Att fostra demokratiska medborgare: demokratisk kompetens genom historieundervisning

Sammanfattning

The Swedish school has the aim to foster democratic citizens. It is of importance to understand how democracy can be understood in the context of school and how history education could be organised to achieve this goal. This overview aims to summarize the results of studies researching how to educate students to be democratic citizens through history education by answering the following questions: 1. What does research say about how the concept of democracy could be understood in the context of Swedish history didactics in theory and practice? 2. What does international research say about which methods could be used to promote democratic competence in history education and what would that look like in practice? Material was found using four main research engines: Education Resources Information Center (ERIC), Education Research Complete (ERC), Google Scholar and SwePub. Additional material was found by searching in the reference lists of relevant sources found. Malmö University’s database Libsearch was used to find physical books in the library. Results show that there are two main perspectives to understand democracy in a Swedish didactic context: disruptive democracy and developmental democracy. These two perspectives could be understood as teaching for democracy or teaching through democracy and reflect how the syllabus for history and the Swedish curriculum use the concept of democracy. Furthermore, results describe two main methods for education that will promote democratic competence which are called deliberative pedagogy and critical pedagogy. We conclude that these two methods correlate with the two perspectives on democracy found in the Swedish curriculum and syllabus. Teaching competences needed in a disruptive democracy could be done through critical pedagogy and is the main perspective seen in the syllabus for history. Teaching competences desired in a developmental democracy could be done through deliberative pedagogy and is the main perspective in the overarching Swedish curriculum. Both methods could be used to meet the aim of fostering democratic citizens.