Portrayals of the Holocaust in English history textbooks, 1991–2016: continuities, challenges and concerns

This study examines portrayals of the Holocaust in a sample of 21 secondary school history textbooks published in England between 1991 and 2016. Evaluated against internationally recognized criteria and guidelines, the content of most textbooks proved very problematic. Typically, textbooks failed to provide clear chronological and geographical frameworks and adopted simplistic Hitler-centric, perpetrator-oriented narratives. Furthermore, textbooks paid limited attention to pre-war Jewish life, the roots of antisemitism, the complicity of local populations and collaborationist regimes, and the impact of the Holocaust on people across Europe. Based on these critical findings, the article concludes by offering initial recommendations for textbook improvement

Complexity, complicity and community in the classroom and curriculum : identifications with 'ethnicity', 'race' and 'nation' in a British secondary school

This thesis presents ethnographic and interpretative case-study material from 'Kingsland' Secondary School- an inner-city, multi-ethnic, English comprehensive to examine the articulation of 'ethnicity', 'race' and 'nation' in young people's lives. It is framed by twenty-first century challenges to official discourses of national citizenship and by governmental 'Re-imagining Britishness' and 'Community Cohesion' agendas as they impact upon, and can themselves be informed with reference to, the experiences of students and their teachers in school. I question those methodological or analytic frameworks which reproduce 'race', 'ethnicity' and/or 'nation' as categorical entities and instead emphasise process and positionality, using a working definition of 'identity' as 'theorising of self. Kingsland students were invited to reflect upon their own apprehension of the material and discursive structures which influenced or offered explanation in their lives. I document that a variety of 'grouped' identities were awarded situational salience at Kingsland and further, that many were commonly articulated in relation to interdependent 'racialising' and 'ethnicising' discourses operating within the school. Students' overwhelming rhetorical rejection of, yet ambivalent relationship towards, 'Britishness' is also reported and explored. Differentiation between the perspectives articulated by 'white' and 'non-white' students constitutes a central axis ofmy interpretation and analysis. I note an apparent 'cognitive gap' which inhibits 'white'/'majority' students' ability to understand appeals to collective identity made by their 'minoritised' contemporaries. Personal or pronounced engagement with 'race', 'ethnicity' and 'nation' remain deeply problematic and discomfiting for many 'white' students at Kingsland School. I argue that this is symptomatic of a broader dilemmatic tension within their intellectual and political heritage which leads them to adopt temporally and spatially foreshortened frameworks for locating themselves and others in the world. Pedagogical and curricular responses to envisioning a multicultural politics able to confront and engage with contemporary, 'white British' subjectivities are examined in the final chapter of the text. I argue that the experiences of staff and students at Kingsland clearly demonstrate the value of process focused and dialogic educational encounters in supporting young people as they grapple with complex questions of 'belonging', 'community', 'identity' and 'responsibility'. As a researcher, I worked with attention to 'complicity' - here denoting complex interpersonal interdependence - as an important ethical and methodological concern. I suggest that complicity might also function as an appropriate framework for facilitating young Britons' understanding and engagement with multicultural politics, to emphasise the tlttlal constitution of relational identities and of differentiated experience in both contemporary and historical terms.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

Confronting the limits of antiracist and multicultural education: “white” students’ reflections on identity and difference in a multiethnic secondary school

This paper is drawn from ethnographic participant-observation data and interview materials collected between September 2004 and July 2005 in 'Kingsland', an inner-city, multiethnic comprehensive secondary school in the South West of England. It explores the complex and often contradictory ways in which young people negotiate and reflect on notions of identity and difference in relation to social and pedagogical vocabularies of belonging, friendship and fairness which operate within their school. The paper pays particular attention to experiences and perspectives outlined by Kingsland's 'white British' or 'ethnic majority' students in order to highlight and critically examine some of the tensions within, and limitations to, both national policy frameworks for citizenship education and local, institutional discourses which powerfully construct the school as a strongly antiracist multicultural community