Inclusion through pluralisation? European history teachers’ beliefs on inclusion

Inclusion concerns many students, most notably those with special educational needs

Concerning understanding what inclusion means or who should be included in history education, there is general agreement that inclusion is intersectional, with a broad meaning. As one of the teachers from group S2 said, ‘inclusion is a wide word, so it has lots of meaning’. Although some teachers in all groups first identified inclusion with students with special educational needs, the definition of inclusion quickly got complex when they consider other groups of students, such as those with a different ethnic or religious background (for example, in group S1) or those with dissident gender and sexual identities (for example, in groups W and N), as one teacher in group N noted:

That’s also what I would, not special needs but also the background, also financial background, and cultural, how they, if they have access to good background or the family is supportive or not. Then, maybe some need more support than others. And also with social skills, you have to help sometimes that they are part of the group.

Thus, there is general agreement among all participants that inclusion means all students have the same rights and possibilities in the educational environment, regardless of their background and disabilities.

Regarding students with special educational needs, there is an extensive understanding of who they are. Although in all groups teachers mentioned students with perceived disabilities, such as dyslexia (for example, in groups E, N and S2), unspecified cognitive limitations (for example, in groups W, N and S1) or impaired vision (for example, groups N and S1), the teachers in group N also considered students with anxiety disorders in need of special education. At the same time, the groups shared how, by adapting to the needs of every student, teachers should also include in their teaching those students considered gifted or above average (for example, in groups S1 and S2). By understanding inclusion as a broad and intersectional concept, teachers expanded its meaning to other groups of students who traditionally might not be considered the target of inclusive practices.

To conclude, as pointed out at the beginning, inclusion has many meanings for the European history teachers interviewed for the study. It is understood as an intersectional practice of care, and in history, education should translate into being able to teach every student. Thus, teachers need to be aware of the background of their students and update their methods to cater for the needs of all students, as one teacher in group S2 shared:

We have to be aware of the background of the students that we have in front of us, because sometimes we give lessons as we did 20 years ago when all our students were white, … their story, their family is completely different, so when teaching history, if you want to connect them with history, you have to be aware of that.

Inclusion causes many problems and provides only a few benefits

Many of the participating history teachers characterised inclusion as a problematic concept. Across groups, the participants expressed critical views on the conditions and effects of inclusive practice in schools. The coding reveals three different types of issues to which the groups primarily refer, in varying degrees: resources, systemic aspects and the diversity of the groups to be taught. In connection with the lack of resources, participants in all groups complained about the lack of experience and time to implement inclusive practices. Many respondents argued that history teachers simply lack knowledge of how to teach history inclusively. As one person from group S1 put it:

About the initial training. Because you know, this is a real problem for all of us … So, the young students in university, especially in my country, are not so well prepared to, uh, confront that situation. With students who are different, who have different problems.

A history teacher from group S2 argued similarly, explaining that the institutional conditions ‘lack specific teacher training and also helping teacher experience’ to make inclusive historical learning possible. In addition to the lack of experience in dealing with integrative learning settings, the participants in the study also pointed to the lack of available time to make history learning inclusive. Particularly in group W, the topic was raised frequently, with one participant noting that ‘if you really want to, to have good history lessons for every child, you also need time to do these lessons’. In group S2, the lack of time for history teachers was also used to justify the lack of inclusive practices. In particular, a Spanish history teacher addressed the problem of lack of time in several places and summarised her argument by using an example:

If you have 30 students in front of you, you have, I don’t know, 20 hours per week. And the curriculum is a long, long list of concepts. And not only life concepts. And you have to teach all these chronological, historical events. How can you deal with this and with all the diversity, all the context diversity that you have in front of you? This is the problem that many teachers have. They don’t know how to face it, but at the same time they don’t know how to deal with no time to prepare all these things. It’s getting quite difficult.

Systemic aspects were only mentioned in groups E and S2, which refer in part to diverging challenges, including institutional communication, economic factors, curricular contexts and class sizes. Group S2, for example, characterised the communication between schools and ministerial or university actors as difficult, as there is no joint approach to achieving inclusion. The following exchange between two members is representative of this assessment:

Teacher 1: Yeah, I think that the main problem is that there is no connection between the curriculum … and the real teachers. Yeah, yeah, sometimes,

Teacher 2: there is a disconnect.

Teacher 1: sometimes they send the curriculum before [it is] published, you can get ideas, but they did not take it into account. … So, there is a big disconnection between the two. Even if they are academic, university academics, who are doing it, they are out of the reality of the classroom of school.

Group E did not frame the lack of communication between different educational actors as an issue, but rather pointed to class size, which makes it more difficult to implement inclusion in schools:

So I think inclusion should be there, but like with some limits. It’s not like always, the way some kids probably need something different, and if we want to mix all of them regardless [of] their special needs, then we should have smaller classes with less students. But this is more expensive, so the state doesn’t want to go there. So if you had like 10 kids in a class you could probably pay enough attention to each one of them, but if you have 30 pupils you cannot really cover all their needs. It’s just a fact.

Finally, in groups E, N and S2, the diversity of the students to be taught was itself presented as a problem. For example, teachers in the three groups argued that history curricula tend to focus on national history. Hence, they claimed, students with different ethnic backgrounds or those from migrant families might not feel included or represented in the content of the classes. A teacher from group N, for example, pointed out that the heterogeneity of the student body has consequences for the way history is taught since, on the one hand, one tries to do justice to all students by including their histories, but on the other hand, the inevitable result is that no history can be given enough time.

Another perceived problem connected to the growing diversity of students who are taught history is language. Some of the interviewed teachers shared concerns over the question of how to talk about these groups of students who might already be targeted and discriminated against due to their ethnic background or for having mental or functional diversity (for example, in group E). Furthermore, teachers pointed to the fact that the different languages inside the classroom present a problem for the students themselves, as a teacher from group E pointed out:

And then it’s really hard to talk about inclusion because now if we go to … a classroom, so the best way to do inclusion is give a safe space for discussion and, you know, text and evidence analysis. But if student A cannot read the text, B is not feeling confident speaking the language, how they can discuss very, you know, edgy topics.

The rare mention of the benefits of inclusive school practices further illustrates the focus of the participants on the challenges associated with inclusion. Of all the codes generated, 60 contained statements about the challenges of inclusion, while only six talked about its advantages. Groups N and S2 did not mention benefits, while the other three mentioned them only twice. The arguments are comparable: groups W, E and S1 primarily emphasised the chance to evoke historical learning by thinking about inclusive issues from which all students can benefit regardless of their personal conditions. A respondent from group E also argued for the use of minority narratives to teach students about the pluralism of the society in which they live:

And once you teach the students or pupils to look at the society as diverse in different ways, not only in one way, like nationality, but many different ways, and you can bring it back to the different times in history, because societies were always very diverse, then maybe we can show them how to perceive society nowadays and how to make life a little bit better for everyone is not to get stuck in one group that you belong to. Because actually nowadays people have strong like affiliation to some groups of extremism and radical views. And this is very dangerous. So, I think we need to work with these, and inclusion could be helpful.

Inclusion means a pluralisation of histories that are taught

Although the interviewed history teachers raised many concerns surrounding inclusion, they also proposed a pathway towards a more inclusive history education. When asked about the strategies history teachers could use to increase inclusivity in their teaching, all focus groups mentioned the importance of content. Overall, the coding process during the analysis resulted in 54 items that were coded as ‘content’, that is, instances in which participants talked about historical content with regard to inclusion. More specifically, teachers in all groups pointed towards the possibility of making their teaching practices more inclusive by including histories of marginalised communities, mostly national minorities (for example, in group E) and migrants (for example, in group S2), but sometimes also women (for example, in group W). Additionally, some teachers described how they adapt their lesson plans according to the student body and divergent backgrounds (for example, in group W). Finally, family history was brought up as an example of strategies to be more inclusive (for example, in groups E and N). As the content of history education varies significantly between the research participants’ countries, our analysis approaches content through different practices, that is, what kind of practices teachers use to make the teaching content more pluralistic.

While all focus groups shared a similar understanding of the need to pluralise content, they differed in their explanations of how to achieve that goal. In order to pluralise the content, the interviewees in focus groups W, N and S2 discussed the importance of knowing one’s students and adapting the curricula accordingly. They argued that inclusion through pluralisation of content starts by connecting with the students and their backgrounds. A German teacher from focus group W stated that getting to know the students requires time but is beneficial in the long run, especially with respect to inclusive history teaching: ‘If they learn fewer facts and more about how they connect with the past and more about what they can do to connect with the past, I think that’s worth more.’ The rationale is that by knowing their students, they can adapt the content and, therefore, possibly make history teaching more engaging to their students.

Teachers from group E did not talk about the importance of getting to know their students better; they reflected primarily on how the dominant historical narratives in their countries are built around a myth of victimhood. Additionally, they discussed how the national narratives on victimhood can be exclusive towards minorities and their side of the story. Teachers from group E explained that the dominant historical narratives tend to centralise the victimhood of the dominant group, which results in marginalising the experiences of minority groups, such as the Jewish community. For them, inclusion could take place by decentralising these narratives of national victimhood and teaching students how different population groups experienced past events. Another example of deconstructing national narratives was brought up by a teacher from group E, who said that she would often remind her students that Lithuania, as they know it today, is a new entity based on political imagination. Similarly, a teacher from Latvia explained that some historical narratives would consider certain events as part of the Latvian national history, even if the historical actors in the past did not consider themselves to be Latvians: ‘The story is [that] we [Latvians] had a colony, and this is some kind of national pride.’ Furthermore, it was pointed out in group E that there is a lot of confusion between an ethnic and a political community. For example, a teacher from Slovakia said that the historical narrative in her home country would imply that actors in the past would identify with the Slovak ethnic group, even if they had more connections to a certain social class. She proposed that talking about a political community would be more inclusive:

Nation is not the political nation, it’s the ethnic nation. And all the others are the others. If it was more like the political nation, and all the citizens of the country, then we would include at least national minorities, or whatever religion you would have, it wouldn’t matter.

She also discussed how inclusion could be advanced by talking about society instead of a nation: ‘We don’t talk about the nation, [but instead] we talk about society. Because it’s a more inclusive term.’ Another point of discussion in focus group E regarding nations was the use of the word ‘we’. The teachers questioned the dominant habit of using the pronoun ‘we’ in history education, particularly when referring to what supports the nationalistic historical narrative.

While for group E the key to pluralisation was a widening of the national focus, group W discussed issues related to gender or, more specifically, the lack of representation of women. A Dutch teacher from this group stated:

The voices of women are very scarcely represented in the history textbooks … And I think, well, it’s half of our society and half of our pupils that don’t feel represented in the textbooks. So, that really [is] an issue.

Teachers in groups N and S1 discussed how teaching content can be pluralised by teaching local and global histories in parallel. A Finnish teacher from group N said that she would teach her students about the similarities between Finland and countries that were decolonised in the twentieth century:

I say, when you’re studying decolonisation, remember that we did exactly the same things, don’t have this feeling of superiority. We did the same mistakes, you know, started fighting with each other after being independent. So, it’s also like trying to find more similarities.

Another way of pluralising the content, which group W, like group N, talked about, was the implementation of family history. According to history teachers in these two groups, family history helps the student (and the teacher) better understand the student’s reference point in history. According to the interviewed teachers, this is helpful if someone has a migrant or refugee background or comes from a country that has recently gone through dissolution or unification. It also helps students connect with the past, as some may feel that their families do not have a link to the national history. However, they acknowledged that family history can be a sensitive topic and that they do not want to pressure their students to open up about their family history. Nevertheless, teachers in both groups stated that when done discreetly, family history can lead to positive outcomes, which also helps the students connect with their past. As an Icelandic teacher from group N said, when she asks her students to learn about their family’s past, ‘the students are very happy to know this [family history] … And they feel very included also that their background is explored.’