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History curriculum and textbooks, as a key mechanism of constructing collective memory, play a critical role in shaping national, social, and cultural imaginations of the young. This paper analyses history textbooks in Taiwan during the martial law period (1950-1987) to explore narratives about Taiwan and examines the ways in which those narratives as collective memory created particular images of Taiwan. The analysis indicates that history textbooks delineated two threads of narrative, one is a Sinicisation narrative, namely Chinese colonisation, and the other is Chinese restoration narrative. The Sinicisation narrative constructed particular collective memory about Taiwan being of Chinese descent and an inheritor of Chinese culture, lost and restored by China after World War II. In the narrative of restoration, Taiwan was imagined as reborn to be the model child of Chinese descent that was obligated to emancipate all Chinese compatriots from Communism and to ultimately realise the goal of Chinese reunification. These narratives served for emancipating Taiwan from Japanese colonisation and constructed particular collective memory that Sinicised Taiwan for Chinese restoration. The image of Taiwan as Chinese descent, identified with Chinese culture, has endured to the present and continue to shape imaginations and discourses about Taiwan in the present. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries Russia experienced a considerable lack of teachers. In this situation, foreign migrants became Russia's preferred teachers for more than a century. Foreigners were particularly welcome to teach languages and a whole range of other subjects such as history, geography, and mathematics. All teaching was done in a foreign language. Foreigners became important actors in cultural transfers from Western Europe to Russia. Social elites (the nobility, particularly its upper strata) became the main clients of these foreign teachers. This process ended up producing several generations of aristocracy possessing a sort of hybrid culture, both Russian and Western-European with a particular predominance of French culture starting from the generation of the middle of the eighteenth century. In my paper I will first analyse the national composition of the teaching staff in some major Russian educational institutions, first and foremost the institutions for the nobility or in which noble students were present, and in private education; then I will give a brief overview of the geographical origin of the students in these institutions. I will finally analyse the positive aspects as well as the problems caused by this situation and will show what reactions the predominance of foreign teaching staff in Russia provoked in Russian society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on the development of history teaching in West Germany from the 1970s onwards. When in the early 1970s the relevance of history - both as an academic discipline and as a school subject - was challenged, this led to fierce debates as a multitude of new concepts were being developed. One of these was Annette Kuhn’s revolutionary concept of teaching history which immediately came under attack. This debate - and others - had far reaching consequences. At first glance it was a debate about how to model objects like the English Revolution in a way to make them suitable for the history classroom. At second glance, however, this debate revolved around fundamental issues like the role of history in school, the relation between social sciences and didactics, and history’s relevance for today in general. The debate and its eventual outcome are explained within the framework of Bourdieu’s field theory. The study re-examines the consequences of this debate. In discussing alternatives to Kuhn’s approach, it shows how debates forced upon traditional history led historians to readdress the essentials of historical thinking and thus to gain new theoretical strength which resulted in a stronger position for history at universities and schools as well as in history didactics. This resulted in a specific construction and role of Geschichtsdidaktik in Germany which helps to explain why there is a difference in comparison to other countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This historical study reflects on history curriculum debates over the last 20 years in Taiwan. To open up possibilities for contemporary Taiwanese to rethink themselves in terms of national culture and subjectivity, this paper explores the construction of Taiwanese subjectivity in the past. It focuses on the history of Taiwan under Japanese occupation as a key issue in history curriculum debates. Particularly, it examines language issues in the 1920s, an important theme in the histories of the formation of Taiwanese consciousness, ideology, and cultural nationalism during the Japanese colonial period. Rather than addressing issues of identity (national or cultural), identifying who Taiwanese really were, or looking for Chinese or Taiwanese consciousness, this study explores how meanings of “Taiwanese” in the 1920s under Japanese occupation were constructed in the discourse of language reform for civilisation. The analysis of the New Culture Movement discourse suggests that the classical Chinese language ofHànwénas a valuable cultural resource and flexible linguistic instrument played an essential role in constituting Taiwanese subjectivities that shaped Taiwanese practices of the self for distinctive civilisation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

During the interwar period, a number of organisations started to look into education as part of an attempt to understand how nationalism was fuelled through education and to what extent it had forced the outbreak of the Great War. In response to nationalism and a perceived need for reformation of national narratives, the school subjects of history and geography became the primary suspects as advocates of chauvinism and militarism. In 1919, associations for the promotion of understanding and cooperation between the Scandinavian countries – the Norden Associations [föreningarna Norden] – began investigating history textbooks. This revision of textbooks was expanded in the 1930s to explore, assess, and develop the entire teaching of history in the Nordic countries. The Norden Associations converged on many levels with the disparate international movements for educational change. This article presents the Norden Associations as part of a process of hegemonic isomorphism in which cultural hegemony set the institutional boundaries within which the organisations could work in order to attain legitimacy. The article demonstrates how an organisation with a specific political agenda, and with only limited international objectives came to be – not only a part of – but, to some extent, an organisational role model for loftier efforts aimed at global and cosmopolitan history teachings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent research on history teaching has begun to focus on political motivation. This paper is the result of the author’s dissertation, which investigates Latvian history teaching under the authoritarian regimes of Ulmanis and Stalin. It reveals the effects of authoritarianism on goals, curriculum, teaching materials and methods, and the teacher’s position in the classroom. The research undertaken attempts to discern how authoritarian political rule manipulates the teaching of national history to further its political goals, and the resulting effects. The article focuses on the teaching of Latvian history under the Soviet authoritarian regime in Latvia (1934–1940, 1940–1941/1944–1991), but includes discussion of the Nazi occupation and periods of democracy in Latvian history as a source of comparison in order to analyse the teaching of Latvian history in democratic and authoritarian societies and define the traits characteristic to authoritarian regimes. Authoritarian traits are revealed through comparisons of the purpose of history teaching as determined by the ruling order, the goal of history teaching, curriculum, methodology and materials, and teacher status under authoritarian regimes and democratic regimes. Results indicate that goals of history teaching become contrived under authoritarianism – politicised curriculum marginalises some groups, textbook authorship and choice is limited, and teachers become transmitters of the regime’s agenda resulting in marginalisation. This study deduces that two cultures of history teaching emerge – official history in school and unofficial history acquisition that helps maintain a sense of national identity. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Although the history of history education is an under-researched topic worldwide, the international literature about history education contains a clear image of the historical development of the school subject. This image basically consists of a sharp dichotomy between traditional history education, which was largely insensitive to topical affairs and focused on tradition; and modern history education, which placed topical affairs at the centre of attention and critically engaged pupils in the study of history. Despite being very pervasive, this image does not do justice to the complex relationship between past and present in history education. In this article I will attempt to reassess this one-dimensional image by examining the changing relationship between past and present in Dutch history textbooks published between 1945 and 1979. More specifically, the analysis concentrates on the question of how these textbooks dealt with matters of proximity and distance on multiple levels, and how this affected the relationship between past and present in the course of time [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates the role of the recent revolutionary past in post-Napoleonic history education in the Southern Netherlands. From 1794 until 1815 the Southern Netherlands had been incorporated into the French revolutionary state and the Napoleonic Empire, respectively. Often, the experience of the revolution is associated with the birth of a new historical consciousness. I examine the impact that the revolution as a shocking event had on the teaching of history. Did the experience of this shock involve new historical interpretations'? To answer this question, I specifically study how the narratives in use after the downfall of the Napoleonic regime related to previous prerevolution-ary narratives. I argue that post-Napoleonic textbook authors took their narratives from former historians, but particularly adapted the endings of these older histories. This was done differently. On the one hand, the adaptation of former narratives stimulated the spread of new, counter-revolutionary histories. And on the other, new national histories came on the market, in which the addition of the recent revolutionary history played a less crucial role. However, generally, the experience of the revolution as a shocking event did not evoke the feeling of an ever-widening gap between past, present and future in history education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the implication of the history of teaching and learning mathematics for teachers. The history of mathematics instruction should constitute one of the dimensions of the professional knowledge of mathematics teachers. The approaches and results from comparative education provide an essential tool for an international history of teaching and learning mathematics, in order to grasp national specificities as well as overall and global trends. The crucial point in the different moments of the long history of mathematics education proves to be the rank attributed to mathematics within the respective set of social and cultural values.