Young People, National Narratives and History Education

What young people do and do not know about the past is frequently discussed in news media and in political debate. Young people are typically presented as having a knowledge deficit in these discussions and it has become almost a truism to claim that the young know little or nothing about history.

This seminar will explore what young people know about the past and the sources of their knowledge from an international perspective. Drawing on research from Quebec, Ottawa and Amsterdam, the seminar will reflect on the nature, form and sources of young people's thinking about the past and aim to challenge the clichéd practice of itemising and lamenting 'the ignorance of the young'.

Seminar Papers

1. Young Québécois, National Narrative, and History Education

Dr. Jocelyn Létourneau, Department of History, Laval University, Quebec City, Canada. Visiting Research Associate, Institute of Education, University College London

2. Dutch Student’s Perspectives on National History

Dr. Arie Wilschut, Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

3. History as a “GPS”: On the use of historical narratives for students’ life-orientation

Dr. Stéphane Lévesque, Vice Dean Research, Faculty of Education and Professional Development University of Ottawa, Canada

Paper Outlines

1. Young Québécois, National Narrative, and History Education

Jocelyn Létourneau

When entering school, kids are not empty pots. They know many things, including things about the past of their society. Getting into the body of this historical knowledge is an interesting business. It reveals to what extent assimilated family souvenirs and community memories and templates are important in shaping children’s historical knowledge and historical consciousness.

If family souvenirs and community memories are structural components in kid’s historical consciousness, they also represent limitations to take students out of the mythistories – a mix of brute facts and historical romance – they’re trapped in when telling the past. One of the main challenges to teaching the past to kids is to get them outside the thinkable they’ve been accustomed to in living in a particular society and being subjected to its broad representations.

The aim of the talk is to discuss a pragmatic approach to teaching the past to kids in the context of a strong presence of community memories and templates everywhere in society, assuming the fact that kids learn history in and out of the classroom. The proposed approach – to start from memory in order to get out of it – comes from an innovative study effectuated in Quebec in the last decade (www.tonhistoireduquebec.ca) which consisted in collecting short narratives (N = 5000) and phrases (N= 3423) produced by students responding to two basic questions: 1) “Tell me the story of Quebec as you know it;” 2) “If you had to summarize in one sentence the historical experience of Quebec, what would you write personally?”

2. Dutch Student’s Perspectives on National History

Arie Wilschut

The paper concentrates on two questions: 1) Which topics of Dutch history are best-known among students leaving secondary education? 2) How do Dutch students deal with first person plural ('we') versus third person plural ('they') perspectives when writing and talking about national history? The results of both research questions will yield an insight into some aspects of Dutch national historical consciousness.

3. History as a “GPS”: On the use of historical narratives for students’ life-orientation

Stéphane Lévesque

What is a historical narrative? What functions do narratives play in students’ life? In this lecture, I will claim that narrative is to history what the GPS is to geography: a mode of orientation. I will begin with the idea of narratives as the structural form with which time becomes human time and acquires a specific temporal meaning. Narration, I will argue, has the general function of orienting the individual and the community in the course of time. Drawing on conceptualizations of historical consciousness from Rüsen to Létourneau, I will show how narrating history and understanding historical narratives are necessary competencies to an educated citizenry. Using empirical evidence from studies with French Canadian learners, I will then discuss how the ability to “think the nation” in narrative-form provides students – and educators – with an additional model of cognition in historical thinking. I will finally conclude by proposing that narrating the history of the nation also serves to establish the historical consciousness, narrative framework, and identity of the students and their community.