Teaching and Researching History in a Divided Society (Alan McCully)

Over the last few years I have been very fortunate to work with a film company, Gaslight Productions, which has produced a powerful visual resource, Epilogues. It features 28 interviews with individuals who experienced the Northern Ireland (NI) Troubles, mainly as combatants or victims. The teaching workshop that accompanies the video footage opens by asking participants to outline the impact the NI conflict has had on their lives. Frequently, stories of tragedy and fortitude are recounted. In contrast, taking part, I have had to acknowledge that the chief outcome of conflict for me is that I have been able to build a career on the back of teaching and researching history in schools and that, in turn, this has enabled me to travel to places where otherwise I would not have had the opportunity to visit! My research colleague, Keith Barton, once coined the phrase, “teaching history where it really matters,” about working in NI. Certainly, views of the present and the past are intertwined in such a way that history’s relevance is visible and easily justified. Arguably, teaching history in such circumstances presents particular challenges and responses. My own career—twenty years a high school teacher of history, social studies and citizenship and twenty as teacher educator and researcher—maps neatly on to the years of the conflict and the slow, disrupted peace process which has followed. That context has dominated my working life. Initially, as a teacher and teacher educator, I was convinced that the way the past was misrepresented and abused contributed to the societal breakdown of the late 60s and early 70s and, hence, I was determined to ensure that my teaching sought to bring greater insight and clarity to young people. Latterly, as researcher there is the uncomfortable realisation that innovative and “enlightened” approaches do not necessarily bring individual or societal transformation in the face of fragmented, selective and deeply held positions within divided communities.

Educational research related to the NI conflict has tended to concentrate on structural issues emanating from a system heavily segregated by religion, and resultant attempts to break this down through cross community contact between students. Instead, from my teacher background, my focus has been on pedagogy and practice, especially related to teaching sensitive and controversial issues, through handling issues associated with Irish history and contemporary local culture and politics. These two strands of my work, in the context of the NI curriculum, one concerned with history teaching and the other with social studies/citizenship, have operated in parallel, and have been complementary to each other. However, throughout, I have been keenly aware of the disciplinary distinctions between the two and, having promoted an “extrinsic” social purpose to history teaching my entire career, recently I have become concerned that funding pressures are fudging that disciplinary relationship to the detriment of students’ rigorous historical understanding.

Central to my thinking on teaching history in divided societies has been the research I conducted with Keith Barton. We were interested in how an enquiry-based history curriculum would interface with the historical understanding students brought to the classroom from history encountered in the media, family and community. A number of interesting findings emerged. First, it was clear that partisan accounts learned in communities were influential for some but that many students also had interests in aspects of the past which had no direct relationship to NI’s divisions. Second, students valued history experienced in school for its perceived objectivity but were unlikely to reject what they had learned informally. Rather, they engaged in what Bakhtin terms “internally persuasive discourse” in order to try to make sense of the contentious past for themselves. Third, whatever the nature of that discourse, students’ positions were unlikely to move beyond the broad unionist/nationalist community identifications of their families. Indeed, there was evidence that as students got older, despite exposure to multiple perspectives in history classrooms, they were likely to “cherry pick” that teaching to support positions conducive to their emerging politicisation in the community.

For me research is particularly valuable if it directly informs classroom practice. Space is short here but by combining my empirical work in history with the findings from my studies into the pedagogy of teaching controversial issues, the following principles for teaching history in NI have emerged:

• Challenge entrenched and unsubstantiated positions, “myth-bust” and expose the abuse of history.
• Follow a disciplinary approach and in doing so encourage complexity and initiate informed individual interpretations and
   debate.
• Enable students to engage in meta-cognition whereby they can be aware how their own backgrounds, allegiances and
   emotions might influence the way they interpret the past.
• Involve students in a constant “dialogue” between the events of the past and their links with the present.
• Engage students in an explicit exploration of the relationship between national identity(ies) and history.
• Help students understand the recent, violent past including empathising with, and critically examining, personal experiences
   of those events.
• Provide an informed context for contemporary dialogue.
• Articulate history’s place in a connected curriculum and its relationship with citizenship education.

However, if students are to benefit from the above, it is crucial that teachers be given opportunities to understand how their own life experiences and values in a divided society may have influenced the way they interpret (and teach) the contested past.
 

Image: Gates in the “Peace Line” during the Northern Troubles. By {{{1}}} (Flickr: Gates in the ‘Peace Line’) [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons