This chapter reports on a study that examines the cultivation of values in teaching ancient history in an Australian junior secondary school classroom. We focus on how the values of ‘democracy’ are discussed in learning about ‘city-states and governments in Ancient Greece’. Our analysis makes visible the language resources used to establish ‘democratic’ values and how these values are transmitted in the discourse of teaching and learning. We first identify three sources of evaluation – including the school’s history perspective, the teacher’s perspective, and the perspective of Australian citizens. We show that as the source of evaluation changes, different types of ‘democratic’ value are enacted. Democracy is formulated as a set of values enacted by clusters of evaluations, in opposition to what is evaluated as ‘non-democracy’. We also consider how the teacher confirms or rejects instances of evaluation as they work to form ‘bonds’, aligning students into a community of shared values. The chapter makes explicit the fact that in building knowledge of history, ‘what you know’ and ‘how you feel’ construct ‘who you are’.

In this chapter we explore the teaching of ancient history in an Australian junior secondary school classroom, focusing particularly on how the knowledge of government in city-states in Ancient Greek are developed. We show that an important part of knowledge building in ancient history involves ‘factoring out’ the meanings which are condensed in technical terms – characterised informally as ‘flexi-tech’ because of the weakly classified nature of the terms. Throughout two history lessons, the teacher guides the students to think ‘critically’ about how types of government are categorised. We show that while Spartan government is referred to in different pedagogic materials as a monarchy, an oligarchy, or a military state, as the lessons unfold the teacher repositions Spartan government as a complex structure – comprising elements of different kinds, including specific elements of democracy. Our analysis focuses on how this repositioning is achieved and what kind of ‘critical thinking’ is involved.

This chapter explores how written Spanish is used to construe causality in history discourse. It particularly examines the realisation of sequences in a Chilean secondary school textbook, when dealing with the implementation of neoliberalism in Chile. The study shows that the official teaching material draws heavily on logical metaphors to construe sequences. Owing to its focus on discourse semantics, this work offers clear criteria for identifying different types of logical metaphors, beyond the isolated causal lexis that might be found in a text. Based on different combinations of figures and connexions, realisations of sequence are scaled from the most congruent to the least congruent. Thus, the chapter delves into the lexicogrammatical particularities of written Spanish to metaphorically realise connexions. In addition, it reveals that logical metaphors interact with other discourse semantic systems and, therefore, make an enlarged meaning potential available for writers in history texts.

This chapter adopts an extended SFL perspective on pedagogic discourse, in dialogue with Bernstein’s work on regulative and instructional discourse and Maton’s work on autonomy codes. The model proposed establishes a framework for analysing shifts to and from disciplinary knowledge and values as curriculum genres unfold. Examples are taken from secondary school classroom discourse, a history lesson on castles in particular. Resources for scaffolding these shifts are reviewed, including internal connexion, semiotic entities, text reference, periodicity, linguistic services, and ‘internal’ attitude. The model is intended as a practical framework for designing and monitoring the role of disciplinary and extra-disciplinary knowledge and values in pedagogic discourse and as a theoretical framework for interpreting the accommodation of unity and difference in coherent text.

This chapter explores the development of empathy as a particular kind of historical sensibility that relates others’ historical experiences to interpreter’s affective semiotic processes. The chapter analyses negotiations of meaning about historical films in a university course to describe students’ affective involvement and moral engagement with the history of others. Learning about others’ history entails engaging in semiotic work to reconstruct past experiences which creates affordances for the past to become relevant in the present in axiological and affective terms. The chapter shows how through response papers and discussions about a film that depicts traumatic historical events, students display their positioning and the construction of axiological communities that connect past and present. The discourse analysis draws on the SFL concept of interpersonal meanings as construed through attitudes (Martin & White, 2005) and point of view (Unsworth, 2013) realising affective and moral orientations to others’ experience. The findings of this study offer some insights into Spanish interpersonal meaning-making resources and the potential of historical film as a tool to develop historical sensibility.

This chapter examines how the language resources used to incorporate written historical evidence contribute to the negotiation of values regarding Mapuche people in primary and secondary Chilean official history textbooks. The study considers as a starting point the broad categories proposed by the ENGAGEMENT subsystem of the APPRAISAL system (Martin & White, 2005). Then it explores in detail the metaphorical, more or less evident and non-metaphorical interpersonal and experiential realisations involved in ENGAGEMENT in Spanish, adopting an interstratal tension perspective on the relation between discourse semantics and lexicogrammar strata. The study shows that the monoglossic orientation as well as the heteroglossic orientation of dialogic contraction tend to be realised by history textbook authors through non-metaphorical realisations. However, the inclusion of external voices as [expand: attribute] tends to be done by both metaphorical and non-metaphorical experiential realisations, and also by lexicogrammatical structures that although they cannot be considered as interpersonal or experiential grammatical metaphors, make the external voices less ‘recoverable’.

This chapter aims to advance the exploration of history beyond SFL’s traditional understanding of it as a school subject. The chapter studies the role of history as part of a disciplinary domain in the humanities, addressing how it contributes to ‘cultivating the artist’ in a bachelor’s degree in Creative Arts in a Chilean university. This study integrates recent developments in systemic theory, particularly in relation to the discourse-semantics stratum. These developments offer interesting tools for examining history with a focus on genre, register, and discourse-semantics (Hao, 2020; Doran & Martin, 2021). The chapter analyses students’ writing at the initial stage of their curriculum, with the aim of identifying the nature of the historical genres that are emerging and their role in cultivating students’ gaze as artists-in-training. The chapter describes historical recounts through a metafunctionally diverse exploration of discourse semantic patterns in texts. This exploration contributes to providing an initial response to the questions what is history as a disciplinary domain? Is there something like ‘the history’, as a monolithic and single discipline?

This chapter explores the attitudinal resources in ancient Chinese history, based on focus texts extracted from Records of the Grand Historian. This book of history assumes historical significance in that it set the model for all subsequent official dynastic histories in China down to the seventeenth century. The study adopts a top-down perspective, approaching the focus texts from their genre and register features. Most chapters of the Records are biographical profiles of historical figures, and most of the biographies have a generic structure Orientation ^ Record ^ Evaluation. A particularly prominent feature of ancient Chinese histories represented by the Records is that they contain an explicit culminative stage of Evaluation, expressing the history writer’s attitude. The discourse analysis in relation to attitudes in this chapter is informed by the APPRAISAL systems of Martin and White (2005) . Through analysing the types and values of attitudes and their lexicogrammatical realisations in classical written Chinese, the study aims to facilitate an understanding of the genre of historical records of the Chinese imperial dynasties that prevailed for about two millennia, and an understanding of the social and cultural values in China that have been passed down from history to the present.

This chapter explores the cultivation of the value of unity in a secondary school history textbook in China by examining the chapters on the founding of the Yuan dynasty in the thirteenth century by the Mongols. The study draws on the system of FIELD in register and APPRAISAL in discourse semantics. As for FIELD, in establishing static relations, the textbook applies shifts in the assigned temporal properties, which affords the reading of a continuous development of history made possible by geo-political unity. In construing dynamic relations, the historical activities are presented as linear, culminating in the unification of the Mongolian steppe and the whole country. In addition, activities are organised in linear series to construe assimilation of the various ethnic groups. As for APPRAISAL, the textbook positively appreciates the activity of unifying the Mongolian steppe and the country, and negatively appreciates wars and disunity. The analyses presented in this chapter show the crucial role of ideational resources (i.e. FIELD), as well as interpersonal resources (i.e. APPRAISAL) in aligning textbook readers into a community of shared values, which is an important aspect of representing minority history in a multi-ethnic country like China.

In this chapter, we explore how Mandarin Chinese is used to describe and taxonomise phenomena in history discourse. While Systemic Functional Linguistics has had a long tradition of studying history discourse, particularly in English and Spanish, the focus has been on historical events and their impact. We show in our study that building knowledge of history also involves reporting what things were like in the past. We analyse a pedagogic text describing the development of handicrafts during the period of the Western Han dynasty (206 BC – AD 24), a particularly prosperous period in Chinese history. We approach the identification of language resources from a ‘tri-stratal’ and ‘top-down’ perspective, taking into account threefold aspects of meaning-making, including the static knowledge structure in the subject area, the language resources organised in the unfolding of the discourse, and the grammatical resources organised in the clause. We reveal that each meaning-making level has its unique characteristics in construing description and taxonomisation.