As the field of history education begins to acknowledge the need to respond to the challenges of the Anthropocene, questions arise concerning students' ability to use history to make sense of pressing environmental issues. To address this, 67 Swedish upper secondary school students were asked to historicise issues like global warming and share their ideas concerning the present and the future. Within the framework of Jörn Rüsen's narrative theory, this article analyses how and to what extent these students experienced and interpreted the past and used history to orient themselves in relation to such issues. It also develops on the outcome of this process. While most students historicised the situation, many students made limited use of history. Their typical narrative can be described as a linear story of historical industrialisation driven by the hunger for progression and wealth and facilitated by ignorance. It was told with little detail or reference to evidence and in a way that generally seemed unsupported by historical thinking. Moreover, their typical narrative mostly aligned with the standard science-based Anthropocene narrative, lacking cultural and political perspectives. Although their orientations varied, students focused on technical solutions and lifestyle adjustments rather than civic engagement and politics. Students were worried about the future. However, the narrative of technological and scientific progression and the belief that people in the past lacked awareness and technological alternatives gave students hope. On the other hand, viewing them as informed or inherently selfish contributed to pessimism. Supported by theoretical work, the findings indicate ways school history may support students' ability to deal with Anthropocene issues, helping them to experience and interpret the past and the present in a more nuanced and elaborate way. They also highlight the need for content that aids students' ability to anticipate Anthropocene scenarios and reflect on strategies for engagement.

It is well established that history can help people to orient themselves temporally and to make sense of contemporary issues in ways that support their attitudes, opinions, and actions. The philosopher of history Jörn Rüsen, among others, has argued that the use of history in this way is especially pronounced in times of great change and crisis. Consequently, history teaching can support the development of several more general competencies and may help students deal with daunting societal challenges. However, people's use of history in relation to the present environmental crisis has gained little attention from the field of history didactics. And the potential of history as a subject to help students deal with the sustainability challenges of the Anthropocene has hardly been discussed. Moreover, several environmental humanities scholars, such as historian Dipesh Chakrabarti, warn that some traditional aspects of history as a discipline may, in fact, limit our capacity to handle these issues. This paper/presentation is an attempt to explore what a history teaching that responds to the Anthropocene could mean in practice. It starts off by briefly discussing some opportunities and obstacles of teaching history that support action-oriented learning for environment and sustainability in the context of the Anthropocene and history as a school subject. Drawing from the fields of environmental didactics, history didactics, and the environmental humanities, it then outlines what ahistorical environmental- and sustainability competence may encompass and how it may be supported through teaching. Fitting this concept to the framework of Rüsens narrative theory, it is here defined as the ability to experience and interpret the past in a way that provides orientation, in support of positions and actions, in relation to issues concerning the environment and sustainability. Finally, the paper provides a brief illustrative example of what such teaching could mean in practice

In the context of the Anthropocene, the aim of the ongoing postgraduate project "Deep time, history, and time for action" is to explore how history as a school subject in Swedish upper secondary school can support the development of competencies critical to dealing with issues concerning the environment and sustainability. The presentation briefly introduces this project and discusses some preliminary reflections regarding priorities for such history teaching, based on both theoretical and empirical work. For instance, it deals with a tentative concept of Historical environmental and sustainability competence and presents some preliminary conclusions from an ongoing study of students’ ideas of the historicity of contemporary sustainability issues, such as climate change, and their hopes and fears concerning the Anthropocene future.