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The aim of this study is to assess the impact that the current status of the country and of the education system has on the identity and place attachment of the students attending the 2nd, 3rd, 4th and 5th grades of the elementary school, in the context of the meanings these students attribute to the concept of homeland via the metaphors they have created and the pictures they have drawn. The study was conducted on 27 male and 33 female students that attend the Yedidalga Elementary School in the Lefke District of Northern Cyprus. Metaphors and pictures were chosen as the tools to assess the students' perceptions of the concept of homeland, and for this reason, the students were asked to reflect their perceptions of the concept of homeland on the metaphors they create and on the pictures they draw. The data obtained were analyzed using the methods of descriptive analysis and document analysis. Students produced a total of 20 metaphors that were categorized into 4 themes about the concept of homeland, and produced pictures, in which they used blue color the most followed by green color. In conclusion, the results of the study suggest that the students' perceptions about the concept of homeland focus mostly on national values and loyalty, and that the elementary school students associated the concept of homeland predominantly with a sense of protection of national values. [The page range on the .pdf (85-98) is incorrect. The correct page range is 84-98.]

Individuals and societies continue and end their lives within the framework of values. One of the most important of these values is the concept of homeland. Homeland refers to the land, where the individuals were born and live in, a piece of which may also be owned by such individuals. The concept of homeland is always given utmost importance in the curricula. In this context, it is important to determine the perceptions of elementary and middle school students towards the concept of homeland in order for foreseeing the love they felt for, and the importance they attach to, the geography they live in. In this study, it is aimed to reveal what students understand from the concept of homeland through metaphors. Phenomenology pattern, one of the qualitative research patterns, was used in this research. The study group of the research comprises 580 students. "Convenience sampling" was used in sample selection. In this study, elementary and middle school students were given a form of incomplete sentences in the following format of "Homeland is like ............... Because ................." as a data collection tool, and then they were asked to write their opinions by filling the blanks. The results of the study revealed that the participants expressed a total of 59 metaphors in relation to the concept of homeland. Based on the metaphors developed by students for the concept of "homeland", 7 categories were created. These categories are; Administration, Vitality, Concrete Object, National Value, Security, Value, Social Environment. The results of the study indicate that particular attention should be paid to the synonyms of the word "Homeland". It would be useful to organize certain activities in order to create a sense of belonging and national awareness among the students.

Problem Statement: The island of Cyprus, due to its strategic location, was under the influence of many conquerors throughout the centuries. Cultural traces of these captors have survived to the present day. This long, turbulent history has had a profound effect on the Cypriot educational system, with the most recent influence being the impact of the British Administration during the 19th and 20th centuries. Purpose of Study: This article attempts to reveal the influence and consequences of British Colonial policies on education, focussing on curriculum and its aims in the 20th century. The emphasis is more on the opinion of the recipients of education concerning their experience with the education system and their perception of its success or failure rather than on the aims and goals as set by the administrators and educators. Methods: This study encompasses a qualitative research approach to gain in-depth data based on interviews of Turkish-Cypriots and Greek-Cypriots of different backgrounds who were students during the colonial times. The data regarding issues of primary and secondary school curriculum and its aims, nationalism and religion at schools, identity, and ties between the two communities and their "motherlands" was recorded, analysed thematically, and presented in detail. Findings and Results: By implementing sometimes extreme measures, the British followed the tactic of "Divide and Rule" which led the two communities to ethic division. The authors discern the trends of the British Colonial policies towards the establishment of a more British society, which was accomplished by influencing the educational and sociopolitical aspects of life on the island. Conclusions: The British educational policies helped both Turkish and Greek Cypriots to create ethno-nationalism, which inspired the subsequent resistance of both communities. Although it is apparent that Cypriots placed a high value on education, this development was confined only within the context of being Greek or Turkish. Indeed, it would appear that within a curricula context, for the most part, this served as a forum in which all parties sought to construct national identities. The cost remains to be seen.

This article reviews research on history education that addresses recent or ongoing conflict since 1990. History education is recognized as a key site for constructing identity, transmitting collective memory, and shaping "imagined communities," which makes its revision or reform a complex and important part of education in emergencies work. The article reviews 42 empirical studies from 11 countries, exploring whether recent conflict forms part of national curricula and, where it does, how this teaching is approached. Young people learn about recent conflict in all of the cases reviewed; in the majority, curriculum is one source for this learning, but in some cases the history of recent conflict is taught without curricular guidance or not at all. Where recent conflict is taught, the review finds a reliance on a traditional, collective memory approach to disseminating national narratives, although often in social studies rather than history classrooms. In many cases, these narratives are top-down and ethno-nationalist and rely on devices like mythical past unity and the exceptionalism of conflict. The review concludes by suggesting that actors undertaking a revision or reform of history curriculum attend to recent conflict as an "active past" and offers some promising ideas for approaching such a past in history curricula.

Background: In the context of Cyprus' accession to the European Union (2004) and a noteworthy increase in immigration towards Cyprus, the Cypriot state was called upon to build more complete and coherent policies addressing culturally diverse educational settings. Cypriot education has historically enforced the nation-building project. However, since its accession negotiations to the EU, Cyprus received calls for harmonising its intercultural education to European standards. Purpose: This study aims to examine the content of intercultural policies in Cyprus, which have been initiated and/or developed by the national state and particularly the Ministry of Education and Culture. Furthermore, it explores the ways in which Cypriot policies are shaped by European influences, and the implications of this process for national constructs of intercultural education. Sources of evidence: We collected a purposive selection of thirty policy documents regarding intercultural education that were produced by the Ministry of Education and Culture in Cyprus. In addition, six Cypriot policy-makers working in the MEC's departments were interviewee participants. They were selected purposively according to the level of their involvement in the development of Cypriot intercultural policy. Design and methods: Data were coded to identify groups of concepts, issues, perceptions and behaviours and interrelationships within a theoretical model. Data triangulation contributed to the development of thematic categories that emerged from the data. Results: The analysis of the documentary evidence in this study suggests that the language of European policy has imbued the Cypriot socio-political environment with inclusive discourses enhancing intercultural education. Analysis in this study identifies that the Cypriot Ministry of Education and Culture maintains an assimilationist orientation in its broader educational goals, despite adopting such (inclusive) discourses. Conclusions: This study argues on the basis of this evidence that Cypriot intercultural policy appears symbolic, indicating "simulated" development and implementation processes. Arguably, there remains a high degree of ambivalence towards the process of transformation needed to Europeanise intercultural policy in Cyprus. (Contains 1 table.)

The purpose of this article is to explore "the mobility of national identities" with reference to the field of education. It argues that as products of multimodal discourse, national identities can move across or between geopolitical settings, and in the process of their movement they tend to shift and change their shape in certain ways. To test this argument the article employs examples from the nineteenth and twentieth century worlds of Greater Britain and Hellenism. In particular, by looking at various school books and practices it seeks to illustrate the movement of identity from Britain to New Zealand and from Greece to Cyprus and the changes that the mobile identities went through as they moved across these settings. The article finishes with an initial theorisation of the "dimensions" of the mobility of national identities and a call for comparative education to engage with mobile and shifting identities in the postcolonial and postmodern cosmos.

This paper examines arguments about the teaching of history in Cyprus, especially as they relate to the cultivation of patriotism. I point out how the narratives of "sacred history" and "dangerous memories" are discursive elements of a pedagogy that aims at maintaining patriotism by preventing subjective and divisive personal memories from eroding a cohesive national narrative. Along with other linguistic strategies ("passions of the past"), these discourses allow an idealization of history and a rejection of subjective, personal memory. I argue that this contributes to viewing history as a distant entity and not as a field of action, something that ultimately works against the purported goal of sustaining patriotism.

In this article, we explore the ways language has been used in Cyprus during different historical periods as a means of a dividing power, with the use of Cypriot dialects as a form of resistance and reunification of the island. We situate these translanguaging themes within a context of affective biopolitics that impacts Cypriot generations in shaping their everyday life through borderscapes and nationalisms. More specifically, we first examine how the official languages of the island (Greek and Turkish) have been used in the dominant public sphere(s) of Cyprus to marginalise Cypriot dialects, which, in turn, have been used as an oral means of communication, but also to impose symbolic signifiers of the biopolitics of borders and nationalisms in dividing communities. Secondly, we explore ways in which Cypriot dialects have been used as forms of linguistic resistance to nationalism, offering an alternative collective identity for generations of both communities, even during periods when nationalism was dominant in both communities. The translanguaging exploration centres on a close discourse analysis of one particular radio programme—the 'Cypriot radio sketch'—that has been very popular among Cypriots since the appearance of radio in Cyprus in 1953. Finally, we analytically and discursively contextualise attempts of revival of the Cypriot dialects by younger generations as communicative forms of resistance to powers of partition, as well as translanguaging pathways to actualise their desire for the reunification of the island. We eclectically draw on a multi-method approach to combine datasets from interviews, media and social media while combining critical discourse analysis to theorise the affordances, borderscapes and affective biopolitics of generational language use within geographies of nationalism and resistance in the borderscapes of a divided Cyprus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During its rule, The Ottoman Empire also established its education system. Under the circumstances of the Ottoman State during this period, Cyprus was rented to England in 1878. England interfered in the education system implemented in Cyprus. This situation lasted until the late 19th century. Cyprus was leased to the United Kingdom in 1878 due to the circumstances of the Ottoman Empire during this period. Since then, the United Kingdom has interfered in the education system implemented in Cyprus. Although the Turkish Cypriot community tried to maintain the national education system under its control throughout the British administration, they were not successful. The British colonial administration, with the influence of the conditions formed after the Second World War, made an initiative that included the development of the national identity of the Turkish Cypriots and established the Turkish Affairs Commission in 1948. Upon a yearly-long work, the commission has prepared a comprehensive Interim Report on Turkish Cypriot community issues. In this study, the chronological development of the Cypriot Turkish education history has been discussed by survey method, the interventions of the British administration to the Turkish Education has been analyzed, the issues related to education in the Turkish Affairs Commission Interim Report have been examined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The article discusses Turkey's political, social, and religious history from the perspective that the country is not a democratic, secular nation-state because Turkish leaders have focused on Muslim supersessionism since the Ottoman Empire era began in 1288. The article notes Muslim supersessionism, a radical form of nationalism based on Islamic hegemony and the idea that all citizens should want to belong to a Turkish "race," was a driving force behind the development of the Young Turks organization and Kemalist political doctrine. Ethnic cleansing, the Armenian genocide, the Greek massacres, and the government's efforts to expel Christians and Jews from Istanbul, Turkey in 1955 are topics in the discussion. Other topics include Cyprus, Islamization, and Turkification.

The article discusses the politics and history of Cyprus, focusing on its division between Turkish Cypriots in the North and Greek Cypriots in the South. It comments on the attempted coup d’état in 1974 that aimed to overthrow the government and annex Cyprus to Greece, and the subsequent invasion by Turkish forces. The author reflects on Cyprus' European Union (EU) membership and Turkey's prospects for EU membership. Other topics include international mediation, the prospect of reunification, and the influence of nationalism.

The article examines the future of the island of Cyprus. The central focus of the article is on a resolution of the political divisions that separate the Greek and Turkish populations living in autonomous regions on the island. Among other issues the article discusses a resolution proposed by Kofi Annan, the former secretary general of the United Nations, the stated goals of Greek nationalists on the island, and the result of the position of the European Union with regard to the ethnic divisions in Cyprus.

Greek Cypriot and Turkish Cypriot history schoolbooks adopted a similar model of ethnic nationalism focusing on the suffering of the Self and presenting an essentialist, unchanging view of national identity. However, the new books that recently appeared on the Turkish Cypriot side follow a social-constructivist model of history, which presents nationalism and national identity as emerging under specific historical conditions rather than as given. They avoid homogenizing assumptions by presenting internal differentiations, and indicate instances of internal violence and suffering of others. These changes have significant implications regarding notions of blame and trauma, and allow for identity to emerge as a political choice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that the kinship relations of the national ‘family’ are not simply a direct appropriation of ‘natural’ kinship relations but involve a transformation of those relations that also takes into account some gendered image of the land as a member of that family. Using comparative research in the Turkish and Greek communities of Cyprus, I propose that what is centrally important in images of national kinship is the common substance that land and people are imagined to share. Moreover, this common substance is regarded as so ‘natural’ that it constitutes an important axiom that is central to understanding the logic of nationalisms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most Cypriots before and since independence in 1960 experienced a double patriotism that contributed to the prolongation of the conflict between the two communities in their country. They identified with the island on which they lived as well as with the nation, Greece or Turkey, from which their ancestors had come. These patriotisms changed after the landing of the Turkish troops in 1974 when Cyprus was split into two distinct sections clearly based upon Turkish and Greek ethnicity. An attempt is made here to describe the resulting insecurity that played a significant role in preventing a resolution of the conflict in 1984-1985. For inductive, theoretical reasons a deliberate effort is also made to isolate ensuing "consequences" and hence to salvage old and slightly new generalizations that perhaps transcend this particular conflict. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]