The purposes of history education, incl. the school history, become topical in a society when it perceives its collective memory, values and identity as problematic. In Estonia, these issues seem to be reemerging more compellingly on the public agenda. To better understand the discussions concerning the history education, and to possibly support the self-reflection of the parties of the discussions as well as those practically involved in the history education, we have initiated a research project on how different social groups in Estonia (incl. history teachers, academic historians, public officials involved in history teaching regulations, museum educators etc.) conceptualize the nature and purposes of the subject. (Incl., for instance, whether and to what extent the conceptions have been affected by the constructivist and competence-based approaches that have gained ground in the Estonian educational discourses since the 1990ties.) Our conceptualization of the diverse empirical constructions of “the” school history as combinations of diverse elements such as images, propositions, emotional associations etc. has been informed by the Theory of Social Representations (Wagner & Hayes 2005). Thus we focus the investigation on a selection (based on our research interest) of components of the representations (i.e. social constructions) of the school history, to investigate their manifestations, combinations, functions etc. in the discourse and/or practices of the diverse social groups. (Whether the social representations, as systems of components, reconstructed by the researcher, are conceived as individual or group-specific, depends on the level of analysis.) To classify the diverse contents of the actual representations, we have devised a model of the possible aspects (perspectives, foci, purposes, or constitutive components) of the school history, based on a number of theoretical and empirical approaches in the English- and German-language history education/didactics literature; as well as discussions and interviews with Estonian history teachers and a student questionnaire. A concise version of the model would be (1) interest; (2) knowledge of the past; (3) lessons from the past; (4) identity and/or values education; (5) generic skills or competencies; (6) historical skills and thinking; (7) conceptions of historiography; (8) sociology of history. (For comparable empirically grounded typologies cf. Donnelly 1999; Husbands et al. 2003; Virta 2001.) In the framework of these general categories of analysis, the inductively extracted group-specific propositions (according to the authors, author positions and central foci of the texts) will be the focus of the concrete analyses. In this study the model of analysis will be applied to compare the representations of the history education in the articles targeting the history teachers in two main teachers’ periodicals in Estonia (a weekly and a journal) from 1992 to 2007. By analysing the individual and group-specific propositions, the aims of the paper will be (1) to determine, which of the possible general perspectives on the school history do and do not occur in articles, written on different foci and from different positions; (2) to relate the detected conceptions to some recent discussions of the nature and purposes of the history education (especially Ahonen 1992, 2001a, 2001b; Council of Europe 2001; Lee 2004, 2005; Pandel 2005; Rüsen 2001; Schreiber et al. 2006; Stradling 2000, 2003); (3) to examine the emerged interrelations, combinations, and possible loci of miscommunications of the detected perspectives. The analysis should contribute to the understanding of the individual and group-specific representations of the purposes of the school history.

The paper will present the results of the analyses of articles (1992-2007) that address the purpose of history teaching in the national newspaper Õpetajate Leht (Teachers’ Newspaper) and the most widespread Estonian educational journal Haridus (Education). The newspaper and the journal are main forums of educational debate in Estonia. The study uses qualitative content analysis (Mayring 2000). The code sheet includes genre category in order to capture the journalistic impact on the discussion.

The content analyses are ongoing.