Journal of Educational Media, Memory and Society (JEMMS)

The explicit and implicit messages conveyed by images contained in history textbooks and in informal educational media call for interpretative acumen, which the authors of this issue provide in their analyses of nation-building in post-Yugoslav textbooks, national myths in Peruvian military manuals, images of war in Japanese and American textbooks, visualisations of war memorials in Soviet and post-Soviet textbooks and front covers of the German magazine Der Spiegel.

Narrative is a powerful pillar of history education. Three articles in this issue focus on narrative content, reception and comparison. They demonstrate the force of the repetition of texts and images in textbooks used in the United States, and structural similarities between accounts of the bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941 and of the attack on the World Trade Center in 2001, but also that depictions of Greek antiquity do not invariably impinge on pupils’ understandings of present-day Greece.

How are modern technologies presented in museum spaces? Exploring ways in which histories of technology have departed from the traditional view of modern linear progress, the authors examine exhibitions, artefacts, narratives presented at former ‘places of progress’ such as the Uganda Railway in Kenya, the Norwegian Petroleum Museum, the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum and the former German military research center at Peenemünde.

Migration and integration form the focus of this issue. Alexandre Dessingué and Ketil Knutsen explore ‘critical memory consciousness’ arising out of dialogic processes in Norwegian schooling. In similar vein, Isabel Rivero-Vilá offers practical insights into uses of documentary films to help language learners to be active members of their host countries, while Lina Spjut explains how temporary Finnish labour migrants came to be seen as a permanent national minority in Swedish textbooks.

The Second World War is central to post-Soviet memory cultures. This issue investigates representations of the war in Russian and Lithuanian educational media, focusing on Russian museums and 'history parks', the falsification of war narratives in textbooks and the 1940 Soviet occupation of Lithuania. Drawing on empirical data, the authors present alternatives to Western cultures of remembering and thereby seek to contribute to overcoming the Western bias in memory studies.

This issue addresses: discrepancies between standards and pedagogical approaches to Arabic grammar instruction in the curricula of Middle Eastern countries; the Indonesian generation z’s identity construction via live streaming apps; Anglophone versus Francophone representations of national reunification in Cameroonian history textbooks; narratives of migration and migrants in Turkish textbooks; and textbook renderings of West Germany’s ‘economic miracle’ versus East Germany’s planned economy.

How did Spanish history textbooks in use during the Franco regime incorporate self-legitimising discourses of democracy, reconciliation and peace into presentations of the Spanish Civil War? Why has National Socialism become favourably connotated in Indian textbooks? How do Albanian history textbooks present the Holocaust? And how were educational films instrumentalised in interwar China by combining recreation, education, and propaganda? These are some of the questions raised in this issue.

This issue contains contributions about the way in which the history curriculum of Religious Zionism in Israel accommodates but also neutralises diverse and contrasting voices, how textbooks in Germany and England mirror prevailing political climates but fail to acknowledge and accommodate young people’s viewpoints, and how smartphones may be used as tools in extracurricular settings in order to help learners to explore urban spaces and their living environment.

This issue examines the development and use of primers around the end of the Second World War in six European countries: Germany, Greece, Macedonia, Poland, Romania and Soviet Russia. The authors investigate the degree to which the primers reflect a break with the prewar past and the forms that this transformation assumed in each context. By drawing on a range of disciplinary perspectives, the issue reveals how primers may serve as primary sources and objects of study.

How should the content of mobile learning devices be designed in order to ensure that its short and dense structures remain pedagogically effective? How may civic education textbooks respond to political apathy among young people in Germany by encouraging critical thinking? And how may training textbooks for budding businesspeople be revised in order to accommodate epistemic beliefs which are not invariably stable and interconnected? These are some of the questions posed in this issue.

During the nineteenth century, world geography instruction underwent a radical change. This issue illuminates how turn-of-the-century textbooks and novels reflected dominant ways in which space and the world were described. Drawing on texts from the German Empire, the Kingdom of the Netherlands, Turkey, the United States, colonial Bengal and Japan, the authors explore how geography served as a context to frame knowledge of the ‘self’ and the ‘other’ and propagate knowledge about the world.

Topics covered in this issue range from visualisations of the national leader in Albania and of National Socialism in East Germany, the epistemological values of multimodal texts and of procedural versus substantive knowledge, Swedish teachers’ observations of pupils learning about the Cold War, the unusual consistency of ideals of citizenship in Swiss textbooks, and a comparison of ways in which the capture of Lviv on 30 June 1941 is presented in different versions of Wikipedia.

Societies in transition face manifold challenges. The authors of this issue examine four cases of political transition in the second half of the twentieth century (post-communist Albania, Post-Suharto Indonesia, Italy since the 1950s and the transition to democracy in Spain). By examining the pedagogical characteristics of a variety of textual genres, the authors shed light on the impact of political transition on textbooks and interpret the roles assigned to educational texts in each context.

Among the themes covered in this issue are: values conveyed in language textbooks in China such as patriotism, diligence and collectivism; a comparison of pupils’ activities dealing with the Cold War in Swedish and Australian history textbooks; humanistic pedagogy in the prized Dutch secondary school textbook Essential Economics; comprehensive school teachers’ strategic uses of textbooks in Sweden; and the Swedish state approval scheme for textbooks in the late twentieth century.

This issue explores uses of educational films in international school settings, including the role of educational films in 1920s Germany, the sociopolitical dimension of educational films during the National Socialist regime, the international educational programme ‘Literacy for the Americas’ in Mexico in the 1940s, the educational film production in postwar Italy and the application of feature films in German history teaching.

This issue explores memory practices and history education from a range of angles and methodologies. By analysing specific cases via sociologically inspired empirical accounts, process-oriented interpretations and sociosemiotic approaches, the authors explore the ‘doing’ of memory in history teaching as a complex phenomenon that emerges via everyday interactions, yet has the power to have an impact on major political configurations.

This issue contains a collection of studies of textbook contents dealing with national stereotypes in French textbooks after the Franco-Prussian War, religious discourse in modern history school textbooks in Ukraine, the continuing presentation of Germany as a victimiser in Israeli history textbooks, but also studies of children’s bibles as a special textbook genre and of the methodologies of history textbooks published after the liberalisation of the school textbook market in Albania in 2008.

Conflicts and identity politics are frequently waged via textbooks in South Asia. However, textbooks have the potential to both exacerbate or mitigate conflict on intra- and interstate levels. Moving beyond interstate conflicts, the authors explore internal identity politics and the contestation of dominant values in textbooks used in Pakistan, Bangladesh, India and Sri Lanka.

Textbooks from Australia, Quebec, the German Democratic Republic, Austria and South Africa are at the centre of this issue. The ‘Forum’ rubric also contains practical recommendations about ways in which pupils may use mobile telephones on historical sites to create digital stories or geocaches designed to promote collaborative debates about the past, and how computer supported quantitative content may reduce normative value judgements in textbook research.

In addition to contributions about teaching machines and the Holocaust in English textbooks, this issue contains a section about narrative strategies in and aesthetic features of contemporary children’s films which burgeoned following the expansion of the children’s film industry in the US and Europe. The authors demonstrate the pertinence of children’s film studies for academic fields including film studies, media education and cognitive psychology.

This issue addresses postcolonial politics of memory in the context of history textbooks and other educational media used in schools in France, Britain, Germany, Italy, Australia and central and eastern Europe. The authors explore the extent to which educational media are currently the site of postcolonial resignifications and relocations of politics of memory in Europe.

In recent decades, museums have revised their curatorial practices, questioning previously accepted historical narratives. This issue examines the educational turn in museum curatorship and assesses new, purportedly inclusive curational strategies in the context of museal spaces in and beyond Europe. Themes include the transformation of museums into ‘spaces of memory’, ‘community museums’ and the role of museums in civic education in various geographical and disciplinary settings.

This issue examines ways in which history education is politicised in the course of debates occurring in different historical contexts. The authors explore ways and the extent to which political authorities have controlled history education in contexts such as Switzerland during the Cold War, the Kingdom of the Netherlands, communist Poland and contemporary Britain. The final article outlines moral and political concerns raised by history education.

How and why do Syrian history textbooks sustain an image of Arab nationalism alongside images of rival Arab nation-states, including those of Syrian nationalism? And how do textbooks in Catalonia maintain a balance between Spanish history and Catalonian specificity via the careful selection of words, images and sources? These, alongside insights into commemoration of colonial and genocidal injustices in Hungary and England, are some of the questions addressed in this issue.

How do curricula present Islam, the Muslim world and Muslims in Canada and Europe? Using the Quebec school system as a case study, the authors explore the degree to which formal curricula reproduce traditional stereotypes. By identifying innovative ways of counteracting bias, the authors contribute towards a better understanding of the role education can play in the transmission of knowledge about minority cultures and religions.

The focus of this issue is on textbook revision in various historical and geopolitical contexts. The topics range from changes in textbook revision on a national level in South Asia and the Middle East to international textbook revision projects such as the German-Polish textbook commission. By illustrating the connection between textbook revision and research, the issue shows how international textbook revision may continue to alleviate conflicts over the interpretation of the past.

Methodological concerns form the core of studies of current challenges to textbook production, and of textbooks as a genre. Case studies cover historical consciousness in Swedish textbooks, Palestinian pupils’ reactions to the dual narrative approach, gender in Jordanian and Palestinian textbooks, ethnic identities in Japanese textbooks, and history atlases. The ‘Forum’ rubric analyses Berlin's Potsdamer Platz as an urban ‘interactive textbook’ and reviews new methods in school historiographies.

This issue addresses the meaning of the term ‘Europe’ by investigating how Europe has been perceived in its spatial and mythical dimensions. Working with the assumption that myths are not objects but dynamic processes, the authors examine representations of Europe in relation to the way in which myths and maps interact, and question basic assumptions about Europe’s nature and boundaries in an era of European enlargement, globalisation and demographic change.

The first issue of JEMMS addresses teaching and learning in a globalising world. Documenting the importance of history and geography textbooks for identity formation, it explores memory and agency, textbook controversies, the representation of ethnic minorities and the political forces that shape textbook production. Countries and regions examined include central and eastern Europe, India, Japan, Mexico, Russia and the United States. The issue also explores the role of film and the internet.