Learning to 'understand backwards' in time: children's temporal cognition and the primary history curriculum

This study examines children’s temporal ways of knowing and it highlights the centrality of temporal cognition in the development of children’s historical understanding. It explores how young children conceptualise time and it examines the provision for temporal cognition at the levels of the intended, enacted and received history curriculum in the Irish primary school context. Positioning temporality as a prerequisite second-order concept, the study recognises the essential role of both first-order and additional second-order concepts in historical understanding. While the former can be defined as the basic, substantive content to be taught, the latter refers to a number of additional key concepts that are deemed fundamental to children's capacity to make meaningful sense of history. The study argues for due recognition to be given to temporality, in the belief that both sets of knowledge, the content and skills, are required to develop historical thinking (Lévesque, 2011). The study addresses a number of key research questions, using a mixed methods research design, comprising an analysis of history textbooks, a survey among final year student teachers about their teaching of history, and school-based interviews with primary school children: What opportunities are available for children to develop temporal ways of knowing? How do student teachers experience being apprenticed into the available culture for teaching history and understanding temporality at primary level? What insights do the cognitive-developmental and sociocultural perspectives on learning provide for understanding the dynamics of children’s temporal ways of knowing? The study argues that the skill of developing a deeper understanding of time is a key prerequisite in connecting with, and constructing, understandings and frameworks of the past. The study advances a view of temporality as complex, multi-faceted and developmental. The findings have a potential contribution to make in influencing policy and pedagogy in establishing an elaborated and well-defined curriculum framework for developing temporal cognition at both national and international levels.

A bookish history of Irish Romanticism

This chapter argues that authors of Irish Romantic novels and national tales, such as Maria Edgeworth and John and Michael Banim, are not only concerned with the extent to which their novels sought to copy from Irish culture but are also worried about the slightness of the novel form in relation to the copiousness of that culture. Such concerns led to attempts by Thomas Crofton Croker and others to add texture and tactility to their depictions of the Irish past, through antiquarian methodologies but also facsimiles, lithography, and other developments in print culture. The chapter demonstrates the ways in which Irish literary texts were concerned not only to accurately and minutely detail the past, but also to adduce evidence of such historical and cultural authenticity, working against teleological accounts of the birth of the modern historical method, which see Romantic history as unconcerned with the evidentiary foundations of the past.

Negotiating national identity on film: competing readings of Zhang Yimou’s 'Hero'

How are national identities transformed? If they are mostly narratives of belonging to a community of history and destiny to which people subscribe, those boundary-making procedures that constitute the political field by instituting differences can provide a tentative answer to this question. This paper is concerned with one such cultural practice, namely film-viewing. Globalisation, a boundary-blurring practice, has been the backdrop against which transformations in national identity are often discussed, either bemoaned as cultural imperialism or celebrated as ongoing hybridisation. This piece of research took Zhang Yimou’s controversial film Hero as a point of departure, and asked groups of Chinese audiences how they understood the Chinese identity it conveys. Although it is still a work in progress, provisional results are reported below.