Mapping Teachers’ Epistemic Beliefs in Collegial Planning

Abstract

Nordgren explores a complementary path to teachers’ epistemic cognition that goes beyond the predominant focus on individual thinking. Based on a longitudinal project that follows teachers engaged in planning in subject-based teams, this chapter focuses on how teachers’ epistemic beliefs evolve in the act of pedagogical recontextualization. Methodologically, the collegial setting allows real-time access to teachers’ negotiations and decisions about content, learning goals, sequencing, and adjustments to students’ needs, without the filters of questionnaires and interviews. Theoretically, the findings problematize the analytical use of categorical epistemic stances and the separation of epistemic from non-epistemic objectives within teachers’ epistemic beliefs. Nordgren thus shows how history teachers’ planning takes place within an intricate web of epistemic choices regarding ontological assumptions, classroom management, and almost everything in between.

The term epistemology is a conjunction of the Greek words episteme (knowledge) and logos (reason). Hence, epistemology is about how we conceptualize and justify our beliefs about the nature of knowledge. Consider this analogy from the thirteenth-century Dominican friar and philosopher St. Thomas Aquinas, where his thoughts on salvation can be read as an epistemological relation: salvation, he argued, requires knowledge of three things—what one ought to believe, what one ought to desire, and what one ought to do. Aquinas’s topic was theology, discussed in a time profoundly different from ours; however, his line of argument illustrates quite well the three basic features of epistemic thinking in education. A teacher must have perceptions about the object of teaching (what), the goal or purpose of teaching (why), and how to promote learning (how). Worth noting is that Aquinas places agency as an epistemic relationship with an external goal—the ultimate goal of reaching salvation. Teaching, we can argue, is in itself an epistemic craft with the goal to impart knowledge and growth.

When, as researchers, we take a specific interest in history teachers’ epistemic cognitions, we assume that there is a specific link to their professional conduct. That is, teachers’ beliefs about historical knowledge (what it is and why it is important) intersect with their notion of how this knowledge should be taught (what it is to teach and learn history). Studies have identified that such connections might “influence (although do not determine) constructs, such as goal setting, teaching orientation, epistemic strategies, and outcomes of historical reasoning” (Stoel et al., 2022, p. 28). However, it has proved difficult to go beyond establishing what seems to be an obvious link between thinking and doing. In fact, it has proven difficult to conceptualize and methodologically explore the complexity of epistemic thinking and its influence on teachers’ choices and activities (Stoel et al., 2022).

This chapter aims to explore teachers’ epistemic beliefs as a performative engagement in planning and preparing lessons, and to discuss the empirical findings of a long-term study on teachers’ subject-specific planning teams (PTs). The chapter will give a brief quantitative and qualitative overview of a series of planning sessions. The epistemic web that they expose is described and graphically illustrated in three figures. Thereafter, a shorter planning session is used to discuss shifts in teachers’ epistemic positions. First, we need to frame the research problem a bit more clearly and elaborate a bit more on the epistemic concepts.

Framing the Problem

The term epistemic has already been combined with cognition and beliefs. These terms have different nuances, where the former is more associated with reflexivity and theory, and the latter with intuition and practice. Maggioni and Parkinson (2008) explain epistemic cognition as the mental process in which people engage while considering the nature and the justification of knowledge. In other words, this is active reflection on the idea of knowledge and “on the warrants for calling these ideas about the world knowledge” (p. 446). Epistemic beliefs are not distinct from cognitions but encompass more tacit or opinion-based assumptions. Beliefs about knowledge are an integrated part of identities and emotions and therefore assumed to be slow-moving and hard to change (Maggioni & Parkinson, 2008). Accordingly, this chapter uses cognition when teachers directly reflect on their beliefs and beliefs as the more intuitive and overarching descriptor.

Research has generally theorized teachers’ beliefs about knowledge and knowing as individual psychological constructs. Methodologies are dominated by self-reports, such as questionnaires to measure variations and interviews to examine in-depth cognizant reasoning. A large bulk of research has tried to categorize teachers’ responses against a set of epistemic stances, based on typologies from naïve to nuanced beliefs, and link them to pedagogical practices (Stoel et al., 2022). Hence, teachers with naïve objectivist beliefs are assumed to favor more non-dialogic forms of teaching, while teachers’ who hold complex views on history should be more inclined to engage students in inquiry and interpretations.

However, it has been difficult to establish such unambiguous correlations (VanSledright & Maggioni, 2016). Gottlieb and Wineburg (2012) remind us that belief systems about a specific disciplinary field or learning context are usually not coherent, but instead comprise assumptions that can switch between logics. Most often, people do not work out a coherent epistemic system or even pay much attention to why they take some claims as more significant and trustworthy.

Bråten (2016) argues that there is a methodological problem here, as self-report examines the phenomenon outside of its practice. Kelly (2016) underlines that psychological approaches downplay the significance of the situational and of interactions with others. Hence, here seems also to be a theoretical problem. Teaching and learning do require the commitment of the individual teacher and learner, but both are practically situated in a social context. Regarding teachers’ professional learning, we know that teachers are influenced by traditions and school culture, and that professional development benefits from collegial collaboration (Lave & Wenger, 1999).

Hence, there are several good reasons to explore teachers’ practical epistemologies as situational and social dependent. Wilke et al. (2022, p. 213) argue, “[R]ather than focusing on general epistemological beliefs, future research might benefit from concentrating more on teachers’ practical epistemologies.” By exploring epistemic beliefs through teachers’ collegial planning, I want to discuss how beliefs about the nature of historical knowledge interplay with the practical and performative side of teaching. The following discussion in this chapter is centered on two problems. One concerns the intersection between discourses of domain-specific epistemologies and teachers’ individual beliefs. Disciplines have different epistemic constructions, and their specific norms of specialization have a socializing effect on teachers’ thinking (Sandoval, 2016). We also know that there are individual variations in the interpretations of these knowledge structures. This highlights an intricate intersection of the disciplinary bases of teaching, individual conceptions, and specific educational context. The question explored here is this: To what extent do the discipline and the educational context frame the individual variations of teachers’ epistemic beliefs?

A related problem concerns the epistemological interplay between history teachers as they are planning lessons. To teach history is to make epistemic considerations about what qualifies as historical knowledge and what it is that signifies that learning has occurred—even if its results do not necessarily correspond with its intentions. What do the performative enactments of such notions indicate about history teachers’ epistemic beliefs?

Domain-Specific Epistemologies

When planning, teachers make a multitude of strategic decisions that affect students’ learning, but how does this craft bring together beliefs about the nature of domain-specific knowledge and teaching practice? The relation between what Nitsche (2019) calls theoretical and didactic beliefs is intricate and complex. Maggioni and Parkinson’s (2008) research overview covers involvement of domain-specific discourses, teaching experiences, interaction with students, and cultural, political, and pedagogical beliefs.

Hofer (2016) notes that the conception of a discipline is often not made clear in epistemic research. From a psychological perspective, it is the individual’s beliefs that vary and change, while the knowledge domain is the constant entity (cf. Stoel et al., 2022; VanSledright & Maggioni, 2016). Less attention has been given to how a discipline tends to socialize those who practice it. According to Bernstein (1999), disciplines are social and historical constructs. However, this does not mean that they are arbitrary or volatile, but based on systematized knowledge that forms specialized discourses. On the one hand, disciplinary borders can reproduce social exclusion (Bourdieu, 1988), but on the other hand, they are powerful tools to think beyond one’s own immediate context. In this respect, access to specialized knowledge is also a question about equity and democracy (Young & Muller, 2016).

In order for specialized knowledge to be accessible for students, its discourse needs to be recontextualized. This process is epistemically challenging and presupposes knowledge and skills to cross-disciplinary and didactical discourses (Bladh et al., 2018; Nordgren, 2021). Disciplinary and curriculum discourses need not only to be reformulated for students to decode but also to be recreated as liminal space for students to engage with learning as a process (Johansson, 2021). In other words, epistemic cognitions and beliefs are part of teaching—sometimes as meta-reflections on professional challenges, but mostly as performative interventions in the intermediate between knowledge and knowers, since this is the position where teaching begins (Clément, 2016). We can think of several ways of empirically exploring epistemic beliefs within the context of social and historical movable knowledge domains: as a comparison over time (see Samuelson’s chapter in this book) or between national cultures (e.g., Åström Elmersjö & Zanazanian, 2022), or as a comparison of disciplines.

In a longitudinal study, we followed teachers from four different subjects who had formed subject-specific PTs that met weekly to plan their teaching. This project was conducted at an upper-secondary school in Sweden. The school was in a mid-sized city (90,000 inhabitants) and had about 2000 students and 250 staff members. The PTs represented history, mathematics, technology, and physics. Each PT comprised two to four consenting participants. The project sought to establish a collegial planning infrastructure rather than testing a specific planning model. However, teachers were encouraged to specify objectives and goals, perform pre- and post-tests, and formatively reflect on lesson outcomes. Data were collected from audio-recorded PT meetings. Each PT recorded and uploaded its own data. A total of 140 hours of meetings was recorded and coded in NVivo.

Teachers’ collegial planning was analyzed using a modified version of Tyler’s (1950) model of the basic principles of instruction, which included such factors as setting goals, choosing and sequencing teaching and learning activities, and evaluating outcomes (Table 7.1). The modifications allowed for the analysis of the formative process of teaching, as well as on the teachers’ reflections on their collegial cooperation. Individual audio recordings were analyzed using deductive coding and thematic analysis to map the analytical framework, which is presented in Table 7.1.

Table 7.1 Analytical framework for teachers’ lesson planning

The relative amounts of time that the history, mathematics, and Swedish language PTs spent on different dimensions of the modified model were compared to explore discipline-related connections. What we found was a pattern with domain-specific elements, indicating that teachers have different kinds of challenges depending on their subject. The history PT allotted much time to discussing overarching knowledge goals and subject content and defining learning outcomes (T1 & T2: 42%). The mathematics team barely discussed this theme (5%), while the Swedish team spent a considerable amount of time discussing defined learning outcomes (14%). In contrast, the mathematics team focused much more on formative aspects (T6: 28%), while the history PT rarely addressed this dimension (T6: 3%); again, the Swedish team fell in between these (11%). The Swedish team focused more on choosing activities (T3: 25%), which was more than the history (13%) and math (14%) teams used (Randahl et al., in press).

It seems that what is epistemically challenging in the recontextualization process differs among subjects. Roughly, for history, it is a question of selection and significance—what history should be about. For math teachers, the main challenge seems to be giving feedback on assignments and tasks, while teachers in Swedish and literature struggle with choices of activities. The history teachers stated that they needed time to negotiate decisions on content and goal settings, while these issues seemed to be more consensus-based for the mathematics teachers.

This outcome is not particularly surprising. The results support previous findings that the fundamental aspects of teachers’ epistemic beliefs are domain-specific (Muis et al., 2016). Mathematics and science are developed paradigmatically by integrating lower to higher forms of knowledge, while the structure of history is horizontal in that scholars can work in parallel with different ontological assumptions (see Bernstein, 1999). To master history, no obvious trajectory of principles has to be followed; rather, a historical perspective must be developed—that is, familiarity with legitimation and justification within the discipline. This historical gaze, as Bertram (2008) explains, encompasses the ability to understand the past in its own context and to approach the past with empathy and imagination.

This quantitate approach can still offer insights into how knowledge structures trigger specific epistemological behavioral patterns. Different domains have different epistemic challenges that are important to be aware of in both quantitative and qualitative analysis. For a subject such as history, the epistemic problem of selection and significance is familiar to history-specific research. However, the question that this investigation presents is this: To what extent do disciplinary and curriculum regimes frame teachers’ beliefs? Therefore, the next step is to go deeper into the planning process and listen to what the teachers themselves have to say.

Mapping the Epistemic Web

This section will report on three planning sessions by the PT study’s history teachers. The history PT consisted of four male teachers. They were all experienced teachers, but they were unaccustomed to planning their teaching together. To make these sessions work, they had to verbalize an activity that was normally tacit. Thematic content analysis was applied to this process using audio-recorded planning meetings. Then, analytical themes from the modified Tyler model (Table 7.1) were used to visually map the discussions (see Figs. 7.1, 7.2, and 7.3).

Fig. 7.1

Planning session 1. Map based on audio file 190826B. The figure describes the first session when four history teachers plan a series of lessons about “The Age of Revolutions.” They raised questions simultaneously about overarching learning outcomes (T1) and sequencing (T4). They decided to examine the students by a summative test (T6). Next step for the teachers was to sketch out the thematic content and learning outcomes (T2)

Fig. 7.2

Planning session 2. Map based on audio file 190902A. The figure describes the second planning session. The four history teachers used this session mainly to share their experiences in teaching “The Age of Revolutions” (R1)

Fig. 7.3

Planning session 3. Map based on audio file 190902B. The figure describes the third planning session. The teachers discussed in more detail their overarching and defined learning outcomes (T1 & T2) and choices of learning activities (T3)

Session 1: Identifying Lesson Content

The four history teachers decided to plan a common series of lessons. They began by raising two questions almost simultaneously: What should the lessons be about? (T1) and How much time can be set aside for each? (T4). They quickly agreed on “The Age of Revolutions,” a common history lesson topic in Sweden (Eliasson & Nordgren, 2016), and they decided to dedicate themselves to using six weeks with two to three lessons per week, including a summative test (T6). Then, the teachers sketched out the thematic content and learning outcomes (T2) related to the terminology for historical thinking (see Fig. 7.1). Hence, the teachers approached the task from a content-oriented perspective. When the main theme and the time frame for teaching it were set, the next question was: Which revolutions should be highlighted? Consensus immediately settled on the Industrial, American, and French Revolutions. The selection of these events as the most significant appeared to be unproblematic and almost obvious to the four teachers.

Building on this content foundation, they started to discuss possible learning outcomes. Hence, working from the perspective of a historical theme, they discussed how to work with second-order concepts such as causes and sources as well as meta-perspectives on the public uses of history. Alongside this, they also became more specific in respect to first-order concepts as they discussed temporality and epoch shifts.

Session 2: Sharing Experiences

A week after the first session, the teachers met for another planning session, which lasted around one hour. They used this session mainly to share their experiences in teaching the theme (R1). Through this conversation, they naturally related to and built on each other’s remarks (see Fig. 7.2). Teacher 1 shared a societal perspective on the historical process, stressing changes in political power and relating them to the emergence of strong states. Teacher 2 applied narrative cohesion and emphasized connections from the Renaissance and the Enlightenment’s diverse expressions across countries over time. Teacher 3 verbalized an analytical ambition, emphasizing the students’ need to discern between historical phases and use explanatory models and sources. Teacher 3 was also very interested in Napoleon. Teacher 4 emphasized the history of ideas and how traces of Enlightenment ideals can be found both in ideas of human rights and in defenses against terrorism. The teachers were interested in comparisons and in the connotations of revolution.

These testimonies expressed not only the teachers’ individual epistemic beliefs but also their commonalities. They were all familiar with historical dimensions and traditions. Their different voices had similarities with Evans’s (2012) categorization of teachers as the storyteller, the scientific historian, or the relativist/reformer. In this case, Teacher 2 emphasized long storylines, and Teacher 3 stressed research-based methods. Teacher 1 talked about societal causes and consequences, while Teacher 4 highlighted cultural dimensions of changes and continuities.

According to Berg (2014), it is possible to discern individual preferences regarding educational purposes, but Berg also notes that history teachers’ conceptions are complex and eclectic and changing over time. Exploring teachers’ PT further deepens this complexity. All of the participating teachers expressed a multifaceted understanding of history as a discipline and a school subject. Teacher 1 initially emphasized political changes but then followed up on Teacher 4’s remarks by demonstrating how art can help students access a period’s zeitgeist. Similarly, Teacher 4 first advocated the history of ideas and culture and later shared examples of analytical models for students to use.

Session 3: The Curriculum

After spending one hour discussing previous experiences, the teachers took a short break before settling on their learning goals (T1 & T2) for “The Age of Revolutions” (see Fig. 7.3). They began with the curriculum’s overall goals for history teaching. Their conversation indicated that they normally did not start planning by reading the curriculum. However, they all appeared familiar with this text. During the session, they focused on the curriculum’s first of five goals: “Teaching history should provide students with the skills to develop knowledge of time periods, processes of change, events, and people, based on different interpretations and perspectives.” They discussed how this goal alone raises endless epistemological considerations since it presupposes that it gives teachers the responsibility to decide on specific content as well as procedural dimensions. Discussing how this goal could be applied to their historical theme led to considerations about continuity and change, and it can be difficult to distinguish between them. For instance, it must be considered whether the advent of Napoleon was a change in or a continuation of the ancient regime and if changes in some parts of society did not necessarily affect ordinary people’s lives. This discussion led to a digression about the extent to which they talk with their students about what history is.

Another dialog concerned the concept perspectives. Teacher 4 argued that the concept is tricky and quickly listed five nuances: perspective can be about gaining distance from something; it can be one aspect of a complex body of knowledge; it can be an opinion from a specific angle; it can be an analytical categorization; and it can be an overview of a period. This observation triggered a discussion about how to avoid teaching history as a collection of facts, or as a multitude of perspectives among which students have no means to navigate. Finally, they settled on applying continuity and change to the historical theme, and from there began outlining specific content and learning activities as well as exploring the pros and cons of designing an overarching question for the theme.

To summarize, the teachers could easily agree on a common theme for their teaching. The choice to teach “The Age of Revolutions” from 1689 to 1815 was content-driven, and they obviously had a shared understanding of the canon of historically significant events and processes. They accomplished this framing simultaneity by setting a time plan for the lessons. Throughout this, an awareness of students’ abilities and needs was a present undercurrent in their discussion and decisions. Hence, the planning sessions built a complex web of both theoretical–historical and practical–instructional epistemological reflections.

Discussing the Epistemic Web

The planning sessions unfold a web of epistemic decisions: So what can this web tell us about teachers’ epistemic beliefs? Initially, this chapter asked how domain-specific contexts frame teachers’ epistemic beliefs, and if planning lessons can be explored as a performative enactment of epistemic beliefs. These questions obviously call for more research, which underlines Nitsche and Waldis’s (2022) suggestion to explore epistemic beliefs in situ. Nonetheless, the short sequences reported here indicate a pattern that can be summed up in a few observations that may be valuable for a continued exploration of teachers’ performative epistemology.

First, we should appreciate the multitude of decisions that teachers need to take just to plan one lesson. Further, we can observe that these decisions are not generated randomly, but based on ideas of what history is and how it should be taught. While teachers have different opinions and make different interpretations, they also share epistemic discourses. As disciplines are structured by specific logics, the challenges of recontextualizing them also differed. While mathematics has a strong grammar, history has few cogent principles for selection and progression. Appreciating the socializing effect, and the specific didactical challenges that disciplinary structures generate, opens the research field to teachers’ recontextualization. This insight can generate a basis for complementary approaches to the dominant psychological perspective and add a contextual perspective on teacher’s cognitive processes.

Second, we noticed how the teachers started their planning sessions by selecting a content-based theme—The Age of Revolutions. Åström Elmersjö and Zanazanian (2022) remark that school history is predominated by core master narratives. In history education research, content matters tend to be contrasted to, or even conflicted with, disciplinary thinking, deconstructing skills, student-centered learning, and inquiry-based teaching. However, in the planning sequences content does not equal a closed narrative. Content matters triggered reflections on the nature of history. As planning progresses, first- and second-order concepts become closely intertwined, and it is on this basis they problematize the ahistorical dimension of second-order concepts such as continuity and change. This observation calls for caution when categorizing teachers’ epistemic understanding. What may appear to be a native retelling may be entrances to meta-reflections.

Third, we are reminded that it is the need to interconnect theory and practice that not only drives the planning sessions forward but also is the spark for all epistemic considerations in the first place. In other words, to recontextualize historical knowledge into learning objects accessible to students is the practice that makes them teachers. In the performative act of planning, teachers’ beliefs about the nature of knowledge do not seem to precede beliefs about how it should be learned in any linear way. To further explore how the collegial setting can offer insights into correlations between epistemic beliefs and instructional practices, a short excerpt section is included here. It is the same group of history teachers about a year after the meetings discussed above. The teachers were planning a short epochal overview, in accordance with the Swedish history curriculum that prescribes the European classification of periodization from a chronological perspective as well as a critical perspective on such classifications. The teachers started by identifying three overarching goals, using an alignment strategy; they identified expected learning outcomes in order to select appropriate learning activities:

Teacher 1: If we look at those three points we wrote up earlier and that we think [students] should be good at, it was epochal knowledge, a few facts and stuff and then some causation.

Teacher 2: That almost felt like three grades. Yes, the last one really requires nuanced knowledge.

Teacher 1: Yes, and here we could formulate a question that becomes a bit more of an open-ended question, an essay question, where [students] can answer: simply, comprehensively, and nuanced [these adjectives refer to the grading criteria in the Swedish curriculum].

Teacher 3: Yes, it does not have to get too advanced. So, here [students] can give simple examples of things if they are at that level.

Teacher 2: Yes, exactly. We have to show breaking points where it changes because that’s what becomes the nuance or the problematization, Or, yes, it’s also problematic to point out continuity as well, at least in a nuanced way.

Teacher 4: I think we have to be a little realistic, and if we have that kind of slightly larger essay question, then [the students have] to be able to discuss and explain causes and reasons. This requires a lot of factual knowledge, and what we found is that we do not have time to give them that much factual knowledge.

Teacher 3: I have started a little bit from a different end with just this thing of change and continuity. First, I gave the students texts, and they would identify what it was about: “Is this about a change or continuity?” And then they would highlight what it is that makes us see this as an epoch. “Was there a change that initiated the epoch, and did a new change occur that ended this epoch?” They could describe the epoch as, “During this epoch, we had this continuity that held the period together.” The prehistoric time is an epoch because we have no narrative sources. This is a continuity throughout this era. The advanced students then start poking in, “Well, okay. When does the line go, then?” and conclude that, “Yes, but an archaeological find can throw us thousands of years back in time and change the prehistoric epoch.” They really had to choose for themselves.

Teacher 1: Something like this, then? They choose an epoch first. “I have chosen Antiquity.” Then, we ask something like, “What is continuity during this epoch?” Yes. Then they get to bring up something: “This has been pretty much the same.” Yes. Okay. Good. What are the changes? Then, they get to say something about that. This is still within the same epoch. Then, we ask, “From the ancient times and onwards, is there any continuity if we look back to the 1600s, and if so, what? And explain why.” Something like that?

Teacher 3: Yes, “The means of production were the force that drove the development of society,” or something like that.

[Laughter].

Teacher 1: Yes, how nice. It’s not just me who’s a Marxist, no, not Marxist, historical materialist.

In a condensed way, this short section summarizes epistemic challenges in the planning of a specific segment. The curriculum goal has to be broken down into specific contents, sequences, exercises, tests, and so on. Teacher 1 started by referring to epochal knowledge as a “few facts and stuff.” Teacher 2 talked about what needs to be pointed out, and Teacher 3 suggests “fairly simple examples.” This dialog might indicate a naïve or objectivist understanding of history as a simple reconstruction that students are expected to reproduce. However, that would be a premature judgment. First, we need to look behind the professional jargon and be cognizant that lessons fulfill several simultaneous needs, such as creating space for in-depth studies as well as proving a cohesive narrative.

The overall goal of the teachers was to equip students with resources to question the certainty of epochs, and the dialog was anchored in concepts, such as causation, continuity, change, and scientific findings, as Teacher 3 remarked, “[A]n archaeological find can throw us thousands of years back in time and change the prehistoric epoch.” Hence, rather than falling into boxes of fixed stances, the web of planning unfolded epistemic waves of varying complexity (see Maton, 2013). The session started with simple concepts and moved on to those of a higher density. Ambitions were negotiated with reminders of basic conditions, and goal setting moved on to teaching methods and then to possible learning outcomes. The section ended with a meta-joke between Teachers 3 and 1, indicating an awareness of history as a theoretical and ideological construct. This was also an example of collegial planning as a professional interaction with a limited need for contextualization.

Discussing the Stances

Typologies can be useful for creating an index for synchronic and diachronic comparisons. Yet, such a project might be risky due to the danger of making categorical mistakes (see Greene, 2016). This risk is not negligible when categorizing something as complex as epistemic beliefs. The typologies used to categorize epistemic stances fall back on philosophical archetypes, denoting universal non-historical notions about the nature of knowledge (Stoel et al., 2022; VanSledright & Maggioni, 2016).

Such a universal index can be problematic as what is explored and categorized is not timeless ontologies, but beliefs about knowledge held by specific professionals (teachers) working within specific educational contexts (history curriculum). Such notions cannot be purely psychological, as they are socially constructed within particular cultural and historical conditions (Maton & Moore, 2009). Take the stance of the objectivist/positivist as an example. In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Bourdeau (2021) notes about the founder of positivism, Auguste Comte (1798–1857), that “it is difficult today to appreciate the interest Comte’s thought enjoyed a century ago, for it has received almost no notice during the last five decades. Before the First World War, Comte’s movement was active nearly everywhere in the world … none of this activity survived.” Hence, educated history teachers in the twenty-first century are likely not positivists in the same way as, for instance, this British Empiricist. Similarly, a timeless subjectivist position would imply the same sets of beliefs as, for example, ancient Sophists, Russian nihilists in the late nineteenth century, and the verity of positions within the postmodern or cultural turn. The criterialist stance is defined in line with disciplinary historical thinking. Sandoval (2016) reminds us that scholars also have epistemic controversies linked to questions on objectivity and spectra of constructivism and therefore warns against simplistic typologies and sharp demarcations between more and less sophisticated beliefs.

Questioners and interviews have provided results pertaining to several indicators and therefore placed the respondents in multiple categories—some of which may even theoretically conflict with each other (Stoel et al., 2022). VanSledright and Reddy (2014) argue that people tend to be inconsistent and “wobble” between epistemic positions. Even teachers who hold criterialist views can, according to Åström Elmersjö and Zanazanian (2022), take an objectivist view and “hold the belief that history, when done right, actually takes you to the past itself” (p. 184). It is probably in the nature of belief systems to be more or less fluid and situational, not least about a non-paradigmatic subject like history. However, it does not seem likely that such wobbling takes place without social and historical boundaries.

For Arendt (1993/1961) the new secular way of understanding history was as something that separated the modern age from earlier understandings of the past on a level deeper than any other individual idea. Chakrabarty (2018) has argued that the recent insight that humans have become a natural force affecting living conditions on a planetary scale challenges our modern understanding of human history as separate from natural history. This is not the place to explore historical regimes; the point here is just to remind us that epistemic thinking is framed by culturally contingent meta-perspectives.

Hence, the epistemic beliefs expressed by the teachers in the planning sessions (see Figs. 7.1, 7.2, and 7.3) cannot in any meaningful way fit into universal archetypes that might situate them outside a modern understanding of the discipline. Planning is an epistemic social activity that amalgamates disciplinary content and skills, lesson time, textbooks, students, curriculum goals, examinations, long-term progress, second-order concepts, content, other educational considerations, and more.

If a teacher literally believes that history equals the past, or that all statements about history are relative, they do not reach the minimum norm of the discipline. Torstendahl (1981) distinguishes between minimum demands, as the limited set of rules that demarks a disciplinary field such as methodology, transparency, and self-criticism, and the optimum norms that are the normative ideals of what the discipline should be about. As history is a non-paradigmatic discipline, there are no objective principles to define a good history (beyond the minimum norm). The advantages of this approach are that it first draws the line between what is not good enough and what has to be, in a general way, acceptable as it is within the borders of the school subject. Second, and more importantly, it directs the research to explore teachers’ epistemic beliefs in relation to norms of good teaching. That is, explicit normative goals.

Concluding Remarks

The first conclusion is that when exploring teachers’ epistemic beliefs, professional situatedness has to be key. Disciplinary understanding is of course relevant but is entangled with and affected by didactical experiences. Several researchers have pointed out the importance of exploring epistemic beliefs as contextual and situated (see Chinn & Rinehart, 2016). In history education, there are few such empirical studies, as most research is based on self-reports (Stoel et al., 2022). This chapter gives a glimpse into how to explore teachers’ collegial planning as a performative epistemic craft. This underlines the recommendation to explore epistemic beliefs inside the context of ongoing task performance (Bråten, 2016; Chinn & Rinehart, 2016; Kelly, 2016). However, such methodological recommendations come with theoretical consequences, which lead to a second conclusion.

If we understand knowledge building and teaching as sociocultural activities, then we should assume that most teachers operate within a social context that essentially meets an epistemic minimum standard of their school subject. When this is the case, typologies of epistemic stances seem too crude and static—and perhaps even redundant (assessing individual suitability is not a research task). Wilke et al. suggest that researchers might

start from the assumption that teachers will bring their didactic context into play, making it difficult to measure something as complex as epistemological views using general statements. Precisely because such statements fail to capture the mediating role of teaching contexts and other beliefs in the translation of teachers’ beliefs into their practice, they appear to be poor predictors of that practice. (p. 213)

The interesting research problem is, as Nitsche and Waldis (2022) also suggest, to analyze epistemological beliefs in relation to specific tasks and historical content. This is to say, to explore how teachers’ epistemic beliefs support or hinder a normatively defined goal, operationalized in planning, teaching, or assessing—and this is crucial—teachers in the research must be aware of any normative goal. If good teaching is assumed to be based on inquiry teaching, then participating teachers need to be aware of this normative assumption. If the exploration is about epistemic beliefs in relation to intercultural learning, the Anthropocene, critical thinking, sourcing, and so on, teachers need to be involved in the conditions as well as the goal of the intervention. This is not only an ethical question, but here, above all, a theoretical one based on the assumption that epistemic thinking is situational.

Teachers’ epistemic beliefs mold the relation between knowledge and knowers, and in the performative act of planning lessons, planning comes forward as an epistemic craft that derives from crossroad where disciplinary knowledge, students’ needs and expectations, curricular aims and demands, and the teachers’ own interest and pedagogical content knowledge meets (Nordgren et al., 2021). A third conclusion, which may be self-evident, but necessary as a reminder, is that teaching is an epistemically demanding profession—just as quality in research presupposes access to a research community, epistemic communities are needed around subject teaching. If we look more closely at the web of teachers’ didactic considerations and put this in relation to the pursuit of good teaching, a need for collegial cooperation emerges, and the need to think of epistemic cognition as a social activity.

St. Thomas Aquinas’s take on the classical didactical relation—what, why, and how—suggests that epistemic beliefs evolve in a practical engagement in such a relation. The nature of the knowledge is interconnected with the reason to know it and the methods to teach and learn it. Taking teachers’ epistemic beliefs as relational and activity-based opens the possibility to explore how beliefs are shaped and possibly changed in the contextual production of teaching.