Citizenship Teaching & Learning - Volume 7, Issue 2, 2012

We sometimes forget that since its birth as a scientific knowledge, not much more than a century ago, history has always been closely associated with the education of the citizen. This article intends to retrace not only the origins of this association, but also its evolution to present time with a particular emphasis on its two main stages. It ends with an illustration of a current association between history and citizenship education in a school curriculum.

At the heart of both historical understanding and democratic decision making is agency – the ability to act on decisions in order to bring about desired goals. Students are rarely exposed to the concept of agency in school, however. In order to better understand the complexity of historical agency, students need exposure to a wider range of historical actors than has traditionally been found in history curricula, and they need to consider the societal factors that enabled or constrained their actions. They also need to recognize that people in the past were not simply acted upon by historical forces but were themselves active participants in events and trends of the day. Such participation involved not only large-scale political involvement but everyday actions and decisions influencing the historical development of cultures and societies. No nation or group, however, acts in complete unison, and students also need to learn about the diversity of perspectives and behaviours that characterized people in the past. By thinking about these issues, students should be better prepared to think about their own lives in the present, about their ability to contribute to societal change and continuity, and about the consequences of their actions. This is one of the ways in which history education can contribute to students’ ability to engage in democratic decision making. Studying history in isolation, however, may not be enough to enhance students’ participation in society. Instead, students need to develop a metacognitive awareness that agency is a lens for making sense of any social topic, past or present. They also need opportunities to explicitly connect historical agency to the choices that face people today as they respond to social, economic, political and environmental issues.

This article explores the possibilities of treaty education for reconciliation with First Nations people, as corrective to the foundational myth of Canada and as a means of fostering ethically engaged citizenship. Lack of historical understanding demonstrated by Canadians regarding treaties and the treaty relationship is examined in relation to discourses of liberal democratic citizenship. Drawing on ‘remembrance as a source of radical renewal’ ‘ethical relationality’ and ‘justice-oriented citizenship’, the argument is made that treaty education has the potential to help all students learn from and through events and experiences of the past in ways that inform not only their historical consciousness, but their dispositions as Canadian citizens, and their relationships with one another. While the discussion in this article is specific to treaty education, it is relevant to broader conversations about the role and value of including more diverse stories/experiences in national histories. Throughout the discussion, attention is paid to the interconnections of citizenship and history education, particularly with respect to possibilities for engaging differently in the world, alongside one another, politically, socially, culturally and ethically as part of the necessary and urgent process of reconciliation.

Commemoration and remembrance are integral elements of postmodern western culture. Although academic historians are increasingly inclined to acknowledge that there is no hard and fast dividing line between collective memory and professional historiography, they do not always welcome the increasing pressure from national governments and international organizations to guide and even regulate collective memory through history education or through so-called ‘remembrance education’. The rationale of remembrance education is that modern nations have a certain responsibility for crimes or suffering that has been caused in the past, and that recognition of this forms a component of education in democratic citizenship. Remembrance education thus becomes a general umbrella for education about ‘dark chapters’ from the past, with the Holocaust as most evident example. This article focuses on a single (sub)national case. Within the Flemish Community, which is the body responsible for education in Flanders and the Dutch-speaking schools in the federal Belgian capital Brussels, remembrance education has, since 2010, been an official part of the cross-curricular final objectives of secondary education. Starting from the concrete context in which this initiative originated and is currently being developed, we examine the complex relationship between remembrance education and history teaching. The differences and affinities between both, we argue, become visible by comparing the position of the academic discipline of history in both fields, by comparing the position of the present, the role of empathy and of a pedagogy of activation and by analysing the way in which ethical questions are dealt with. The absolute moral standards and the present-centred character of remembrance education are, for instance, far removed from the ambitions to stimulate historical and contextual thinking that are central to history education. Many of the real tensions between both, however, reproduce in magnified form the equally real inter¬nal tensions that characterize contemporary history teaching, with its simultaneous scientific and civic ambitions. But unlike remembrance education, history education does not regard memory as the starting point for knowledge or attitudes, but as a subject of critical historical research in its own right.

This study examines how secondary history teachers in the United States and Canada understand their role in promoting citizenship and national identities. Building upon Anderson’s concept of ‘imagined communities’, I argue that compulsory history classes are key sites for imagining the nation and communicating norms about citizenship. While the citizenship education literature has begun to explore teachers’ beliefs about citizenship, researchers in the fields of citizenship education and history education have not examined how history teachers understand the ‘good’ citizen or the place of their subject in forming national identities. I interviewed thirteen secondary history teachers (seven US/six Canadian) to examine their beliefs about citizenship and national identity. I sought to understand how they engage with broader discourses about citizenship and the nation. Twelve of the thirteen teachers described the good citizen in ways consistent with Westheimer and Kahne’s models of the personally responsible citizen and the participatory citizen. US teachers also expressed a desire to foster students’ individual judgement and critical thinking skills, whereas Canadian teachers stressed the importance of fostering national identity as well as students’ responsibility to the collective good.

History education has often been associated with the inculcation of citizenship values, especially in the forging of national identity. In instilling a sense of pride in the common past, the teaching of a nation’s history contributes to the creation and strengthening of nationalism and national identity. This article examines the politics and policies concerning the formulation, implementation and changes regarding the teaching of Singapore’s history between 1984 and 2001, focusing on the lower secondary history curriculum. The Singapore state initially regarded the teaching of the recent national past to be divisive, which resulted in a near neglect and de-emphasis of Singapore’s past in the first decade or so following its independence. However, the state did an about face and started to emphasize history education in the 1980s. This intensified towards the end of the 1990s with the introduction of the ‘National Education’ programme in schools. With that, the role of history in nation building and citizenship education in Singapore found its fullest expression. Thus, the Singapore case is unique compared to the newly independent states after World War II in that history education was used for nation building much later – two decades after its independence.

FUTURE CITIZENS: 21ST CENTURY CHALLENGES FOR YOUNG PEOPLE, KRZYWOSZ-RYHNKIEWICZ, B, ZALEWSKA, A. AND OSS, (EDS) (2010) Krakow: Impuls ISBN: 978 83 7587 431 0, h/bk, €14.27

What’s Fair? Young Europeans’ Constructions of Equity, Altruism and Self-Interest, Ross, A. and Dooly, M. (eds) (2010) Barcelona: Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona Press ISBN: 978 84 608 1112 1, p/bk, £20

THEIR HOPES, FEARS AND REALITY: WORKING WITH CHILDREN AND YOUTH FOR THE FUTURE, M. DOOLY, PETER BERG (2010) ISBN: 978 3 0343 0441 2, Oxford: Peter Lang, p/bk, £41.80

CHILDREN AS DECISION MAKERS IN EDUCATION: SHARING EXPERIENCES ACROSS CULTURES, SUE COX, ANNA ROBINSON-PANT, CAROLINE DYER AND MICHELE SCHWEISFURTH (EDS) (2010) Continuum, London, 180 pp., ISBN: 978-0-8264-2548-5, h/bk, £70

TEACHING HISTORY: DEVELOPING AS A REFLECTIVE SECONDARY TEACHER, IAN PHILLIPS (2008) London: SAGE Publications Ltd, 288 pp., ISBN: 978-1412947916, p/bk, £24.99