(Re)reading national identities in school historiographies: pedagogical implications from the case of Cyprus

Abstract

Abstract: The article, using Cyprus as a case study, seeks to reframe disputes over the nature of national identities constituted in school historiographies and it does so by introducing a novel approach to the study of the making of identity in school history. This approach, grounded on post-foundational thinking and an inter-discursive mode of textual analysis, moves debates away from interpretative certainties and understandings of identities as determinate, coherent, and ethnocentric entities. Instead, it provides a lens through which identities are (re)imagined in relation to an archive of historical events, semantic resources and rules of formation, and therefore, along hybrid, ambivalent, and pluralist lines. This approach to the practice of identity-making in school history writing has several pedagogical implications for policy-making, teacher education, teaching and learning, textbook analysis and identity research, which challenge both the collective memory and the disciplinary paradigms of history education. © 2016 Pedagogy, Culture & Society.