Introduction

Why is teaching history part of elementary education, and how does it become useful for children outside the school context? How can concrete events and abstract principles be related in history teaching, and how can history be a means of relating to the past and orientating toward the future? How can the child become explorative and active in history teaching? These questions are central for history teaching and have been approached in different ways within various traditions of instructional theory.

In this chapter, I argue for an activity-theoretical approach to history teaching. The activity approach is characterized with the help of four principles. In the last part of the chapter, I use these dimensions to describe and analyze a history teaching experiment we conducted in Grades 4 and 5 in a Danish comprehensive school. In this experiment, historical knowledge was viewed as a tool for understanding the societies of today.

The objective of history teaching has changed over time (Engelund, 1988; Sødring Jensen, 1978; Manifest, 1983). In Denmark schools became public in 1814 and in Sweden in 1842 (Ramirez & Boli, 1987). From the beginning, history teaching in the Scandinavian countries had the task of developing students' national identity and moral character. This last task coincided with the ideals of the obligatory teaching of religion, and the two were the main objectives in public school teaching besides teaching reading (Sødring Jensen, 1978). The task of history teaching was transformed in the late 1950s.