A national hero or a Wily Politician? Students’ ideas about the origins of the nation in Sweden

The topic of this article is how primary school students express ideas about the ‘origins of the nation’. The study is based on texts written by Swedish students aged 12–13 about a historical event well embedded in Swedish national mythology, the rise to power of Swedish ‘founding father’ Gustav Vasa. The analysis is inspired by James V. Wertsch's concept of schematic narrative templates. The main finding of the study is that the students mainly structure their answers along one of two different narrative templates; either a kind of historical master narrative with strong foundations in traditional Swedish history culture, or a more generic story about the founding father as a ruthless or corrupt politician, which is arguably influenced by presentism.     

Representations over the Earth’s shape and the process of day and night from Nahua indigenous schoolchildren / Representaciones sobre la forma de la Tierra y del proceso día y noche en niños de escuelas indígenas Nahuas

This research presents the way in which children from a Nahua indigenous community build representations of the Earth’s shape, as well as the process that causes day and night. Concepts from school and local culture were studied. For the first case, a questionnaire was applied to 331 children, out of which 38 children were then interviewed on the topics from the questionnaire. For the cultural ideas, three teachers from the region and 30 children from the sample were interviewed. The results show that the representations depend on the form of questioning and the existence of three models: a flat structure with a celestial dome and mechanisms that hide or remove the Sun or the Moon in order to create day and night; a spherical structure with a surrounding sky, where the Sun and Moon rise and set; and a transitional model with a hollow sphere, flat surface and celestial dome. Cultural ideas do not appear to have any influence over these models, probably due to a loss of the community’s cosmogonic knowledge and the age of the children.