Ideology and history as immunologies: history teaching reform in two ethnic borders in the 2000s

• In Event: Poster Session: Translating policy into practice: The challenges and possibilities of education reform in diverse contexts

Abstract

The movement of educational reforms across borders has become an object of scholarly interest in comparative education in the context of globalization (e.g. Steiner-Khamsi & Waldow, 2012). In this body of scholarship however, little attention is given on ‘failed’ and ‘short-lived’ travelling reforms: i.e., reforms that are either unsuccessful in crossing borders or cancelled out shortly after they had passed through a border.

This paper explores the topic of ‘border immunology’. It utilizes history education as a specific type of de-territorialised reforms and Greek-Cypriot and Turkish-Cypriot ethnicities of Cyprus as two particular sorts of borders with different immunological logic. It is argued that while educa-tional history, especially colonial conflicts over school history in the 1930s and 1940s between British colonialists and Cypriot Hellenists, blocked history education reform from crossing the Greek-Cypriot border, political ideology – the ideology of Cyprus as a Turkish land – reversed history education reform a few years after it passed through the Turkish-Cypriot border.

The paper, drawing on data collected from an educational project on controversies over history teaching in Cyprus in the 2000s, is divided into four sections. The first section introduces the idea of borders as domains with immunological power. In the second section, an attempt is made to stabilize the motif of history education as a de-territorialised or travelling reform. The third and fourth parts examine the immunology of the Greek-Cypriot and Turkish-Cypriot borders respec-tively.

Author

• Eleftherios Klerides, University of Cyprus