5B - Coloniality in social studies education

10:15 - 11:45 Thursday, 20th May, 2021

Subject area Social Sciences

Presentation types Symposium presentation

Session Chair Mari Kristine Jore

207 This presentation aims to contextualise what can be understood as a new drive of post-colonial perspectives in teacher education. It will serve as an introduction to the other papers in the sessions (Jore, Harnes, Greger Eriksen). The presentation will first outline a brief timeline of (the lack of) post-colonial perspectives in teacher education.  It will further present a series of examples of current student research projects that has been designed and crafted through post-colonial lenses. The examples include topics such as decolonizing of curricula; children’s’ spatial conceptualizing of the world; constructions of stereotypes in space and time – xenotypes and autosteoreotypes; the dilemmas of terminology – race, ethnicity and the Other.Finally, the presentation will discuss some of Achille Mbembe’s ideas of the way ahead for a more balanced and, so-called decolonized higher education – herein also teacher education.

127 The overall aim of my PhD-study is to explore lower secondary students’ and teachers’ interpretations of colonial imperialism in Africa. One challenge in interpretative processes in history education is presentism, that is interpreting historical agents and events merely from a contemporary perspective, instead of seeking to understand past agents and events as part of the context in which they lived and occurred.The aim of this paper is to discuss one finding in my study; how the present and past are intertwined in students’ interpretations. The project is an action research project. An intervention was tried out and data collected in four 9^th grade classrooms in cooperation with five teachers in 2019. The teachers and I created a lesson plan in order to enhance contextualisation, perspective taking, and an affective connection, in line with Endacott and Brooks’ (2013) conceptualisation of ‘historical empathy’. The collected data includes participant observation, students’ written work, and sound recordings from students’ group work and meetings between teachers and the researcher. The data will be analysed through the lens of ‘history education and colonialism’ and ‘historical empathy’.In the paper, I will present and discuss three preliminary and interrelated aspects of this finding:Participants’ moral judgment of colonial imperialism in Africa and how this challenges and/or encourages historical contextualisation.Which ideas from the present that inform students’ interpretations of colonial imperialism.Participants’ historical questions as a starting point for learning about this topic.I will also include some reflections on possible implications for history teaching and learning about colonial imperialism.Key words: colonial imperialism, historical empathy, presentism, contextualisation, historical judgmentReference:Endacott, J.L. & Brooks, S. (2013). An Updated Theoretical and Practical Model for Promoting Historical Empathy. Social Studies Research and Practice, 8(1), 18.

104 The purpose of this paper is to present postcolonial theory (see, for example, Said,1979, Spivak, 1988, Chakrabarty, 2008) as the theoretical foundation of my PhD-thesis. In this paper, I ask how this theoretical lens challenges social studies didactics and what contributions the theories can make to the field of citizenship education. In my PhD-project, I examine structures of identification in social studies education and particularly ask what narratives and imaginaries were constructed about Norwgianess and Westerness in social studies education at a public lower secondary school in one of the larger cities in Western Norway. The thesis builds on a microethnography where data for the project was established through observation of the social studies subject in three ninth-grade classes and through interviews with 36 pupils concerning their reflections on, and experience of, the social studies subject. Postcolonial theory, which amongst others is represented by Said (1979) and scholars of the Subaltern-studies  (Spivak, 1988, Chakrabarty, 2008), draws attention to how practices of representation reproduce a logic of subordination that endures even after former colonies gained independence. In the last decade, we have seen an increase in the debate concerning the role of the Nordic countries in colonialism (Loftsdóttir and Jensen, 2012). Research showing the Nordic countries’ participation in colonial practices and processes of globalization (Eidsvik, 2012; Mikander, 2016) underlines the Nordic countries' colonial complicity (Keskinen et al., 2009). This challenges the ideas of Nordic exceptionalism and eurocentrism, hegemonic notions which influence social studies education (Jore, 2018, 2019), and ideas of othering (Spivak, 1988) and stereotypical representations of us and them (Jore, forthcoming). In response to this critical thinking and awareness of power relations is of uttermost importance. What kind of didactical approaches can help us challenge hegemonic notions and denaturalize stereotypical representations of “us” and “them”?

106 In this presentation, I report from my doctoral study exploring the coloniality of Norwegian citizenship education. The methodology in the study is Colonial discourse analysis, focusing on relations between knowledge production and power, and identifying hegemonic, ahistorical, and Eurocentric institutionalized discursive structures. To do this, I apply a combination of methods allowing me to explore discourses from different modalities of discursive practice, hereunder textbooks, classroom conversations, and students’ and teachers´meaning-making. The first modality is accessed through critical discourse analysis of textbooks, and the other modalities are approached through ethnography, including participant observation of classroom interactions and conversations, semi-structured interviews with students and teachers, and teaching interventions. The analytical emphasis on coloniality engages analyses of how historical colonialism installed enduring epistemological and material structures that continue to inform our current ways of thinking and being. Coloniality encompass a system where the white majority represents the invisible norm, acting as the bearer of the alleged universal rationality. The significance of coloniality for citizenship education is related both to locating the possible limitations posed by colonial frameworks of knowledge to the potential for fostering critical thinking, and the reproduction of racialization and othering through educational discourses. In the presentation, I will present implications from the study towards an antiracist, decolonizing, and critical citizenship education practice, and discuss challenges and opportunities posed by a decolonizing approach to citizenship education in the Norwegian context.