Väitös (kasvatustiede): KM, MA Mikko Kainulainen

KM, MA Mikko Kainulainen esittää väitöskirjansa ”Like historians? On the practice of historiography and its implications for history education” julkisesti tarkastettavaksi Turun yliopistossa lauantaina 28.11.2026 klo 10.00 (Turun yliopisto, Educarium, Edu2-luentosali, Assistentinkatu 5, Turku).

Vastaväittäjänä toimii emeritusprofessori Mario Carretero (Autonomous University of Madrid, Espanja, ja Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences (FLACSO), Argentiina) ja kustoksena dosentti Marjaana Puurtinen (Turun yliopisto). Tilaisuus on englanninkielinen. Väitöksen alana on kasvatustiede.

Tiivistelmä väitöstutkimuksesta:

In recent decades, approaches to history education have increasingly modelled their pedagogical designs based on conceptions about what it is that historians do while engaged in historical research and writing. Most prominently, this is present in inquiry-based learning approaches to history education, where in scaffolded and guided ways, the students themselves engage in historical inquiries through simplified designs.

Educational researchers have conducted empirical studies with historians, and through these studies, aspects of historical inquiry have been identified as key to students’ comprehension of the production of historical knowledge. But how well does this existing understanding represent the various aspects of historians’ practices? This thesis explores the practice of historiography (i.e., historical research and writing) both theoretically and empirically and reads this practice against the educational approaches that rely on it.

The theoretical part of the thesis analyses the concept of history as different kinds of epistemic practices, and considers the implications of this from the perspective of conceptual change learning. After this, the thesis proceeds to its central point of inquiry: empirically exploring experts’ practices of historiography. In this regard, the thesis asks: What do historians aim to achieve with their research and writing, and why? How do they evaluate their own and others’ work? What do historians do while engaged in historical research and writing?

The empirical part of the thesis presents the findings from in-depth interviews with 26 Finnish academic historians. These interviews focused on a set of investigations that the participants were currently engaged in or had recently finalized. The interviews were analyzed by means of qualitative content analyses. As findings from these analyses, the thesis presents a range of different aims, ideals, and processes that characterize historians’ practices of historiography. The findings are discussed in terms of what new aspects they suggest for consideration in future models of inquiry-based learning in history and how some of these aspects might be more relevant or suitable at different levels of history education. Overall, the thesis contributes to further developing approaches of history education and to future studies of epistemic practices of historians and other experts.