views of past events, can be historically explained by logical chains of events.

Gustav describes how he addresses his students with a call to see the logic in the explanations he presents (Gustav, interview, April 14, 2021). Despite an orientation towards “multi-perspectivism”, logic and objectivity are still important guidelines towards what seems to be an attempt to present value-free logical narratives about past realities and their role in the formation of values.

Critical Expressions

The teachers Jakob and Gabriella expressed a critical understanding of history. For Jakob, this is manifested in his view that the past can be described from different perspectives and that one perspective is not necessarily more right or wrong than another. In some regards, the critical Jakob and objectivistic Nils, who talk about challenging students’ perspectives, were seemingly similar; however, Jakob’s critical position is explicitly expressed as an aim to make his students aware of the gap between the past and the history of the past. This aim was not at all present in Nils’ statements. Jakob considers it important to make his students aware of the history subject’s dependence on present day circumstances, that it is not possible for history teaching to be free of values; therefore, he sees an objective transmission of the past as an impossibility (Jakob, interview, May 28, 2021).

His reasoning should not be understood as a relativistic view that all stories are equally good, because he emphasises the importance of having a scholarly perspective and challenging the students’ sometimes very simplistic, emotional understandings. However, instead of discussing a given historical truth, he describes the aim of his teaching in terms of broadening perspectives on identity and society, exchanges of experiences and bildung in the sense of developing as a human being. Jakob perceives tolerance as a potential indirect positive result of the cultivation of understanding the history subject’s constructivist dimensions (Jakob, interview, May 28, 2021). The teacher Gabriella also mentions perspectives and history’s significance for students’ identity as an important aim and frames it in terms of a developed historical consciousness. For Gabriella, history always is about uses of history or differing perspectives. In her teaching, she finds it important to make her students aware that teaching can always be conducted from another perspective and that it is possible to talk about historical times in terms of contradictions rather than as a straight story (Gabriella, interview, January 26, 2022). In other words, according to Jakob’s and Gabriella’s approach, the relationship between the past and the history about the past is complex with a gap between them impossible to bridge.

A Multi-Ethnic Context’s Meaning in Light of Objectivistic Epistemic Expressions

Nils’ and Gustav’s descriptions of a multi-ethnic context’s meaning for their teaching took rather different forms despite similarities in epistemic expressions. This can partly be explained by the fact that Nils’ ideas about fostering national cohesion made him see history education about the students’ “own country” as counterproductive. Gustav, on the other hand, viewed historical content close to the students’ ethnic and cultural affiliations as necessary for a more successful transmission of historical understanding and his attempts to foster tolerance. Nils described the multi-ethnic context, and its meaning for his teaching, in challenging terms. In general, a multi-ethnic student group—according to his experience—makes it more challenging to reach an “unbiased mindset” among his students in relation to certain content. According to Nils, many of his students with multi-ethnic backgrounds tended to use racism as an historical explanation too readily, while students with a Swedish ethnic background tended to utilise critique against religion in the same way. He thinks it is important to challenge his students’ understandings and in different ways described students’ ethnic and religious affiliations/identities as a problem for his aim to have “openminded” discussions. He exemplifies how he finds it important to bring up the realities of the Muslim expansion and Muslim atrocities in addition to the Christian crusades—not to excuse the latter—even though according to him it can be tough for students with a Muslim identity when, for example, the history of Islam is mentioned in the classroom (Nils, interview, September 2, 2021). Even if Nils underlines that he considers it important to be able to discuss everything, he thinks that an overly narrow focus on a subject like the dark side of the welfare state does not necessarily have a constructive outcome. It might result in judgmental conflict-ridden positions between his “ethnic Swedish students” and “multi-ethnic students”, prejudicing discussions that risk dividing rather than uniting the classroom (Nils, interview, September 21, 2021). For Gustav, the multi-ethnic context has other implications for his teaching, namely that in his view, successful realisation of teaching is based on finding historical content that can be fitted into his students’ diverse frames of references. For example, the Cold War took place in many global arenas, and he thinks that it is important focusing, for example, on Afghanistan and Iran to better relate to the students frames of references. For Gustav, it is important to be neutral as a teacher and not take sides in historical conflicts—especially in a classroom where the students feel that they belong to different sides of a conflict. This indicates a view that the neutral, value-free, objective position is possible. Gustav is also somehow striving towards developing an openminded approach among his students. He maintains that the focus on fostering an unbiased understanding of the—from the student’s perspective—other side’s historical experiences is a strategy to ease conflict-ridden positions among students in class. In Gustavs’ mind the students should have the right to express different opinions about past processes, actors and events but he finds it important to use history to explain the historical background behind their differing views (Gustav, interview, April 14, 2021). Even if their fostering attempts are different, the objectivistic expressions are visible in both Gustav’s and Nils’ description of a multi-ethnic context’s meaning for their teaching.

A Multi-Ethnic Context’s Meaning in Light of Critical Epistemic Expressions

Jakob likens history teaching to dancing: “You always need to think of who you are dancing with” (Jakob, interview, May 28, 2021). According to him, it is always important to adapt teaching to the students’ sense of belonging, and he underlines that an ethnic dimension is part of that belonging. His critical epistemic view opens opportunities to adapt his teaching to his students with no requirement to be “objective”—which he sees as impossible—or present supposedly logical representations of how everything is connected. As mentioned, he finds it important to make his students aware of the gap between the past and the history about the past. Other aims related to historical consciousness, and what Nietzsche so famously called a life-affirming history (Nietzsche, 1874/1998), are seemingly attached to context-bound considerations, which have implications for his ideas about developing a scholarly awareness among his students.

Jakob thinks that history—regardless of context—should relate to where his students come from, and according to his experience, he often meets individual students who are proud of their national history in classrooms where students have backgrounds from different countries. He gives one example of a student who had great pride in Assyrian history, with visions of an Assyrian heyday. Jakob thinks it is important to meet the students’ wishes about historical content: first, because it is a way to show your students that you see them, and second, because it is an opportunity to cultivate the ability to resist an overly romanticised historical understanding of something important to you. He describes it as central to balance between cultivating resistance to historical myths—without necessarily dissecting them—and thus draining them completely of meaning:

But then comes another problem with this. The balance between a critical myth-revealing perspective and offering opportunities for meaningful stories. […] I remember a student who came from Iran and was thinking something like: “Iran was amazing”. Then we must help him—or at least offer the opportunity—to critically review. A lot of people come up with a kind of mythology that is not necessarily true—but they have never felt the need to critically examine it, and it can be very sensitive. (Jakob, interview, May 28, 2021)

According to him, a part of doing history is to construct a context that both arouses emotions and at the same time can be relatable to one’s identity. The act of offering opportunities to critically examine myths can, according to Jakob, be especially challenging in classrooms encompassing students holding rival mythologies as true. In a multi-ethnic class, Jakob believes that problematisation of the division of European historical epochs should be given a more prominent place. He illustrates this with questions like “Where does Muslim expansion come in? Is it part of the Middle Ages?”

Gabriella, in comparison, brings up consideration, emphasising the context-bound need problematising Eurocentric concepts like “the post-war period”, especially when nearly all her students have a non-European background. European history is still important for Gabriella, so her students are excluded from learning that history, which could be seen as especially important when many of her students do not learn about European history from their families. Both Gabriella and Jakob mention history in terms of a difficult subject in relation to the students’ young age. For example, Gabriella mentions the risk of presenting “the Enlightenment” as a prescription for modern society that ends up in a “development thought” (Gabriella, interview, January 26, 2022). In her classes, where many students have poor Swedish language skills and/or lack of earlier school-knowledge about European history, she considers theoretical reasoning as even more challenging but points to the fact that history teaching could still never just be an unproblematic transmission of historical knowledge of European history. This idea can be illustrated in her own words: “I can still use it [the concept of the Enlightenment], but thoughtfully, so that you don’t shove it down their throats […]” (Gabriella, interview, January 26, 2022).

Concluding Discussion

In this chapter, I have not strived to give a complete picture of the individual teachers’ context-bound teaching in all its complexity. Still, I have illustrated how teachers expressed many different aims for their history teaching, such as developing students’ analytical skills, tolerance and historical consciousness. Examples of other identity-related teaching intentions were to strive for national cohesion or increase students’ sense of belonging. Based on the interviews, it is not possible to connect a specific epistemic expression with specific educational intentions. In contrast, the study highlights examples of how teachers expressing different epistemic beliefs (understood as an objectivist or critical approach to the history about the past) can express similar intentions with their teaching. However, a conclusion only drawing on similarities in intentions would ignore how conceptually similar teaching intentions are filtered through teachers’ differing epistemic beliefs. My focus on teachers who express relatively clear epistemic beliefs make such an approach possible but has other limitations. One limitation is that I cannot contribute to the discussion about the prevalence of epistemic wobbling or to what degree teachers’ wobbling can better be understood in terms of what Maggioni and Parkinson (2008) called holding a “double epistemic standard”.

Previous research on pedagogical beliefs has shown how teachers’ acquisition of new knowledge is filtered through personal epistemic beliefs or epistemologies (Kagan, 1992). Instead of focusing on how knowledge is filtered, I have exemplified how different teaching intentions are filtered. I argue that when the teachers’ intensions are filtered through their ideas about the epistemic nature of the relationship between the past and the history about the past, it leads to very different functions of that teaching, even if it was conceived with the same intensions. In other words, differing epistemic stances between teachers will lead to different functions of teaching, even when teachers agree on intensions.

For example, tolerance according to Gustav (a teacher expressing objectivistic beliefs) is about showing how the past shapes the understanding of individuals and groups; in his description of the power of the past, he metaphorically compares students to “dominoes” in a historical flow of time. In Gustav’s eyes, developed tolerance means an increased understanding of how processes of the past form different groups and individuals depending on their background and historical experiences; the dominoes behind one student will push her in one direction, while the dominoes behind a different student will push him in another. Jakob (a teacher expressing critical beliefs) also strives for tolerance, but his critical epistemic filtering results in a view that tolerance develops through an understanding that history is something that is created in the present and through an awareness of how history is always associated with construction.

Nils (a teacher expressing objectivist beliefs) and Gabriella (a teacher expressing critical beliefs) had, despite epistemic differences, similar intentions in creating an understanding of historical processes with direct influence on the present. Both believed that multi-ethnic classroom contexts could be associated with special requirements to fulfil this stated aim. According to Nils—who had experiences of handling conflicts within student groups, sometimes along ethnic and religious lines—diversity could make it challenging to develop an unbiased mindset among the students in relation to certain parts of the past. Gabriella (and the same applied to Jakob), on the other hand, emphasised the importance of creating understanding by increasing students’ awareness of how narratives and concepts carry ideological undertones. In that sense, ethnic and religious heterogeneous classroom contexts could fill the function of a reminder concerning how their own stereotypes and concepts might express an unwanted socialisation.

The functional outcomes can be seen as significant factors in the formation of knowledge about the meaning of a multi-ethnic context. This reasoning assumes that teachers develop their teaching in relation to the context (Kagan, 1992) and is in line with Dewey’s transactional epistemology, which emphasises that context must be understood in relation to action. In other words, knowledge is a construction, but not a construction in our head, but in “transaction”—in meeting and acting with the world (Biesta, 2020). One outcome of this view is that it seems difficult to uphold a separation of research with a focus on epistemic issues for teachers as learners, on the one hand, and epistemic beliefs in relation to various dimensions of teaching on the other; the border is somewhat blurred and perhaps that is something desirable.

Another concluding remark is that Jakob’s aims—seemingly inspired by Nietzsche’s life-affirming history—sometimes made it necessary to balance a myth-revealing approach with giving his students opportunities for maintaining meaningful stories. The last example from Jakob—who was explicit in his critical position—indicates that certain aims of school history related to, for example, identity development might create a need for an intricate balancing act within the boundaries of a critical position. Nils’—in comparison—lack of consideration regarding this balancing act could partly be explained by his objectivistic position and foothold in a disciplinary tradition; students’ biases—reinforced by heterogeneous views—logically become more threatening when the overarching aim is to prepare the students to develop an open-mindset in order to be able to convey the most likely truth. Overall, the results of this study indicate that research interested in history teaching in relation to ethnically and culturally diverse contexts would benefit from paying attention to the epistemic dimension of teachers’ thinking, in a sense that goes beyond how historical knowledge is constructed and questions about epistemic progress. The categories “objectivistic approach to the past” and “critical approach to the past” have proved to be a useful conceptual tool in such an enterprise.