(Re)Constructing Memory: School Textbooks and the Imagination of the Nation

(Re)Constructing Memory: School Textbooks and the Imagination of the Nation
Author: James H. Williams
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 342
Release: 2014-08-08
Genre: Education
ISBN: 9462096562

This book examines the shifting portrayal of the nation in school textbooks in 14 countries during periods of rapid political, social, and economic change. Drawing on a range of analytic strategies, the authors examine history and civics textbooks, and the teaching of such texts, along with other prominent curricular materials—children’s readers, a required text penned by the head of state, a holocaust curriculum, etc.. The authors analyze the uses of history and pedagogy in building, reinforcing and/or redefining the nation and state especially in the light of challenges to its legitimacy. The primary focus is on countries in developing or transitional contexts. Issues include the teaching of democratic civics in a multiethnic state with little history of democratic governance; shifts in teaching about the Khmer Rouge in post-conflict Cambodia; children’s readers used to define national space in former republics of the Soviet Union; the development of Holocaust education in a context where citizens were both victims and perpetuators of violence; the creation of a national past in Turkmenistan; and so forth. The case studies are supplemented by commentary, an introduction and conclusion.

(Re)Constructing Memory School Textbooks and the Imagination of the Nation

(Re)Constructing Memory School Textbooks and the Imagination of the Nation
Author: James H. Williams
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2014
Genre: Education
ISBN:

This book examines the shifting portrayal of the nation in school textbooks in 14 countries during periods of rapid political, social, and economic change. Drawing on a range of analytic strategies, the authors examine history and civics textbooks, and the teaching of such texts, along with other prominent curricular materials--children's readers, a required text penned by the head of state, a holocaust curriculum, etc.. The authors analyze the uses of history and pedagogy in building, reinforcing and/or redefining the nation and state especially in the light of challenges to its legitimacy. The primary focus is on countries in developing or transitional contexts. Issues include the teaching of democratic civics in a multiethnic state with little history of democratic governance; shifts in teaching about the Khmer Rouge in post-conflict Cambodia; children's readers used to define national space in former republics of the Soviet Union; the development of Holocaust education in a context where citizens were both victims and perpetuators of violence; the creation of a national past in Turkmenistan; and so forth. The case studies are supplemented by commentary, an introduction and conclusion.

(Re)Constructing Memory: Textbooks, Identity, Nation, and State

(Re)Constructing Memory: Textbooks, Identity, Nation, and State
Author: James H. Williams
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 380
Release: 2016-07-08
Genre: Education
ISBN: 9463005099

This book engages readers in thirteen conversations presented by authors from around the world regarding the role that textbooks play in helping readers imagine membership in the nation. Authors’ voices come from a variety of contexts – some historical, some contemporary, some providing analyses over time. But they all consider the changing portrayal of diversity, belonging and exclusion in multiethnic and diverse societies where silenced, invisible, marginalized members have struggled to make their voices heard and to have their identities incorporated into the national narrative. The authors discuss portrayals of past exclusions around religion, ethnicity, sexual orientation, as they look at the shifting boundaries of insider and outsider. This book is thus about “who we are” not only demographically, but also in terms of the past, especially how and whether we teach discredited pasts through textbooks. The concluding chapters provides ways forward in thinking about what can be done to promote curricula that are more inclusive, critical and positively bonding, in increasingly larger and more inclusive contexts.

Textbooks and Quality Learning for All

Textbooks and Quality Learning for All
Author: Unesco
Publisher: UNESCO
Total Pages: 412
Release: 2006
Genre: Education
ISBN:

Focused on the dual aspects of access and quality, this publication discusses the role of textbooks in facilitating quality education for all. The book consists of reviews of the international perspectives as well as case studies on Brazil, Russian Federation, and Rwanda. It also documents strategies that could help to optimise procedures of textbook development, production, and evaluation; enhance textbooks' pedagogical impact; improve teachers' selection of textbooks; and raise textbook supply efficiently.

The Palgrave Handbook of Conflict and History Education in the Post-Cold War Era

The Palgrave Handbook of Conflict and History Education in the Post-Cold War Era
Author: Luigi Cajani
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 800
Release: 2019-06-28
Genre: Education
ISBN: 3030057224

This Handbook provides a systematic and analytical approach to the various dimensions of international, ethnic and domestic conflict over the uses of national history in education since the end of the Cold War. With an upsurge in political, social and cultural upheaval, particularly since the fall of state socialism in Europe, the importance of history textbooks and curricula as tools for influencing the outlooks of entire generations is thrown into sharp relief. Using case studies from 58 countries, this book explores how history education has had the potential to shape political allegiances and collective identities. The contributors highlight the key issues over which conflict has emerged – including the legacies of socialism and communism, war, dictatorships and genocide – issues which frequently point to tensions between adhering to and challenging the idea of a cohesive national identity and historical narrative. Global in scope, the Handbook will appeal to a diverse academic audience, including historians, political scientists, educationists, psychologists, sociologists and scholars working in the field of cultural and media studies.

(Re)Constructing Memory: Education, Identity, and Conflict

(Re)Constructing Memory: Education, Identity, and Conflict
Author: Michelle J. Bellino
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 339
Release: 2017-02-08
Genre: Education
ISBN: 9463008608

How do schools protect young people and call on the youngest citizens to respond to violent conflict and division operating outside, and sometimes within, school walls? What kinds of curricular representations of conflict contribute to the construction of national identity, and what kinds of encounters challenge presumed boundaries between us and them? Through contemporary and historical case studies—drawn from Cambodia, Egypt, Northern Ireland, Peru, and Rwanda, among others—this collection explores how societies experiencing armed conflict and its aftermath imagine education as a space for forging collective identity, peace and stability, and national citizenship. In some contexts, the erasure of conflict and the homogenization of difference are central to shaping national identities and attitudes. In other cases, collective memory of conflict functions as a central organizing frame through which citizenship and national identity are (re)constructed, with embedded messages about who belongs and how social belonging is achieved. The essays in this volume illuminate varied and complex inter-relationships between education, conflict, and national identity, while accounting for ways in which policymakers, teachers, youth, and community members replicate, resist, and transform conflict through everyday interactions in educational spaces.

The Legacy of the Civil War

The Legacy of the Civil War
Author: Robert Penn Warren
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
Total Pages: 83
Release: 2015-11
Genre: History
ISBN: 0803299273

In this elegant book, the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer explores the manifold ways in which the Civil War changed the United States forever. He confronts its costs, not only human (six hundred thousand men killed) and economic (beyond reckoning) but social and psychological. He touches on popular misconceptions, including some concerning Abraham Lincoln and the issue of slavery. The war in all its facets "grows in our consciousness," arousing complex emotions and leaving "a gallery of great human images for our contemplation."

Reconstructing Dixie

Reconstructing Dixie
Author: Tara McPherson
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 340
Release: 2003-03-31
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780822330400

DIVA cultural studies reading of white southern femininity as seen in a range of popular sites including novels, television, and tourist attractions./div

School Memories

School Memories
Author: Cristina Yanes-Cabrera
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 273
Release: 2016-09-15
Genre: Education
ISBN: 3319440632

This book reveals how school memories offer not only a tool for accessing the school of the past, but also a key to understanding what people today know (or think they know) about the school of the past. It describes, in fact, how historians’ work does not purely and simply consist in exploring school as it really was, but also in the complex process of defining the memory of school as one developed and revisited over time at both the individual and collective level. Further, it investigates the extent to which what people “know” reflects the reality or is in fact a product of stereotypes that are deeply rooted in common perceptions and thus exceedingly difficult to do away with. The book includes fifteen peer-reviewed contributions that were presented and discussed during the International Symposium “School Memories. New Trends in Historical Research into Education: Heuristic Perspectives and Methodological Issues” (Seville, 22-23 September, 2015).