Att ta ansvar för historien : Elevers historiska tänkande kring Förintelsen

Sammanfattning: The Holocaust is an important part of Swedish history teaching. It tends to exemplify human rights violations and has become a means to educate students to be better citizens. Swedish studies have often focused on students’ historical consciousness. This study aims to examine students’ historical thinking about the Holocaust. Three questions are addressed; how students express substantive knowledge, how students express procedural concepts, and how do students express moral aspects about the Holocaust. The material was created during the authors’ teaching practice (in Swedish VFU) and consists of 28 students’ texts. To analyze the material qualitative content analysis was used. Procedural concepts such as continuity and change, cause and consequence, historical agency and, moral aspects, were also used as tools to interpret students’ texts about what was the cause of the Holocaust. The results show that students made implicit references to different procedural concepts when describing how the Holocaust happened. Students often referred to anti-Semitism, Adolf Hitler, and the developed train system as causes for the Holocaust. They tended to understand Hitler as the founder of anti-Semitism and Nazism. He was described to convince the German people to vote for him. Structures and agency of other actors, therefore, disappeared leading to a shallow understanding of the Holocaust. The author of the study argues for a Holocaust education that uses Alice Pettigrews’ concept of “powerful knowledge” and Gert Biestas’ notion of qualification, socialization, and subjectification, to develop students’ moral and civic understanding.