Earlier research · 2012–2021 · University of Graz · University of Salzburg · University of Oxford · Georg Eckert Institute
History education, textbooks and teachers’ beliefs
Three funded lines of research before character education — from the University of Graz via Salzburg to Oxford
Before character education became his main field, Roland Bernhard’s research asked how history is taught in Austrian and German classrooms: what teachers believe about their subject, how they and their pupils use textbooks, and which myths textbooks pass on. Three lines of work — funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) and by the Habilitationsforum Fachdidaktik & Unterrichtsforschung of the University of Graz, and carried out with colleagues in Salzburg, Braunschweig and Oxford — shaped the mixed-methods approach that later projects such as SQTE and TEPACE built on.
Habilitation project · University of Oxford, Department of Education · 2018–2019
EBAHT — The Epistemic Beliefs and Practice of Austrian History Teachers after the Paradigm Shift towards Historical Thinking
In 2008 Austria introduced a competence-based curriculum for history and civic education: pupils were no longer to memorise the past but to learn to think historically. Ten years on, EBAHT asked those who enact the curriculum every day — the teachers — what they actually believe about their subject, about historical thinking and about the reform. The project drew on the qualitative data of the FWF project CAOHT (50 interviews and 50 lesson observations) and looked more closely at teachers’ epistemological beliefs, connecting them to their views of the competence-based curriculum and to their classroom practice.
A Bridge scholarship of the Habilitationsforum Fachdidaktik & Unterrichtsforschung of the University of Graz (€29,000) made it possible to complete the last phase of the habilitation as a Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Oxford’s Department of Education, from 1 September 2018 to 28 February 2019; the fellowship then continued until 2020 within the FWF project SQTE. Katharine Burn (University of Oxford), Ulrike Greiner and Christoph Kühberger (University of Salzburg) accompanied the project.
The habilitation thesis Berufsbezogene Überzeugungen von österreichischen Geschichtslehrpersonen und historisches Denken was accepted at the University of Salzburg in February 2019. Two monographs grew out of it — Von PISA nach Wien (2020) and Geschichte für das Leben lernen (2021) — as well as a category system for researching history teachers’ beliefs. The Oxford years also opened the door to the themes that have shaped his work since: school improvement and character education.
Von PISA nach Wien. Historische und politische Kompetenzen in der Unterrichtspraxis
Empirical findings from qualitative interviews with teachers · Frankfurt/M.: Wochenschau, 2020 (Geschichtsunterricht erforschen) · 288 pages · open access (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), publication funded by the FWF
How far has the competence orientation of the 2008 curriculum reached classroom practice and teachers’ beliefs? Fifty in-depth interviews with history teachers give the answer — and show what teachers need if historical thinking is to become everyday practice. Open-access edition (Wochenschau) →
Geschichte für das Leben lernen. Der Bildungswert des Faches in den Überzeugungen österreichischer Lehrkräfte
Frankfurt/M.: Wochenschau, 2021 (Geschichtsunterricht erforschen, vol. 13) · DOI 10.46499/14654
What can one learn from history for life? The book reconstructs the “philosophy of the subject” — the educational value teachers ascribe to history — from the same fifty interviews: for most teachers, what matters is the relevance of the past for their pupils’ present lives, orientation and critical thinking. Full text (PDF) →
FWF project P 27859-G22 · 2015–2018 · University of Salzburg and University of Teacher Education Salzburg
CAOHT — Competence and Academic Orientation in History Textbooks
A three-year project of the Austrian Science Fund (€286,000) on historical thinking and textbook use in Austria. Roland Bernhard conceived the project and wrote the proposal together with Christoph Kühberger, who led it as principal investigator; Roland Bernhard and Christoph Bramann carried out the research.
Two questions
How do teachers and pupils actually use history textbooks — in lessons and in preparation — and what role does historical thinking play in it? And how far do Austrian textbooks reflect the shift from a focus on content to a focus on domain-specific competences?
A sequential mixed-methods design
Ethnographic observation of around 50 history lessons in Vienna and interviews with the teachers, analysed with grounded theory; then questionnaires with 277 history teachers and 1,086 pupils in Salzburg, Graz and Vienna; and an analysis of all approved Austrian history textbooks for lower secondary school — texts, images, sources and tasks.
What the interviews and observations showed
The textbook is the guiding medium of history teaching in Austria: teachers rely on it heavily and it shapes what happens in the classroom — yet in initial teacher education, working with textbooks plays hardly any role. Teachers value their subject above all for what it offers pupils for their present lives.
International partners and outputs
Luigi Cajani (Sapienza University of Rome), Terry Haydn (University of East Anglia) and Béatrice Ziegler (University of Applied Sciences and Arts Northwestern Switzerland) accompanied the project. Outputs include two edited volumes, two special issues of Erziehung und Unterricht, the final conference “Das Geschichtsschulbuch” in Salzburg (June 2018) and the habilitation project EBAHT.
Project page, University of Salzburg → · Project description, H-Soz-Kult →
Textbook research · 2012–2019 · with the Georg Eckert Institute for International Textbook Research, Braunschweig
Historical myths in textbooks — and how to teach with them
Roland Bernhard’s doctorate at the University of Graz (2012) examined how German and Austrian textbooks tell the discovery, conquest and colonisation of the Americas — and found narratives that historical research had long dismantled, among them the “flat earth of the Middle Ages”. The Faculty of Humanities nominated the thesis, as its best dissertation of 2013, for the Award of Excellence — the Austrian ministry’s prize for the best doctoral theses of the year; it appeared in 2013 in the series of the Georg Eckert Institute, with publication funding from the FWF, and is freely available.
Out of this grew a research partnership with the Georg Eckert Institute — Susanne Grindel, Wibke Westermeyer and Robert Maier — and with Felix Hinz and Christoph Kühberger. Three FWF-funded volumes followed: Mythen in deutschsprachigen Geschichtsschulbüchern (2017), which asks what a historical myth is and traces myths from Marathon to the Élysée Treaty through textbooks in Germany, Austria and Switzerland; its English edition Myths in German-Language History Textbooks (2019); and, for the 500th anniversary of the Reformation, Luther und die Reformation in internationalen Geschichtskulturen (2017), on how textbooks in different countries present Luther and the Reformation. All three are open access.
The point was never to catalogue errors. Myths are offers of orientation: they tell readers who “we” are. Teaching with them — de-constructing the flat earth, the “triangular trade” or Martin Behaim as the “real discoverer of America” — is a way of learning to think historically. Journal articles in Geschichte in Wissenschaft und Unterricht, Historische Sozialkunde and the International Journal of Historical Learning, Teaching and Research take single myths apart and turn them into classroom material.
Mythen in deutschsprachigen Geschichtsschulbüchern – von Marathon bis zum Élysée-Vertrag
Roland Bernhard, Susanne Grindel, Felix Hinz & Christoph Kühberger (eds.) · Göttingen: V&R unipress, 2017 (Eckert. Die Schriftenreihe, vol. 142) · 293 pages · open access, CC BY 4.0 · publication funded by the FWF
Myths in German-Language History Textbooks. Their Influence on Historical Accounts from the Battle of Marathon to the Élysée Treaty
Roland Bernhard, Susanne Grindel, Felix Hinz & Christoph Kühberger (eds.) · Braunschweig: Eckert. Dossiers, 2019 · open access, CC BY 4.0 · translation funded by the FWF
Luther und die Reformation in internationalen Geschichtskulturen. Perspektiven für den Geschichtsunterricht
Roland Bernhard, Felix Hinz & Robert Maier (eds.) · Göttingen: V&R unipress, 2017 (Eckert. Die Schriftenreihe, vol. 145) · 407 pages · open access, CC BY 4.0 · publication funded by the FWF
Research methods · 2017–2019 · History Education Research Journal, UCL Press
Mixed methods and triangulation in history education research
CAOHT combined observation, interviews, questionnaires and textbook analysis — and raised the question of how such designs should be built and reported in history education research. In May 2017 Roland Bernhard, Christoph Bramann and Christoph Kühberger convened the conference “Triangulation in History Education Research” in Salzburg, and from it edited a special issue of the History Education Research Journal (UCL Press, 2019), with the methodologist Udo Kelle (Helmut Schmidt University Hamburg) and partners from University College London (Arthur Chapman), the History Educators International Research Network (Jon Nichol) and the University of Cumbria (Hilary Cooper). The introduction to mixed-methods and triangulation designs written with Udo Kelle and Christoph Kühberger is the issue’s methodological cornerstone.
Roland Bernhard is a member of the editorial board of the History Education Research Journal and of the Mixed Methods International Research Association. The mixed-methods craft developed here carried over into SQTE and TEPACE.
Publications from these projects
Selected publications 2013–2021
Monographs
Edited volumes and special issues
Articles and chapters
The complete list of publications from this period is in the CV.
What stayed
Two things carried over from these years into everything that followed: the conviction that research on schools has to listen to teachers before it advises them — and a mixed-methods craft that combines depth with breadth.