Abstract
The field of memory studies tends to focus attention on the ‘3Ms’ – museums, monuments, memorials – as sites where memories are constructed, communicated, and contested. Where education is identified as a site for memory, the focus is often narrowly on what is or is not communicated within curricula or textbooks, assuming that schools simply pass on messages agreed or struggled over elsewhere. This article explores the possibilities opened when educative processes are not taken as stable and authoritative sites for transmitting historical narratives, but instead as spaces of contestation, negotiation and cultural production. With a focus on ‘difficult histories’ of recent conflict and historical injustice, we develop a research agenda for education as a site of memory and show how this can illuminate struggles over dominant historical narratives at various scales, highlighting agencies that educational actors bring to making sense of the past.
Original language | English |
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Pages (from-to) | 429-451 |
Number of pages | 23 |
Journal | International Studies in Sociology of Education |
Volume | 29 |
Issue number | 4 |
Early online date | 15 Apr 2020 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published (in print/issue) - 1 Oct 2020 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:This work was supported by the GW4 (gw4.ac.uk) [Accelerator Grant, Transformative History Education Initiator Grant; Transformative History Education].
Publisher Copyright:
© 2020 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.
Copyright:
Copyright 2020 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.
Keywords
- Memory studies
- History teaching
- Difficult histories
- Education and conflict
- Historical memory
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Kelsey Shanks
- School of Education - Professor of Education - UNESCO Chair
- Faculty of Arts, Humanities & Social Sciences - Full Professor
Person: Academic