Historical literacy and contradictory evidence in Finnish high school setting : The Bronzen Soldier of Tallinn

This is an electronic reprint of the original article. This reprint may differ from the original in pagination and typographic detail. Author(s): Title: Year: Version: Please cite the original version: All material supplied via JYX is protected by copyright and other intellectual property rights, and duplication or sale of all or part of any of the repository collections is not permitted, except that material may be duplicated by you for your research use or educational purposes in electronic or print form. You must obtain permission for any other use. Electronic or print copies may not be offered, whether for sale or otherwise to anyone who is not an authorised user. Historical literacy and contradictory evidence in Finnish high school setting : The Bronzen Soldier of Tallinn Veijola, Anna; Mikkonen, Simo Veijola, A., & Mikkonen, S. (2016). Historical literacy and contradictory evidence in Finnish high school setting : The Bronzen Soldier of Tallinn. Historical Encounters, 3(1), 1-16. http://hej.hermes-history.net/index.php/HEJ/article/view/52 2016 PLEASE CITE AS: Veijola, A., & Mikkonen, S. (2016). Historical Literacy and Contradictory Evidence in Finnish High School Setting: The Bronze Soldier of Tallinn. Historical Encounters: A journal of historical consciousness, historical cultures, and history education, 3(1), 1-16. ISSN 2203 7543 | © Authors | Available Online: http://hej.hermes-history.net Historical literacy and contradictory evidence in a Finnish high school setting: The Bronze Soldier of Tallinn Anna Veijola & Simo Mikkonen University of Jyväskylä ABSTRACT: This article revolves around three key issues. First, over the last 30 years, the traditional approach to history teaching as memorization of facts and chains of events has been changing. Currently, the Finnish national core curriculum fixes the focus of history teaching on students’ critical and historical thinking skills. However, the curriculum leaves a lot of maneuvering scope for schools and individual teachers, but teachers seemingly still emphasize content over skills with too little focus on historical thinking skills. Second, Finland has so far been lacking in research on students’ historical thinking skills, even if they have been adopted as an important part of the curriculum. What existing research there is shows that only a few students are able to evaluate the information available and make sense of contradictory interpretations of past events. Third, this article reports an experiment that aimed at offering students more opportunities to develop their historical thinking skills and at the same time evaluated their historical thinking ability. The case chosen was confrontation in Estonia between ethnic Russian and Estonian population around historical interpretations of the so-called Bronze Soldier that led to unrests and violence in Tallinn in 2007. Our research points out that Finnish students have weaknesses in their text skills. Furthermore, analysis of these weaknesses emphasizes a need for research that would examine what kind of interventions change how students learn and how their ability for historical thinking can be improved. KEYWORDS: historical thinking, historical literacy, history teaching, Finland, high school students, critical thinking skills Introduction History as a subject is more than just facts about the past. Working with documents that can be interpreted in several ways or that contain contradicting evidence comprises an important part of historical research (Seixas & Morton 2013; Wineburg 2001; Lee 2011). The traditional approach to history teaching—the memorization of facts and chains of events—has changed over the last 30 years. This has resulted in part from the linguistic turn in history. Ever since Hayden White (1973) suggested that historiography mirrors literary writing and emphasizes “narrativity,” the traditional tenets of historical objectivity have been increasingly challenged. This has resulted in an emphasis on the role of interpretation in the process of historical inquiry. The historians’ turn towards language, particularly in the 1980s, did not fail to have an impact on the objectives and practices of history teaching. The linguistic turn in history was followed by a new emphasis on the interpretational nature of history. This led to changes in the curricula of Finnish primary and secondary education in the 1980s, but it was especially influential during the 1990s. Earlier, the curricula Historical Literacy and Contradictory Evidence in Finnish High School Setting: The Bronze Soldier of Tallinn 2 were more clearly content based, which meant that competence in history required a good rote memory. Since the 1990s, however, history teaching in Finnish general upper secondary schools (hereafter: high schools)1 has been based on skill-based curricula and instruction. Today, competence in history requires that students know how to determine causes, present their reasoning, and consider the authenticity of the evidence. The stated focus of history teaching is to develop students’ critical and historical thinking skills (National Core Curriculum 2003; Rantala 2012). Jukka Rantala (2012) has pointed out that these changes in the Finnish history curriculum are manifested in two effects: history itself has become more popular, but at the same time, it has become a more difficult subject. The traditional memory-based history was easier to master, because the information provided was static. The “new history” requires the student not only to know the content, but also to be able to deal with the uncertainty of information (Rantala 2012). Teaching in Finland is based on a national core curriculum, which is determined by the Finnish National Board of Education. It defines the objectives and core contents of different subjects, subject groups, thematic subject modules, and student counseling. It also specifies the principles of student assessment but leaves a lot of maneuvering scope for schools and individual teachers. The present national core curriculum for the upper secondary schools was approved in 2003. According to it, history learning is strongly skill-oriented, and its main objective is to teach students about the nature of history, which means that attention will be focused on critical analysis and interpretation of information (National Core Curriculum 2003, 180). At the moment (2015), the core curriculum is being revised, but is not expected to bring major changes. Although the Finnish national core curriculum for basic education and the upper secondary school has since the early 1990s emphasized an understanding of the nature of history, changes in teaching practices have been minor. Several reasons for this can be found. Firstly, textbooks hold a strong position in Finnish school culture (Törnroos 2004, 32-34), and even though they may contain attempts to try to teach analytic skills, they without exception stress content knowledge and pay little attention to the nature of history. Furthermore, even though teachers are allowed to choose the textbooks they use and to customize their teaching, they still quite commonly follow the textbook. Secondly, teacher-centered orientation is strong in history teaching, and the teachers’ basic ideas about what history is and how it should be taught have not changed. Even when new methods like co-operative learning are used, the basis of history teaching is still content oriented (Rautiainen 2013; Rantala 2012). Thirdly, it has proved hard for teachers to change their teaching methods. It is difficult especially for novice teachers to find a proper balance between substantive and procedural knowledge in their teaching. Moreover, experienced teachers commonly stick to their familiar teaching habits. They might not see the point of following the latest didactic discussion, or they may lack sufficient skills to teach procedural history and hence continue to teach in the way they have always done (Rantala 2012, 203-204). The little research that exists also shows that only a few students are able to evaluate the information available and make sense of contradictory interpretations of past events (Rantala & van den Berg 2013; Veijola & Mikkonen 2015; Kouki & Virta 2015). Both substantive knowledge and conceptual thinking as well as the interplay between them are essential in the learning of historical thinking. As Rantala (2012, 203) states, “The dichotomy of content versus skills is not valid because both are needed in developing students’ historical thinking.” Historical thinking skills, then, form the basis of the nature of history as a discipline and its criteria for the formation of knowledge. Peter Seixas and Tom Morton (2013, 2) write that the basic question about historical thinking is “How do we know Historical Literacy and Contradictory Evidence in Finnish High School Setting: The Bronze Soldier of Tallinn 3 what we know about the past?” There is no single answer to this question. Historical thinking is a creative process without a universal structure that would apply to all cultures at all times. Seixas and Morton have pointed to six concepts of historical thinking that constitute a framework for helping students to think about how historians transform the past into history, and guide them toward constructing history themselves. These concepts are historical significance, evidence, continuity and change, cause and consequence, historical perspectives, and the ethical dimension (Seixas & Morton 2013, 4; see also VanSledright 2004). Historians’ knowledge of the past is largely bound to texts. After the linguistic turn, the complex ways in which historical meaning is constituted, transmitted, and transformed have become more apparent (Toews 1987). Instead of simply regurgitating textbooks in order to learn history, students have to read different kinds of texts and make interpretations based on them (Schleppegrell & de Oliveira 2006). Different scholars have offered slightly different definitions of historical thinking. However, all research on historical thinking comes down to documents as key elements to examining how students understand and make sense of the past (e.g., Ashby 2005; VanSledright & Afflerbach 2005; Gago 2005). Reading itself is not a simple or neutral process. When reading sources, the reader has to realize the manifest contents of a text, which means that he or she needs to understand concepts, the structure of the whole text, find out the underlying messages, detect bias, and finally draw conclusions. Literacy also includes the dimension of writing and communicating as an active participant in a society, the ability to express ideas effectively (Virta 2007). Apple (2000, 42-43) points out that it is not enough to possess technical literacy or even functional literacy; critical literacy is needed, because knowledge is not neutral. Thus, in history, the concept of literacy is much broader than simply “reading and writing” (Virta 2007). In Finnish school contexts, historical text skills are defined as “the ability to work with documents that have a historical context, the skill to read (analyze) texts produced by past actors and to produce valid interpretations about those uses.” (Rantala & van den Berg 2013, 395; Opetushallitus 2014, 415). When historical text skills and historical literacy are defined like this, they overlap with historical thinking skills. In this article, we propose that historical thinking requires historical text skills. Furthermore, by observing students’ historical text skills, it is possible to understand their historical thinking skills. In Britain, the Schools Council History Project has focused on historical thinking skills since the 1970s (Laville 2004, 172–173). This approach spread beyond Britain, reaching Finland in the 1990s. Educational research has shown an increased interest in the learning of history, particularly since the early 1990s. It is perhaps illustrative of the fluid nature of the field that the terms used to describe the aims of history education have fluctuated: for example, historical thinking (Seixas 1993, Wineburg 2001; Husbands 1996; VanSledright & Frankes 2000; Seixas & Morton 2013), historical literacy (e.g., Lowenthal 1997; Lee 2011), historical reasoning (van Drie & van Boxtel 2008), and historical consciousness (Rüsen 2004; Von Borries 1997; Lee 2004). Van Drie and van Boxtel (2008) point out that some authors relate historical thinking and reasoning to historical literacy and consciousness. In our research, we have adopted the terms “historical thinking” and “historical literacy.” We believe that historical literacy is an essential tool (although we acknowledge that it is more than just a tool) for developing historical thinking skills. Implementation The data used in this research is linked to a course held in a Finnish high school. We had compiled a set of assignments that were used in the course “The history of the Soviet Union/Russia and the USA.” The other author of this article was also the teacher of this Historical Literacy and Contradictory Evidence in Finnish High School Setting: The Bronze Soldier of Tallinn 4 course. Typically for courses in a Finnish high school, it lasted 38 hours (5 hours a week over 7 weeks). The main idea of the course was to combine problem-based learning with ICT. One part (unit) of this course was a document-based exercise dealing with the events surrounding a statue called the Bronze Soldier of Tallinn and particularly with different interpretations concerning these events in 2007. This part was used for collecting the data for this study. The course was tooled to offer students opportunities to develop their historical thinking skills and simultaneously make it yield research data about their abilities in historical thinking. Most of the existing studies about historical thinking have used data based on materials compiled solely by the researcher, allowing little room for students to gather and process information as researchers themselves. We wanted to create a more open and genuine research framework. For this purpose, we planned a unit in which students worked with source material consisting of texts and pictures and also had a chance to use the internet throughout the course. They were also given an opportunity to present and check their interpretations with a university scholar who is a specialist in the subject (and also the other author of this article). One important part of this exercise was that students needed to make subject-related questions that they would present to the specialist. The idea was that they would not only get more information in this way but would also learn to pose questions that would direct them towards alternative interpretations (see also Reisman 2012, 240). The Bronze Soldier is the informal name of a war memorial featuring a Red Army soldier in Tallinn, Estonia. It was erected by Soviet authorities on September 22, 1947, three years after the Red Army returned to Estonia during WWII, on the site of several war graves. The official name of the memorial was originally “Monument to the Liberators of Tallinn.” This was considered too controversial after Estonia became independent in 1991, and it was therefore changed to “Monument to the Fallen in the Second World War,” which reflected the fact that Estonians fought in both the German Wehrmacht and the Soviet Red Army. In April 2007, the Estonian government relocated the Bronze Soldier as well as the remains of the Soviet soldiers (after exhumation and identification) to the Defense Forces Cemetery in Tallinn. Political differences over the interpretation of the war and the Soviet period in Estonia that the monument symbolized had, even before 2007, led to controversies between ethnic Estonians and the community of multiethnic Russophone post-WWII immigrants living in Estonia, and between the Russian and Estonian governments. The dispute surrounding the relocation peaked with two nights of riots in Tallinn, a weeklong blockade of the Estonian embassy in Moscow, and cyber-attacks on several Estonian organizations. The students received a material pack compiled by the authors containing two pictures of the monument, two news items about the situation related to the dispute in 2007, excerpts from a book Pronssisoturi [The Bronze Soldier] (Johan Bäckman, 2008) and a copy of the oath sworn by the Pioneers who guarded the statue during the Soviet era, a tradition revived by the pro-Russian activists during the riots in 2007. Texts were of different lengths and styles. The longest excerpt (722 words) was from Bäckman’s book. The oath was 119 words, and news items were 115 and 350 words. Both news items were from a regional, independent newspaper Turun Sanomat, based on information from the Finnish News Agency and printed three days after the riots first began. Photographs depicted the statue, the first one in its original place and the other after the statue was relocated. The texts contained contradictory facts and interpretations. Johan Bäckman’s book for its part was a polemical—even propagandistic—description of the dispute, and the situation in Estonia regarding its Russian minority. It was quite obviously one-sided, demonizing the actions of the Estonian government and making the Russians innocent victims. All the texts were in Finnish, the students’ native language. The students were also given six groups of questions to answer, which were to be answered over a period of six consecutive 45-minute- Historical Literacy and Contradictory Evidence in Finnish High School Setting: The Bronze Soldier of Tallinn 5 long lessons spread over several days. Throughout the course, the students could use laptops, tablets, and their smartphones for acquiring information. Question groups in the assignment were built to incrementally deepen the students’ understanding of the historical research process. The idea was to teach them to work like historians. First, they were asked to try to contextualize the pictures and texts and link them to past events. Then, they had to itemize the content and, after that, look for possible contradictions found between the texts. Finally, the students were asked to write their own conclusions about the Bronze Soldier dispute. The questions eliciting their answers gave quite explicit hints that the Bronze Soldier dispute contained controversial views. The idea was that this would lead the students to focus on differing interpretations. Ultimately, students were asked to reflect upon their work, findings, and the whole process. Before students wrote their own conclusions, they were given a chance to ask questions from a university scholar related to the documents and findings made by the students. Questions were drafted beforehand during the lessons. The teacher did not collect the questions in advance, although some of the students wanted to check their questions from the teacher before the scholar was contacted. Contacting took place via a video conferencing system. Students were familiar with both the system and the scholar through previous similar sessions during the course when the university scholar had explained the situation in Estonia to the students by, for example, giving them facts about the population of Estonia, underlining that it is an ethnically heterogeneous country. Scholar explained how the statue was important to Russian identity in Estonia. After consulting with the scholar, students were asked to write their own analysis of the situation and answer to the question “What was the Bronze Soldier dispute about?” Throughout the process, students produced written answers that we have been able to use as the data to examine their learning processes, not just their final analysis. The teacher was present throughout the course and assignments were written at school. The data were collected from 11 high school students from an average Finnish high school of about 300 students. Six of them were female and five were male. The students were 17–19 years old, and they were all Finnish native speakers. The idea of the course was that students would work independently with the teacher acting less as the specialist and more as their guide to research, answering questions when students needed to consult someone. Students were aware that their answers would become part of this study. They had a right to refuse their answers from this study, but no one declined. Students wrote their answers alone, but they were allowed to discuss with each other during the whole process. In order to check the limits of what was possible, we had 13 history students (7 male and 6 female) at the University of Jyväskylä do the same exercise and act as a reference group a few months later.2 The selected students were history majors who were studying to become history teachers. They had all studied history for at least two years and a few had longer periods of study behind them. This group did basically the same exercise, but with less time for contextualizing, and without a chance to check their interpretations with the specialist scholar. Furthermore, they had altogether only 60 minutes to complete the whole task. We assumed that they would have basic knowledge of the research area in question and be familiar with historical analysis and the nature of history. Results For the analysis, we used the framework introduced by VanSledright and Afflerbach (2005, 2- 4) to recognize different aspects related to students’ historical thinking. They point out that the analysis and assessment of the nature of sources draws on at least four closely interconnected cognitive activities that begin with close critical reading. These activities are Historical Literacy and Contradictory Evidence in Finnish High School Setting: The Bronze Soldier of Tallinn 6 attribution, identification, perspective, and reliability. Attribution involves recognizing that a source is an account constructed by an author for a particular purpose. It also requires locating the historical context of its author. Identification involves knowing what a source is: what type of account it is (a primary or secondary source, a diary, a letter, a newspaper article, etc.); when it was created; and what the grammar, vocabulary, and spelling is like. Perspective involved a set of judgments about the author’s social, cultural, and political position, which, according to VanSledright and Afflerbach (2005, 2-4), is difficult because ascertaining the author’s perspective or personality often takes the form of reading between the lines or below the surface of the text. Reliability, too, calls for judgment. Judging the reliability of a source involves comparing it with other sources from the same period or context. We added one more level, novice, below these four, in order to reflect the fact that students might fail to consider the reliability of sources. Wineburg (1991) points to several differences between expert and novice ways of reading historical texts. Typically, novices seek only to know (content knowledge); they ask what the text says (facts); and they assume neutrality and objectivity in texts. It is also common that novices ignore word choice and tone, and when they make their own summaries, they try to tell the “truth” and sound as certain as possible. However, instead of dividing readers to novices and experts, we considered it expedient to have several categories for measuring students’ ability for historical thinking. The data were analyzed by dividing the students’ reports into five levels: 0) Novice (sees the sources as neutral information; does not see them as artifacts created by authors); 1) Attribution (recognizes that someone has drawn up the source for some particular purpose); 2) Identification (identifies the nature of the source and can tell if it is a primary or secondary source); 3) Perspective (is able to associate the source with a historical context and to compare the sources); and 4) Reliability (is able to assess the reliability of the sources and compare them). It is important to notice that attribution and identification often go together (VanSledright and Afflerbach 2005, 4). Typically, several of these activities occur simultaneously when an expert works with sources. Both the high school and the university students’ texts were analyzed using this framework. University students were used merely as a reference group that would exemplify what was possible. In the analysis, we were fairly strict and required quite a lot from answers in order to reach certain levels. Thus, for example, when a student displayed some ability to identify a single source as written by someone, this was not enough to reach this level. Students had to evaluate sources as a whole and compare them with each other. Practically all students made some comparison between the sources when asked but rarely included this in their final analyses. Furthermore, it was quite common among the high school students’ texts that they recognized only some of the sources as having a writer. Novice Attribution Identification Perspective Reliability High School students 5 6 1 University Students 9 2 2 Figure 1: Level of students’ cognitive activity One of the 11 high school students reached the Identification level (as shown in Figure 1) and was able to question the reliability of the sources, but even he failed to contextualize the Historical Literacy and Contradictory Evidence in Finnish High School Setting: The Bronze Soldier of Tallinn 7 texts, which would have been a prerequisite for proceeding to the next level. Six students reached the Attribution level, and five were Novice readers. Typically, the students were able to identify the type of text in question as “a newspaper article” or “an excerpt from the book,” but they did not recognize that someone had written it for a particular purpose. Another interesting finding was that the students did not refer to any sources when they were writing their own analyses about what the dispute was about. Moreover, most of the high school students failed to use the “memorial guards of honor oath” altogether, which was the only primary source given. Only the reader who attained the Identification level, one of those who reached the Attribution level and two Novice readers, seemed to pay any attention at all to the oath. However, it needs to be pointed out that university students had similar problems. Even though they routinely described the content of the source as asked, none referred to it as part of their analysis, suggesting that it was too much to ask high school students to pay attention to it. In the third part of the exercise, students were asked to itemize the content of each text and identify possible contradictions. Students were also asked to consider the reliability of the information and ask which source (text or person) they felt was most reliable and why. University students were apparently used to controversies in source materials. Subjectivity in Bäckman’s text in particular was easy to discover for them. More striking, however, was that news items were dealt as neutral sources of information. It was no wonder, then, that high school students had even more problems evaluating the reliability of the sources. They were able to evaluate the information mainly to the extent of when, where, and by whom the sources were produced. As for considering the credibility of the sources and authors’ intentions, if at all, they pointed out to a source that for them seemed to be incompatible with others, most typically Bäckman’s book. Thus, it seemed that they tried to find a source that ran counter to others. After discovering this, they tended to think that other sources were correct, providing the right version of events. The newspaper articles present the relocation of the statue in a more neutral way [than the book written by Johan Bäckman]. (HS Student 11, F3) Bäckman’s research gives only one researcher's opinion about the events. … Both news items are fairly neutral. (HS Student 2, M) Perhaps I trust the text written by a specialist more than those newspaper articles or texts in the internet. (HS Student 3, M) The author’s opinion may appear in the book and the attitudes of the authors can tinge [the presentation of] the matter. (HS Student 3, F) Common to all these answers was the fact that although the students tied their answers to the texts to some extent, their answers seemed rather extraneous to them. Only one student was able to analyze the sources more deeply: Bäckman’s (subjective) book, The Bronze Soldier, tells the story of the Bronze Soldier in a very aggressive way (for example, the choice of words: “nondescript platitude,” “Blitzkrieg against the dead”) and is sometimes even hostile. He [the author] feels that the exhumations were a sacrilege, and he is sure that everybody thinks like he does. He also thinks that the relocation of the statue was a military operation. Furthermore, he thinks that the riots surrounding the statue dispute were caused by “fascist leaders,” while the newspaper articles mostly adopt a more objective position. (HS Student 10, M) This student’s answer shows his ability to back up his argument with this source. More typically, however, students’ answers contained isolated fragments from the sources. Moreover, the high school students very typically tried to find “the facts” from the texts. That could easily be seen from the questions that the students put to the specialist. In fact, it was very hard for them to come up with questions to present in the first place. They were Historical Literacy and Contradictory Evidence in Finnish High School Setting: The Bronze Soldier of Tallinn 8 much more used to answering than asking questions (see also Logtenberg 2012, 20). The questions the students asked indicate their strong focus on the history of events. They seemed to think that studying history means knowing dates, places, numbers, and names: How many corpses were buried there? (HS Student 3, M) Were there 12 or 13 corpses buried under the monument? (HS Student 9, F) Some of the questions showed their confusion about the essence of what had happened: Who was against the relocation of the statue? (HS Student 1, F) Why were the Estonians rioting and against the relocation of the statue? (HS Student 6, F) Even though the university students did not have an opportunity to present questions to the scholar, we asked them to pen down questions raised by the source material. Those university students who just identified the nature of the sources and summarized their contents posed questions that dealt mostly with content of the events: How was the dispute solved? (Uni student 10, F) What is the role of Russians in Estonia? (Uni student 11, F) However, some of the university students were more able to pose questions that opened the door to a wider examination of the phenomenon: How does Bäckman explain the “facts” that he claims? (Uni student 13, F) How was the situation experienced in the Russian media? (Uni student 5, M) Will events like Bronze Soldier become more common between Russia and its neighbors? What kind of relationship will there be in the future between Russia and those countries that were formerly part of its empire? (Uni student 4, M) The ability to form questions is one of the most important parts of historical thinking. Developing deeper historical thinking and understanding begins with rich questions. As VanSledright (2014, 32-35) states, students are not able to pose questions if they are not used to doing so. Students need a deep understanding of history in order to know how to ask good historical questions. It is quite typical of novice learners that their understanding is too shallow to ask deep historical questions, and therefore the questions that they ask seem trivial. Logtenberg (2012, 34-38) points out that students who have the best background knowledge ask more questions. Even if the questions are so-called lower level questions, not very relevant considering the topic, this might lead them towards more relevant questions than not posing questions at all. The students also tended to simplify the past into as few events and persons as possible and ignored those that they considered irrelevant. For many of them, the events of 2007 were completely detached from the situation after WWII, which was of extreme importance for the conflicting Russian and Estonian interpretations. The high school students’ answers were vitiated by their failure to appreciate the chronological and topological context involved. They reported the events in 2007 but did not link their answers to the past, even though they had been pointed in that direction. Barton and Levstik (2009, 134-136) note that students quite commonly tend to simplify historical change. For many students, history is a very simple, single narrative. This seems to be supported by our findings. When asked to consider the reliability of different sources, high school students opted for the written texts. At the same time, they had accepted interpretations from the scholar they had consulted during the process and repeated his interpretations, even copying the formulation the scholar had used. Even so, the students wrote that they placed most trust in the book written by Bäckman. They felt that since Bäckman’s book was non-fiction, it had to Historical Literacy and Contradictory Evidence in Finnish High School Setting: The Bronze Soldier of Tallinn 15 VanSledright, B. & Frankes, L (2000). Concept- and strategic-knowledge development in historical study: A comparative exploration in two fourth grade classrooms. Cognition and Instruction, 18 (2), 239–283. VanSledright, B (2004). What does it mean to think historically... And how do you teach it? Social education, 68 (3), 230–233. VanSledright, B (2014). Assessing historical thinking & understanding. Innovative designs for new standards. New York: Routledge. VanSledright, B. & Afflerbach, P (2005). Assessing the status of historical sources: An exploratory study of eight U.S. elementary the students reading documents. In P. Lee (Ed)., International Review of History Education, vol. 4 (pp. 1–20). London: Routledge. Veijola, A. & Mikkonen S (2015). Miten menneestä tehtyä historiaa tulkitaan? Tutkiva oppiminen ja monilukutaito lukion historian opetuksessa. In M. Kauppinen, M. Rautiainen & M. Tarnanen (eds)., Rajaton tulevaisuus. Kohti kokonaisvaltaista oppimista (pp. 155- 170). Ainedidaktiikan symposiumi Jyväskylässä 13.–14.2.2014. Jyväskylän yliopistopaino: Jyväskylä. White, H (1974). Metahistory: The Historical imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Wineburg, S (2001). Historical thinking and other unnatural Acts. Charting the future of teaching the past. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Virta, A (2007). Historical literacy: Thinking, reading and understanding history. Journal of Research in Teacher Education, 14 (4), 11–25. [http://www.lh.umu.se/digitalAssets/21/21031_lofu_4_07.pdf] Von Borries, B (1997). Concepts of Historical thinking and historical learning in the perspective of German the students and teachers. International Journal of Educational Research, 27 (3), 211–220. About the Authors Anna Veijola * has worked for several years as high school history teacher. Currently, she is university teacher at the Department of Teacher Education, University of Jyväskylä. In her PhD work, she examined the development of history teacher students' pedagogical thinking. Currently, she is conducting research on inquiry-based history teaching and historical literacy in high school setting. Simo Mikkonen is Research Fellow of the Academy of Finland and an adjunct professor of Russian history at the Department of History and Ethnology, University of Jyväskylä, Finland. He has previously published the monograph State Composers and the Red Courtiers. Music, Ideology and Politics in the Soviet 1930s (Mellenpress 2009), and edited Beyond the Divide: Entangled Histories of Cold War Europe (Berghahn 2015), as well as Music, Art, and Diplomacy: East-West Cultural Interactions and the Cold War (Routledge 2016) and authored several research articles. * Corresponding Author Email: [email protected] Historical Literacy and Contradictory Evidence in Finnish High School Setting: The Bronze Soldier of Tallinn 16 1 We use high school instead of Finnish general upper secondary school (lukio in Finnish) for the sake of clarity. In Finland, the post-compulsory upper secondary level comprises general and vocational education. After comprehensive school education, 95.5% of school-leavers pursue further voluntary basic education (2.5%) or continue their studies in upper secondary schools (54.5%) or in initial vocational education and training (38.5%). Upper secondary education offers general education for students of approx. 16–19 years of age. Subjects are taught in courses that are not bound to a particular year of study. It usually lasts three years. 2 The University of Jyväskylä is a nationally and internationally prestigious research university that focuses on the human and natural sciences. The QS World University Rankings by Subject has ranked the University of Jyväskylä among the world’s top 200 universities in education, psychology, and history. For education, it is ranked among the 51–100 top universities and for history among the top 151–200. (http://www.topuniversities.com/subject-rankings) 3 Students’ answers have been numbered and indicate whether a student is male or female, although there were no visible gender differences.