This paper discusses the outline and implications of a recently initiated research project, ”REMAKE: Representations, resources and meaning-making. The Middle Ages as a knowledge domain in different learning environments”, funded by the Swedish research council. The aim of the project is to study how – and with what social and epistemological consequences – a knowledge domain is realized in different learning environments. Here, we look at how the subject of history, and more specifically “the Middle Ages”, is realized in pre-school, compulsory school and upper secondary school contexts.

Based on a design-theoretic, multimodal perspective on learning and communication (Rostvall & Selander, 2008; Selander & Kress, 2010), the project takes a starting point in the assumption that a given knowledge domain is realized in different ways in different learning environments, as a result of a complex interaction of selections, representations and actions by the participants involved. There is not a given core or consensus of what this domain is or what parts or aspects the subject area should encompass.

The project will put an emphasis on the resources used by teachers and learners in their work to design and re-design the subject content, and on how specific designs for learning shape the possibilities for how one can learn and engage with a certain knowledge domain. The resources brought into play will be analysed in terms of how they are used, what they add to the representation of the historical epoch in focus, and how they affect the learners’ possibilities to make meaning.

By means of classroom observations, where all work around the Middle Ages will be documented in a selection of groups and classes, the project will investigate a) teachers didactic design; b) different representations of the Middle Ages and c) how children/pupils interpret, transform and design their conception of the knowledge domain. Doing this, we deal with questions of agency, cultures of recognition (what is acknowledged as history, as knowledge/knowing in relation to history and as resources for learning about history) and the uses of history in different contexts.

On a more comprehensive level, the project aims at comparing the differences within the educational system. We ask ourselves: How do the representations of the middle ages differ in pre-school, compulsory school and upper secondary school? What may the long term consequences of these differences be in terms of learners’ abilities to engage with and deepen their understanding of the specific domain?