Interest in history as the basis of profession: prospective history teachers’ relation to history

Authors

• Arja Virta Turun yliopisto

Abstract

The growth of historical consciousness is a socio-cultural process on which the informal historical culture can have at least as strong an influence as the formal history education. Also the formation of professional historical consciousness can have strong informal starting points. The article analyses how prospective history teachers describe their relation to history, its starting points, and the forms in which they had been in touch with history. The analysis draws on essays written by 38 prospective history teachers. In their essays they reflected on how their own relation to history, or their historical consciousness, had developed in childhood and during school and university studies. The essays, which often were structured as narratives, were analysed according to the principles of the qualitative content analysis. The narratives indicate clearly that interest in history could derive from numerous sources, often long before the formal history education at school had began. There was also an obvious gap between the history out of school and inside the school, and another gap between school history and university studies.