Accessing the Past: Epistemic Beliefs about History in Social Studies Pre-Service Teachers.

Abstract

Studies published in the last decades show that epistemic beliefs about history can strongly influence the way in which the past is approached and addressed in the classrooms. From this point of view, it is essential to understand how pre-service teachers perceive this discipline, as well as whether their academic background in history has influenced their perceptions and beliefs regarding this subject. By establishing the hypothesis that history education can help develop a more nuanced and coherent conception regarding this area of knowledge, this study makes a comparison between epistemological beliefs found in secondary and primary education trainee teachers. By making use of a quantitative approach, the present study presents a Spanish translation of the BHQ (Beliefs about History Questionnaire), developed by Maggioni and VanSledright, which has been applied to a total of 177 prospective teachers. After categorising the participants in three different stances (copier, borrower and criterialist), results show that pre-service secondary education teachers manifest significantly more intricate conceptions about history than their primary education counterparts, favouring a criterialist stance over the other two. At the same time, the consistency of the answers are shown to be significantly higher for secondary education trainee teachers. It can be concluded that historical education plays an important role in influencing teachers’ epistemic beliefs, and that, consequently, initial teacher training should help prospective teachers reflect on these issues by putting its focus on them.