The Palgrave Handbook Of Conflict And History Education In The Post Cold War Era

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.

This Handbook presents an international collection of essays examining history education past and present. Framing recent curriculum reforms in Canada and in the United States in light of a century-long debate between the relationship between theory and practice, this collection contextualizes the debate by exploring the evolution of history and social studies education within their state or national contexts. With contributions ranging from Canada, Finland, New Zealand, Sweden, the Netherlands, the Republic of South Africa, the United Kingdom, and the United States, chapters illuminate the ways in which curriculum theorists and academic researchers are working with curriculum developers and educators to translate and refine notions of historical thinking or inquiry as well as pedagogical practice.

This book illustrates the multiple roles of textbooks as victim, transformer, and accomplice to conflict by introducing the Intersecting Roles of Education in Conflict (IREC) framework for use in the research, development, production, distribution, and dissemination of textbooks and learning materials. The framework illustrates these three potentially overlapping roles by mapping the complex educational contexts of conflict-affected societies and considering how textbooks, learning materials, and education systems more broadly may simultaneously operate within these various roles. Country case studies from Asia, Europe, Africa, and the Middle East are used to analyze primary and secondary school textbook development, content, and application from a variety of approaches that articulate conflict as protracted and/or socio-political violence. The breadth of case studies shows how conflict discourse circulates in educational systems and materials in a wide range of contexts, indicating that the complexity of the relationship between textbooks and conflict is not unique to one culture, geographic region, or type of conflict.

The heightened resonance of identity-driven politics in many states across twenty first century Europe emphasizes the critical role of history in shaping public contestation of the idea of the nation, and accordant manifestations of nationalism and national identity. How the past is interpreted or what and how is remembered has proven increasingly febrile, contentious, and divisive. Debates about history have gone beyond academia, and have permeated and polarised politics and society in many European countries. Intense debate and dispute about national history and culture has often focused on the history teaching in schools, colleges, and universities. According to the aforementioned, it is evident that the teaching of history in the classroom is a relevant topic within the educational system. For this reason, it is not surprising that many times the choice of what kind of history to teach becomes a controversial topic. The existence in a given society of different visions about the nation or the various responses proposed to face the social challenges existing in it (immigration, independence nationalisms...) can turn the teaching of history into a debated and controversial topic. Logically, depending on the specific political context of each country, this debate can acquire different developments and characteristics. The school is not an institution isolated from its socio-political context. In fact, both areas constantly interact. Therefore, this book proposes an approach to this topic that tries to connect the specific political context of different countries with the debates about education and history teaching from 1990 until the present. It deals with the extent to which the social and political context affects the history teaching practice developed in the classrooms through the decisions made on the official curricula and textbooks. Emphasizing this connection between both aspects is one of the strengths of this book. That is the reason why this book proposes an approach to that reality from diverse points of view and show the different materializations observed in this area in the studied cases. The chapters of this volume allow us to verify this heterogeneous reality and help enrich our knowledge on this broad and interesting topic.

This book explores how the expectations of historical justice movements and processes are understood within educational contexts, particularly history education. In recent years, movements for historical justice have gained global momentum and prominence as the focus on righting wrongs from the past has become a feature of contemporary politics. This imperative has manifested in globally diverse contexts including societies emerging from recent, violent conflict, but also established democracies which are increasingly compelled to address the legacies of colonialism, slavery, genocides, and war crimes, as well as other forms of protracted discord. This book examines historical justice from an educational perspective, exploring the myriad ways that education is understood as a site of historical injustice, as well as a mechanism for redress. The editors and contributors analyse the role of history education in processes of historical justice broadly, exploring educational sites, policies, media, and materials. This edited collection is a unique and important touchstone volume for scholars, policy-makers, practitioners, and teachers that can guide future research, policy, and practice in the fields of historical justice, human rights and history education.

This edited book explores the problems and challenges of negotiating the representation of ethnic minorities within history education. It investigates how states balance the (non-)acknowledgement of the reality of cultural or religious diversity, and the promotion of a point of convergence in history education to foster national identity. Shifting our attention away from the intractable challenges posed by post-conflict countries for reconciliation, the contributors draw attention to the need to explore ways to prevent or pre-empt conflicts and exclusion through history education, which could contribute to developing a more sustainable culture of peace. Drawing on a wide range of contexts and sources, this book asks how history education could contribute to forming critical, historically informed, and committed young citizens. The book will be of interest to students and academics working on themes such as nationalism, citizenship, ethnicity, history education, multicultural education, peace studies and area studies, as well as practitioners in the fields of history, social studies, civic or citizenship.

This edited volume explores the evolution of history education from a transnational perspective, focusing on border regions in Europe that are considered on the "periphery" of the Nation-State. By introducing this concept and taking into consideration the dynamics of decentralization and the development of minorities’ teaching practices and narratives, the book sheds light on new challenges for history education policy and curriculum design. Chapters take a comparative approach, dissecting and analyzing specific case studies from school systems in France, Germany, Italy, the UK, and Scandinavian countries. In doing so, the editors and their authors weave a systematic account of the impact of local autonomy on educational culture, on the civic remit of schools, and on the narratives embodied by history school canons.

This book is open access under a CC BY 4.0 license. This book explores how the socially disputed period of the Cold War is remembered in today’s history classroom. Applying a diverse set of methodological strategies, the authors map the dividing lines in and between memory cultures across the globe, paying special attention to the impact the crisis-driven age of our present has on images of the past. Authors analysing educational media point to ambivalence, vagueness and contradictions in textbook narratives understood to be echoes of societal and academic controversies. Others focus on teachers and the history classroom, showing how unresolved political issues create tensions in history education. They render visible how teachers struggle to handle these challenges by pretending that what they do is ‘just history’. The contributions to this book unveil how teachers, backgrounding the political inherent in all memory practices, often nourish the illusion that the history in which they are engaged is all about addressing the past with a reflexive and disciplined approach.