A3 Refereed book chapter or chapter in a compilation book
Moral Education and Citizenship Education in Bringing Emotions and Meaning Giving in the History Curriculum : A Finnish View
Authors: Löfström, Jan
Editors: Tirri, Kirsi
Publisher: BRILL
Publication year: 2025
Book title : Nordic Perspectives on Moral and Citizenship Education
Series title: Moral Development and Citizenship Education
Number in series: 26
First page : 80
Last page: 94
ISBN: 978-90-04-74589-6
eISBN: 978-90-04-74590-2
ISSN: 2352-5770
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004745902_005
Publication's open availability at the time of reporting: No Open Access
Publication channel's open availability : No Open Access publication channel
Web address : https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004745902_005
This chapter discusses links between history education, moral education and education for democratic citizenship in the current curriculum for history in Finnish lower secondary school. The aims of history teaching in the curriculum largely relate to the skills of historical literacy. Aspects of moral education and democratic citizenship education are vague in the curriculum although in historical scholarship ‘a moral turn’ (Cotkin, 2008) took place already at the turn of the century. The chapter first discusses historical consciousness as a basis for democratic citizenship and then the space for democracy education in the aims of history teaching in the current Finnish curriculum. It then proceeds to discuss how Finnish lower secondary school students perceive the space for discussing moral questions in the history classroom and how they justify their views. These justifications show that students’ conceptions of moral are vague. In order to develop them, reasoning about, for example, the moral quality of people’s actions and reflecting on the moral meaning of the past to the present could be valuable in the history classroom. In history education the space for moral education is also located in perspective-taking, in history education often conceptualized as historical empathy. The focus in historical empathy has often been placed on cognition-based perspective-taking, but in this chapter, it is argued that affect-based perspective-taking—with links to moral emotions—is also essential in historical empathy. It is also relevant for history teaching as a component of education for democratic citizenship: deliberative democracy is seen as a possibility to invigorate liberal democracy, but it depends on citizens’ ability for perspective-taking which entails empathy. In this chapter it is argued that students’ cognition-based and affect-based perspective-taking abilities would be supported by giving more space to their personal meaning-giving in encounters with history in the history curriculum.