Polish teachers’ epistemic beliefs on history as seen through the lens of social media

Abstract

This article is based on the content analysis of the Polish Facebook group Nauczyciele historii (“History Teachers”) which is administered by, and addressed to, practicing and prospective history teachers. The group’s over six thousand members engage and interact by writing, reading, reacting to, and commenting via as many as twenty plus posts daily. We examined the group’s on-line discussions for manifestations of the member-teachers’ epistemic considerations: their reasoning about the epistemic nature of history; their assumptions regarding the goals and meaning of history as a school subject; and their attitudes toward the narratives of difference, diversity, and multi-perspectivism. Our findings reveal that Polish history teachers’ epistemology is poorly conceptualized, rather naïve, and largely unaffected by the developments in historical and didactical theories of the last 50 years. Those teachers do not reflect on the epistemic nature of history. They approach history as a “science”, which they presume to be objective and unambiguous. They tend to see themselves as transmitters of knowledge about the past which their pupils should internalize, and as propagators of those “patriotic” values that - according to certain received, long-established discourses - strengthen national identity and social cohesion.