Communications on History. Building Identity and “Making Sense of History” in the History Course—A Matrix for Empowering Historical Thinking

Abstract

This paper describes didactic design for competence building in history education through the application of analogue and digital forms of communication. The example is given for teacher education of subjects “ history ” , “ social studies ” and “ civic/citizenship education ” at university level. Proceeding from a social-systems approach to historical learning, this paper gives an introduction to theoretical and practical elements of a digital tool, namely, the Planungsmatrix. This matrix is in use at several universities and institutions of teacher education in Austria, and is actually supporting the process of designing case-studies for transnational modules of history teacher education in the European TEEM-project 1 , a collaboration between the Universities of Graz, Augsburg, Budapest, Lucerne, Valladolid and Wroclaw. The Planungsmatrix provides design features for planning, observing and evaluating concrete communications of historical learning in the context of a history course. The underlying theory of process-oriented learning, the didactic explication and design of substantive/first-order concepts and the role of the procedural/second-order concepts of “historical thinking” in the conception of the matrix will be described. Emphasis will be further placed on the role of feedback/back-coupling and self-reflection as important elements in the hermeneutic process of a learning situation. Students in this setting are encouraged to negotiate existing narratives on a given topic and/or to elaborate onhistorical narratives which are connected to the experience of their proper living environment (Lebenswelt). These arrangements of “historical learning” are expected to foster identity-building and “making sense of history” in the learning process of the concrete history course. The function of the Planungsmatrix is to provide a visualization of the complex composition of a process of historical learning in central elements such as organization, aims, content, communicative structure, interpretation and transfer, back-coupling and reflection. Additional functions allow collaborative writing on the matrix, receiving written feedback from the supervisor, along with saving the planned design for further work on it or for entering it into a research database.