Vol. 14 No. 2024:3 (2024): Nordidactica 2024:3

The third issue of Nordidactica in 2024 is perhaps smaller in number of articles than other issues this year, but it has a bigger significance for us, because through it we are saying farewell to our two-year period as editors of the journal. During these two years we have aimed at keeping up and further raising the quality of the journal. There are many factors that have helped us in this quest. First and foremost, it requires a solid reputation to attract researchers in our field to submit their work to the journal. We are grateful in this respect to our predecessors and to all who have contributed to the establishment of Nordidactica since 2011. We also wish to thank everybody who has placed their trust in Nordidactica and sent their manuscripts to be reviewed and published. S

The current issue focuses explicitly on history education. In the research design of Anders Persson and Mikael Berg, Nordidactica is treated as a significant platform of Nordic research on history education. They conducted a longitudinal study of Nordidactica’s history exploring how history didactics articles have used theory in 2011–2022. Their analysis leads to discussion on whether educational research should strive for a balance between approaches that justify theories and generate them. 

The article by Yngve Skjæveland, Birger Andreas Marthinsen and Linn Maria Magerøy-Grande is very near to the lived realities of history education as it is based on an action research project in an upper secondary school in Norway. It follows upper secondary school students making sense of historical secondary sources. 

Alexandre Dessingué has also worked on Norwegian upper secondary students’ relationship to history. When exploring their perception of and interest in history he found four types of chronotopes behind the connection they made with history: chronotope of actualisation, chronotope of distanciation, chronotope of anticipation and chronotope of disconnection.

Johannes Heuman’s contribution takes us to theoretically review emotions in history education, but also to the past as he illustrates his theoretical model through examples from Swedish upper secondary history education in the 1860s. He argues that history didactics would benefit from discussions concerning emotions in historical research.