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Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/44686

Title

School history as post-colonial text: the ongoing struggle for histories in the New South Wales curriculum

Author/Creator

Parkes, Robert

Institution

The University of Newcastle. Faculty of Education & Arts, School of Education

Description

School history as post-colonial text: The on-going struggle for histories in the New South Wales curriculum This paper is concerned with theorizing a curricular response to what has become known in Australia as the ‘history wars’ (Macintyre & Clark 2003). The central debate in the history wars is over the representation of the colonization of Australia. What is at stake in these history wars is not only ‘national identity’ (Halse & Harris 2004), but also our conceivable future, because as Bennett (1995) has argued, “more than history is at stake in how the past is represented. The shape of the thinkable future depends on how the past is portrayed and on how its relations to the present are depicted” (p. 162). History curriculum, as “a disciplining technology that directs how the individual is to act, feel, talk, and ‘see’ the world and ‘self’” (Popkewitz 2001, p. 153), serves a function in the history wars by operating as an apparatus for the social re/production of national identities, through linking “the development of the individual to the images and narratives of nationhood” (Popkewitz, Pereyra & Franklin 2001). Consequently, the importance of school history as a battlefield in these ‘history wars’ should not be underestimated (Clark 2003). This study reserves as a context for its deliberations and ruminations, history curriculum in the state of New South Wales (NSW). The NSW context does more than simply anchor the discussion; it works as a case through which deliberations, in terms of the problematic, are rendered meaningful, and purposeful. Its significance is in the global trends that it reflects, and its possibility to speak to those trends it terms of a reconceptualized history curriculum. I argue that what has remained uncontested in the struggle for histories, has been the representational practices of history itself, and that addressing this null curriculum has significance for school history as a critical practice.

Relation

2nd World Curriculum Studies Conference. Proceedings of the Second World Curriculum Studies Conference: Programme and abstracts: Curriculum as Conversation (Tampere, Finland 21-24 May, 2006) p. 94-95

Relation

http://www.uta.fi/laitokset/okl/tokl/wcsc

Date

2006

Publisher

University of Tampere, Department of Teacher Education

Keyword(s)

school history;  history wars;  nationhood;  curriculum

Resource Type

conference paper

Identifier

http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/44686

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"School history as post-colonial text: the ongoing struggle for histories in the New South Wales curriculum"

 

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