More or Less Powerful Ideas of Fifteen-Year-Old Greek Students About

Accounts and Empathy During the Teaching of a

Controversial Historical Issue

Kosmas Vasileios

(Department of Primary Education, Democritus University of Thrace, Alexandroupoli, Greece)

Abstract: The use of controversial issues in education and particularly in history teaching has intensified in the last decades. This research belongs to an increasing body of literature on the limitations and auspicious perspectives of exploiting controversial aspects of the past. Furthermore, it associates controversial issues with the enhancement of the procedural concepts of history. The research was conducted in three middle schools of the Xanthi Prefecture, northern Greece, in 2017 and 2018. During a teaching of the Greek civil war, which consisted of role-playing activities promoting historical competencies, the 15-year-old students of the experimental groups expressed a variety of ideas about the differing narratives of a controversial issue and showed different levels of historical empathy. The findings of the lesson recordings indicate that teaching grounded in the disciplinary nature of history could facilitate the emergence of students’ tacit ideas, compared to a traditional instruction based only on declarative knowledge. 

Key words: controversial issues, different accounts, Greek civil war, historical empathy, multi-perspectivity, role-playing activities