Resumen de Disrupting Certainties: history Education for Informed Lived Citizenships
How might teacher education engage pre-service teachers with unfamiliar voices and historical representation in an age of diversity, and view history as a critical project for young citizens? This context is situated in an Aotearoa New Zealand university’s initial teacher education (ITE) secondary programme. As a history educator, I negotiate multiple sites’ cultural practices and legacies of doing and being. I juggle professional, curriculum and assessment discursive practices and teachers’ certainties about their history programmes. This involves history theorising, scholarship and expectations. Tensions exist in relation to ‘sacred’ history contexts and knowledge claims embedded in curriculum and assessment standards that act to lessen possibilities of critical approaches. Critical pedagogy informs my stance that young citizens need to be confident and informed about their identity/ies and lived pasts to question what counts as knowledge and in whose interests this knowledge serves. Problematised history pedagogy (PHP) research aimed to disrupt pre-service teachers’ normative discourses. Emergent findings have subsequently shaped my history programme’s pedagogic approaches and evidence-informed assessment. Recent scholarly and public interest in histories that ‘play out’ in Aotearoa New Zealand’s present, serve to refocus history in ITE and schooling spaces to disrupt pedagogic certainties and exclusive notions of citizenship.
