Teaching History and the Changing Nation State - Reflections on the book

Blog 1 Teaching History and the Changing Nation State – Transnational and Intranational Perspectives (Bloomsbury Academic, 2016), edited by Robert Guyver [see Note 1]

Thoughts and reflections on the project by the editor

One problematic which has perhaps been under-researched can be found in the complex networks where politicization (and manipulation) of collective memory in the context of history education has privileged one memory (and therefore one narrative) by the suppression of another. This can perhaps be best seen through the lens of the settler colonialist interpretive paradigm. In this recent study (which I edited) questions are asked about the possibility of the development of societies which have sufficient maturity to allow for the co-existence of parallel memories of conflict and displacement, but from different ‘sides’. Thus a deeper question is implied or suggested: would the allowing of such parallel memories within the education system reduce political tension and serve to solve long-standing international and intranational conflicts, especially by finding inclusive criteria for a plurinational kind of citizenship? Spain provides a plurinational case-study where the authors see the end-product of history education as the production of citizens educated to criticize.

There are three elements in this debate: the first are paired, pedagogy and curriculum theory, and the third is historiography, but the former two are necessary to transform academic history into school history. In some of the case-studies there is ample evidence of these educational imperatives being deployed to reduce political tensions. Australia’s ‘black armband’ versus ‘whitewash’ public debate about the country’s past which came to the fore under the premiership of John Howard (1996-2007) was skilfully addressed if not entirely resolved by the adoption (2010 [hyperlinked]) of a disciplinary approach which examined the national past within the wider parameters of global contextualization, but drawing on such devices as overview and depth study which had characterized the School History Project in the UK in the 1970s and 1980s. Historian John Hirst’s response to Howard’s demands for a nostalgic canon of events during a summit in August 2006 had been to request ‘landmarks with questions’, clearly an idea transferable to other jurisdictions, including Michael Gove’s England. Into this mix were added North American ideas of ‘historical thinking’ promoted by Sam Wineburg and Peter Seixas [see Note 2]. Australia’s own brand of historical literacy remarkably – but nevertheless helpfully – allowed for ‘contestability’ as a curriculum element.

In South Africa, rather by contrast with Rwanda, an official policy of ethical remembrance, i.e. of the apartheid years, was encouraged by Education Minister Kemal. In Rwanda Tutsi traumatic memory was made official but Hutu memory was and is suppressed. Here one set of inter-generational traumatic memory transfer is thus official, and the other is driven underground. Under Kemal however, South Africa’s history curriculum became an open rather a closed text, allowing for official macro-narratives to be studied alongside unofficial micro-narratives which might sometimes illustrate the official but at other times provide an oppositional story. It was also about ethical remembrance and moral imagination.  

Undoubtedly not so far advanced in this kind of curriculum thinking is the relationship between Israel and Palestine, ably dissected in Chapter 1. The crucial missing element seen here is an Israeli appreciation of the need for a narrative that allows for parallel sets of traumatic memory and parallel beliefs about attachment and identity associated with the land. In their reports which reflect rather complacent attempts to manage history education across the Palestinian and Israeli ‘divide’, IPCRI (the Israeli-Palestinian Centre for Research and Information), a body set up as a result of the Oslo Accords, shows that there has been a failure to achieve fairness in the distribution of educational expectations. The authors of Chapter 1 suggest that only the setter colonialist paradigm can explain the Israeli attitude to the Palestinian narrative, and stress that facts on the ground confirm that the paradigm is apt (see Note 3 below).

The relationship between Turkey and not only its surrounding neighbours but also its internal ethnic groups (particularly the Kurds) is a matter that reaches the media every day now (I write in mid-February 2016), particularly as Kurdish fighters are making some effective inroads into territory held by Daesh, but are still out of favour with the Turkish government. Migration through Turkey to Greece and the rest of the EU is also a very live problem, as indeed it was as an outcome of the last phase of the Greco-Turkish Wars that followed the First World War and the break-up of the Ottoman Empire, with very large population exchanges to and from Greece accompanying the setting up of the new Republic of Turkey in 1923. Many other nations have large Turkish populations, for example Germany and Australia. There are about 70,000 Turks living in Australia, many of them enjoying full citizenship.

Australia is not a repository of all virtue and is still coming to terms with a history of discrimination. In 2013 Amnesty International published a report [see Note 4] expressing concern about conditions on Manus Island, Papua New Guinea where 1,100 migrants (aspiring immigrants) were being detained. However, on a more positive note there have been moves to include Turkish memory in Anzac Day marches as press photographs show, and the annual commemorations at Anzac Cove have taken on an inclusive flavour also reflected in memorials there, one of which has Attatürk’s words (1934): ‘… having lost their lives on this land they have become our sons as well’. Chapter 14 gives examples of classroom debates about Gallipoli where the Turkish voice is being heard. In New Zealand Maori memory includes the internal wars of 1845-72, which may indeed be of more significance than the Gallipoli campaign, but are neglected in school history and public discourse.  

  My caption: Attatürk’s comments imply an adoption of the Anzac (and other) dead. This universal aspect of his vision of military spiritualism thus embraced the failed aspirations of other nations.

My caption: Celebration or commemoration? On a faraway shore at Anzac Cove in Turkey Australians and New Zealanders ponder a landmark historical event which has defined their national identity. 

My caption: Members of Australia's Turkish community are seen here being applauded as they march on Anzac Day [Getty Images]. 

To extend what was intended to be a short blog there needs to be mention of problems of identity in Ukraine and the Russian Federation. The authors of Chapter 2, writing after ‘skyping’, comment that too much self-identity is a feature of youth culture in both jurisdictions. Indeed too much self-identity might be said to be a bar to mutual understanding in all national, intranational and transnational situations where there is conflict or the potential for conflict. The interventions of the Netherlands-based organization EUROCLIO in helping to set up history teacher networks across Russia were partially successful in promoting a diverse and less nationalistic approach to history education across a vast nation-state, but another factor is explored in Chapter 11, the resentment of what is seen as the interference of the West in internal Russian affairs, and Chapter 2 narrates some details of the imposition of stricter controls over the professional freedom of teachers of history.

Some key words and phrases in this study have been ‘shared histories’, ‘landmarks with questions’, ‘pedagogy, democracy and dialogue’, ‘border crossing’, ‘memory’, ‘collective memory’, ‘identity’, ‘disciplinary approach’, ‘historical thinking’, ‘narrative’, ‘framework’ and ‘canon’. One tentative conclusion is that within history education if a disciplinary approach is adopted it has to have some kind of relationship with narratives of memory – narratives that may stray outside traditional national borders and which do not have to be, or be defined as, ‘collective memory’. Similarly a curriculum does not have to be designed as a canon of events, but it is helpful if it is characterized by chronological or perspectival frameworks. Within these frameworks there must be space to use disciplinary principles to explore contrasting and contested memories, and to place history and citizenship together to form a conjunction of opportunities to examine such traumatic memories in dialogue between different communities. This can be clearly seen in an example of good practice in developments (and improvements) both within Northern Ireland and in the relationship between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland, ably analyzed in Chapter 3.  The ‘open text’ of South Africa’s history curriculum which permits unofficial memory to be incorporated within official memory is a remarkable achievement. For any global group committed to the reduction of conflict the political and educational need to offer frameworks for understanding and maintaining the co-existence of different ‘theatres of memory’ must be one of the most crucial imperatives in today’s world.    

Notes

1. Substantive (and other) chapters in the book 

(Online: Prelims (including Introduction))

Nadia Naser-Najjab and Ilan Pappé, Palestine: Reframing Palestine in the Post-Oslo Period’, pp. 9-29 (Chapter 1)

Tamara Eidelman, Polina Verbytska and Jonathan Even-Zohar, Russia and Ukraine: EUROCLIO and Perspectives of Professional History Educators on Societies in Transition, pp. 31-51 (Chapter 2)

Fionnuala Waldron and Alan McCully, Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland: Eroded Certainties and New Possibilities, pp. 53-73 (Chapter 3)

Gülçin Dilek and Eleni Filippidou, Turkey and Greece: Reconstructing a Shared Past, pp. 75-93 (Chapter 4)

Gail Weldon, South Africa and Rwanda: Remembering or Forgetting?, pp. 95-113 (Chapter 5)

Marlene Cainelli, Helena Pinto and Glória Solé, Portugal and Brazil: How Much of ‘Our’ Past Is ‘Theirs’Too? pp. 123-139 (Chapter 7)

Cyndi Mottola Poole, The United States: Learning about Native American History, pp. 141-157 (Chapter 8)

Robert Guyver, England and the UK: Conflict and Consensus over Curriculum, pp. 159-174 (Chapter 9)

Tony Taylor, The Russian Federation and Australia: Comparing Like with Unlike, pp. 181-200 (Chapter 11)

Ramón López Facal and Jorge Sáiz Serrano, Spain: History Education and Nationalism Conflicts, pp. 201-215 (Chapter 12)

Jennifer Lawless and Sedat Bulgu, Turkey, Australia and Gallipoli: The Challenges of a Shared History, pp. 223-235 (Chapter 14)

Mark Sheehan and Tony Taylor, Australia and New Zealand: ANZAC and Gallipoli in the Twenty-First Century pp. 237-254 (Chapter 15)

Chapters 6, 10, 13 and 16 are ‘discussant’ chapters written by the editor, summarizing and discussing the previous chapter sections.

2. See Peter Seixas’s six benchmarks for historical thinking: http://historicalthinking.ca/ and Sam Wineburg's Historical Thinking and other Unnatural Acts – Charting the Future of Teaching the Past (Temple Press, Philadelphia, 2001) 

3. Dr Nadia Naser-Najjan (co-author with Ilan Pappé of Chapter 1) sent me this YouTube clip, which shows the predicaments which a group of Palestinian children encounter when going to school: https://youtube.com/watch?v=IMZMqMOSLOs

4. This is Breaking People – Human Rights Violations at Australia’s Asylum Processing Centre on Manus Island Papua New Guinea (Amnesty International, December 2013) http://www.amnesty.org.au/images/uploads/about/Amnesty_International_Manus_Island_report.pdf

Blog 2 (actually written before Blog 1)Robert Guyver (Ed.) Teaching History and the Changing Nation State – Transnational and Intranational Perspectives (Bloomsbury Academic, 2016)

Reflections on some of the book’s conclusions and lessons

An ideal history curriculum has to have an ideal nation state as its host. This utopian society would abandon attempts to manipulate collective memory or identity, would promote critical and inclusive citizenship through open-minded dialogue, and embed a disciplinary approach to a history education that allows unofficial narratives to be taught not merely alongside the official, but even to act as counter-narratives to challenge or widen the concept of what is or had been official.

Turkey has a large Kurdish population. The Kurdish narrative does not seem to be a welcome one within the current Turkish polity as it runs counter to a particular interpretation of national identity. There are however other approaches which widen the capacity of a nation to accommodate multiple or hybrid identities under a civic umbrella, and allow for intellectual and psychological border-crossing. Australia now has a large Turkish population, perhaps in the region of 70,000.  In Australia (and indeed in New Zealand) Gallipoli has been one event with the status of a mythic identity-creating landmark, but adapting the words of Australian historian John Hirst (when offering alternatives to PM John Howard’s desire for a statutory school historical canon in 2006), ‘landmarks should be accompanied by questions’. The presence of Turkish students in classrooms makes demands on teachers, particularly that Gallipoli be taught in a transnational way.  The recent film The Water Diviner (2014) presents a challenging transnational alternative to Peter Weir’s Gallipoli (1981) which had an anti-war but essentially pro-ANZAC message.

We live in an age of migration, and clearly in the past new nations have been formed as a result of or in resistance to significant migrations. Enforced population exchanges between mainland Greece and Anatolia were features of the treaty agreements following the last phase of the Greco-Turkish Wars in the early 1920s. The post-Holocaust migration, mainly of Jews, from Europe to the Levant is a well-known nation-creating example. But a forgotten example of a very large migration is the enforced movement of perhaps as many as 13 million German-speaking people from the Soviet bloc into what became East and West Germany after 1945. As post-colonial phenomena, Pakistan and indeed Israel, both created in the late 1940s, come to mind as having arisen out of wide-scale migration motivated by nationalist politics and by dominantly ethnic and/or religious rather than civic affiliations. These migrations led to other migrations, particularly the Palestinian diaspora, traumatic memories of which are fed not only by current facts on the ground, but also by family experience of land-appropriations and violence.  

Israel is not a utopia as defined in the first paragraph above.  Indeed the Palestinian Nakba narrative is not regarded as acceptable material to be taught in Israeli schools. Nevertheless in post-Oslo arrangements an organization called IPCRI (the Israeli-Palestinian Centre for Research and Information) was set up to monitor a less confrontational history education in Palestinian schools, especially to ensure that there was recognition of an Israeli state and an understanding that there is an Israel history both ancient and modern that supports the linkage between the past and the present.  However a reciprocal curriculum recognizing a similar Arab/Palestinian history and aspiration is not officially taught in Israel’s schools.

What if? What if there was a move to a political utopia that allowed for an educational utopia that allowed other narratives as alternatives to the official? These narratives already exist on the street and in family life. Would this contribute to peace? This has happened in South Africa and to some extent in Northern Ireland and indeed in the Republic of Ireland. Untreated suppressed traumatic memory can lead to further outbursts of conflict because of sheer frustration, but a shared view of critical citizenship fed by an exchange of contextualized historical empathy has much to recommend it.

One of my heroes is Raphael Samuel who, being aware that I had had to read about 1000 letters written about the first draft of the English national history curriculum (the Interim Report of August 1989), asked me to write an article for his History Workshop Journal in 1990 [see Note 1]. He wrote two volumes in a Theatres of Memory series (one published posthumously) [see Note 2] and represents a radical pluralist grass-roots tradition much needed in countries where history education is a site for political hegemony, for example in the Russian Federation or Rwanda. Even in Ukraine there is a need for a more utopian attitude to identity.  An obsession with self-identity especially among youth is as much an individual and collective psychological problem as a problem in history or citizenship education (see final paragraph below). Changing from a position of national or group exceptionalism to a transnational border-crossing stance on history education can be like moving from what Oakeshott in his analysis of the essence of conversation referred to as an excess of ‘superbia’ to a position characterized by an ability to see something of the lives of others, some of whom may be neighbours, from the inside [see Note 3]. 

Editing this book has been a rewarding experience, although I was already aware that outsiders might consider England’s own history curriculum debates to be rather parochial, I am now convinced that a subtle mix of pedagogy and curriculum theory can act as very effective seasoning (across the world) to enhance some rather indigestible canonical stews.  Although the Kurdish problem is referred to above, there is no chapter on it, although there might have been. There is one on Turkey and Greece however, and there are chapters on the Indigenous history of what became the USA, on the relationship between Portugal and Brazil, and on plurinational Spain. One unusual chapter compares Vladimir Putin with John Howard especially in their mutual search both for a positive slant on national history and for ways of handling (or sidelining) blacker or bleaker episodes. 

I find it ironical that two events had a very similar chronology. One followed the Cronulla riots on a beach near Sydney in December 2005 between Lebanese and Anglo-Celtic youths. John Howard (Prime Minister at the time) asked why there should be fighting as the participants were Australians with a shared (civic) history of which they could be proud.  This led to the August 2006 summit about a new Australian history curriculum, but this was ill-fated. Another event was Gordon Brown’s Britishness address to the Fabian Society in January 2006 [See Note 4] (which I attended) when he asked questions about the possibility of hybrid identities, for example of being at the same time British, South Asian and Moslem, to which the answer was ‘Yes – it is possible’.

The Australian curriculum that did emerge in December 2010 set the nation in a global context and included for the medieval period, an Asian, a Western and an American focus. Like the rest of the subjects in this first national curriculum in Australia the approach was disciplinary (e.g. ‘[t]he content provides opportunities to develop historical understanding through key concepts, including evidence, continuity and change, cause and effect, perspectives, empathy, significance and contestability’), with inspiration drawn from the North American work of Peter Seixas and Sam Wineburg on historical thinking. But there are British and European models of this too, as well as an Australian version, i.e. historical literacy.

South Africa in the 1990s had two history curricula in succession drawing on the American-British-European models of pedagogical and curricular historiography, providing a framework not only for ‘truth and reconciliation’ but also to support a policy of handling traumatic memories in a positive way (rather than a policy of getting one group to forget, as in Rwanda’s case). Michael Gove, in 2013 England’s Secretary of State for Education, had to take advice involving the transformation of a canon into a workable curriculum, but in so doing was obliged to reach out not only to loyal historians but also to ‘educators’ who knew about pedagogy and curriculum theory, including those with experience of the structures and processes of the School History Project, once regarded as subversively progressive.

The book was published on February 11 but will be out in paperback at more than half the cost in a year’s time. I have not referred to the 20 other authors by name here, but this does not lessen my deep appreciation of their contributions. The chapter headings and author names can be found in the website given in the heading.

Robert Guyver

guyverrobert@gmail.com Twitter Robert Guyver@GuyverRobert

My caption: This is a favourite transnational image, entitled ‘Respect to Mehmetçik’ depicting a Turkish soldier, the equivalent of a Tommy, carrying a wounded Australian officer back to his own lines at the time of Gallipoli. Anna Clark described Australia’s preoccupation with military history as a form of ‘national spiritualism’. [See Note 5; See also Chapters 14,15 and 16 of the book]

Note: Mehmet is a very common Turkish name and Mehmetçik is its diminutive and familiar form, so this has a meaning like ‘little Tommy soldier’, but in Turkish it also has the meaning of ‘unknown soldier’ - giving it a universalist quality. 

Notes

1. Guyver, R. (1990), ‘History’s Domesday Book’, History Workshop Journal (30), pp. 100-8. 

2. Samuel, R. (1994), Theatres of Memory: Volume I – Past and Present in Contemporary

Culture, London: Verso.

Samuel, R. (1998), Island Stories: Unravelling Britain – Theatres of Memory, Volume II, ed. A. Light with S. Alexander and G. S. Jones, London: Verso.

3. Oakeshott, M. (1959), The Voice of Poetry in the Conversation of Mankind. London: Bowes and Bowes. (Available on pages 488-541 in M. Oakeshott (1962/1991) Rationalism in Politics and other Essays, new and expanded edition with Foreward by Timothy Fuller. Indianapolis, Indiana: Liberty Fund.)

4. Brown, G. (2006), ‘The Future of Britishness’, Fabian Society, 14 January. Available online: http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2007/feb/27/immigrationpolicy.race (accessed 19 March 2015).

5. Clark, A. (2008), History’s Children: History Wars in the Classroom, Sydney: University of New South Wales.