Teaching Local History in History Courses from the Perspective of Secondary School History Teachers and Students in Kohkiloyeh and Boyerahmad Provinces

The main purpose of this study was to investigate teaching different dimensions of local history in history courses from the perspective of secondary school history teachers and students. To conduct the research, 16 teachers were selected purposefully and 285 students were randomly selected. The data collection tools for the quantitative data were two researcher made questionnaires for history teachers and students. The content validity was checked to determine the validity, and the Cronbach's alpha was measured to determine the reliability, which was 68.2 and 97.3 for the questionnaire number one and two, respectively. The qualitative data, in addition to the open-ended questions of the students’ questionnaires, and semi-structured interviews with 8 history teachers, were analyzed through grounded theory. The results showed that students and teachers have positive attitudes towards teaching the local history of the province. From the students points of view, teaching political history have the most importance and economical history has the leastimportance as compared to other dimensions. History teachers found teaching cultural-social history the most important and teaching economical history as the least important dimension of local history. Morever, among the teachers and students points of view regarding the importance of teaching local history in the history courses were: pedagogical necessity, understanding one’s living environment, meeting the spiritual needs of individuals, strengthening the spirit of patriotism, representation and preservation of local identity and multilateral development of the community. In order to teach local history, history teachers proposed the following cooperative teaching-based teaching-learning method, narrating historical stories by the teacher (oral history), and teaching by electronical resources