Thomas Nygren is Professor of history and civics education at the Department of Education, Uppsala University. His research interests focus on educational challenges in history and civics education, for instance international understanding, the digital impact on education, critical thinking and human rights. He has conducted research on the practice and history of history teaching, the relationship between international guidelines and Swedish history education 1927-2002, how students write history when using digital databases and what the impact of data and visualizations on students and academia is. His current focus is on how digital media and teaching practices can be used to support and analyze different forms of critical thinking and values, to better understand different learning processes and how this can be stimulated in a digital era.
He has been part of EU funded projects aimed, among others, to
- enhance critical thinking and media literacy among learners and educational staff through developing, implementing and evaluating innovative methods and practices to debunk disinformation and propaganda;
- raise awareness of the public at large and the education and media literacy community about disinformation and “fake news” as a threat to democracy;
- study the credibility of digital news feeds and build a digital tool and a database to better understand today’s news feeds in digital media and design evidence based tools for teaching and learning digital civic literacy.
