Temporal orientation in Spanish and Swedish teacher students’ narratives about gender equality

The main objective of the study was to analyze how Swedish and Spanish pre-service teachers’ temporal orientation influences their narratives and moral conceptions about gender inequality. 55 Spanish students and 76 Swedish students participated. The narratives were analyzed through a separate process of coding by both authors and the subsequence crossing of information in order to achieve agreement and reliability for the codes used. The analysis shows differences depending on cultural context, which may reflect the learning of narrative templates in History Education instead of a reflexive and critical learning. Mainly Spanish students described time under the concepts of change and continuity while Swedish students oftener saw time more as abrupt changes when describing the differences of current gender inequality regarding past times. Likewise, in almost all the narratives there is a naive way of understanding the sense of change over time. In the narratives there are no calls for individual action or descriptions of what possible actions there are for us to fight for a better future probably because history education does not provide examples in the past which mirror current social issues. These reflections make us to question why we teach history and how we do it.