Historiefagets forhold til redegørelse

Abstract

The article focuses the concept of narrative (redegørelse) as it appears in teachers’ and students’ utterances in and about history as a subject matter. The main finding of the article concerns the observation that narrative on the one hand reflects a dichotomy between narrative understood as both knowledge transfer and knowledge construction. On the other hand, since history teaching is organized and regulated through ideas of cognitive taxonomy thinking and progression, narrative gets evaluated and assessed as knowledge transfer only. The article discusses the fact that narrative as knowledge construction appears in the way teachers and students reflect on subject issues meanwhile the transferring of a grand and common narrative occupy a great deal of the history teaching. In the light of a postmodern perspective, the article draws the conclusion that history as a subject matter can gain from considering its approach to narrative as knowledge construction.

The findings of the article rely on thorough and in-depth analysis of teachers’ and students’ utterances transformed into speech act codes established during ethnographic field-studies in Danish upper secondary schools. In supporting the study, theorists such as J.L. Austins, Ole Togeby, Kathy Charmaz and Peter Seixas have all been helpful.