Barton, K. 2005. History-Identity-And-The-School-Curriculum
Barton, K. 2005. History-Identity-And-The-School-Curriculum
Barton, K. 2005. History-Identity-And-The-School-Curriculum
To cite this article: Keith C. Barton & Alan W. Mccully (2005) History, identity, and the school
curriculum in Northern Ireland: an empirical study of secondary students' ideas and perspectives,
Journal of Curriculum Studies, 37:1, 85-116, DOI: 10.1080/0022027032000266070
Download by: [Ulster University Library] Date: 08 January 2018, At: 06:36
J. CURRICULUM STUDIES, 2005, VOL. 37, NO. 1, 85–116
history and identity in Northern Ireland. Interviews with 253 students from a variety of back-
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grounds indicate that they initially identify with a wide range of historical themes, but that
these identifications narrow as they study the required national curriculum during the first 3
years of secondary school. Often, they draw selectively from the formal curriculum in order
to support their developing identification with the history of their own political/religious
communities. This process is most apparent among boys, at predominantly Protestant
schools, and in schools located in areas of conflict. These findings suggest that to address
history’s role in ongoing community conflict, educators may need to challenge more directly
the beliefs and assumptions held by students of varied backgrounds, as well as to provide a
clearer alternative to the partisan histories encountered elsewhere.
Keith C. Barton is a professor in the Division of Teacher Education at the University of Cin-
cinnati, Cincinnati, OH 45221-0002, USA; e-mail: [email protected]. He is the co-au-
thor (with L. S. Levstik) of Teaching History for the Common Good (Lawrence Erlbaum
Associates, 2004) and Doing History: Investigating with Children in Elementary and Middle
Schools (Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2001).
Alan W. McCully is a Lecturer in the School of Education at the University of Ulster, Cole-
raine, Northern Ireland. He formerly taught history in Northern Ireland and has been in-
volved in a number of projects focused on the handling of controversial cultural and political
issues.
Journal of Curriculum Studies ISSN 0022–0272 print/ISSN 1366–5839 online ©2005 Taylor & Francis Ltd
http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals
DOI: 10.1080/0022027032000266070
86 K. C. BARTON AND A. W. MCCULLY
studying the required national curriculum. The findings reported here call
into question any simplistic notion of the relationship between historically-
grounded identities and formal study at school: students neither reject
school history outright nor use it to replace prior, community-based histor-
ical narratives. Rather, they draw selectively from the school curriculum
(and other sources) to support a range of developing historical identities.
Although many students’ identifications in Northern Ireland are bound up
with the current political conflict, they are by no means dominated by simple
Unionist/Nationalist divisions. Moreover, these identifications vary by reli-
gious background, gender, geographic region, and type of school. By shed-
ding light on the complex ways in which students’ historically-grounded
identities develop during early adolescence, this paper provides information
critical to curriculum design in history. These findings should stimulate
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reflection on the history curriculum, not only in Northern Ireland but in any
society where history aims at contemporary relevance through its impact on
young people.
peoples, the Vikings, Ancient Egyptians, and so on—as well as about the
nature of evidence and interpretation. They begin to study national history
in the first 3 years of secondary school, when they are about ages 11–14.
Each year features a core module focusing on a period deemed essential for
understanding Irish history, but these modules are contextualized within a
wider British and European framework. In the first year, students study the
impact of the Normans on the mediaeval world, including the Norman inva-
sion of Ireland. In the second year, English conquest and colonization of
Ireland is placed in the context of change and conflict in the 16 th and 17th
centuries. Third-year students study the growth of Irish nationalism and
unionism from the Act of Union to Partition,1 including links with British
politics, the influence of European nationalist movements and the impact of
World War I (Department of Education, Northern Ireland 1996). This
curriculum is the same for students at all schools, regardless of the religious
affiliation of those who attend. At the time of writing, however, the curricu-
lum is undergoing a process of revision, which may result in a curriculum
framed more by learning outcomes than prescribed historical content.
However, history at the secondary level in Northern Ireland is not meant
simply to cover content. Seeking to build on foundations established at
primary level, teachers encourage students to take an inquiry approach, to
understand events from the perspectives of those at the time, to recognize
differing interpretations, and to arrive at conclusions only after considering
primary and secondary evidence. As the third year of the secondary school
represents the last compulsory exposure to history, there is a tacit recogni-
tion by those who designed the curriculum that, by the completion of this
stage, history—through its knowledge and skills—should contribute to
greater understanding of a variety of cultural and political backgrounds
amongst young people in Northern Ireland. If school history is successful in
reaching its goal, it should provide students an alternative source of histori-
cal understanding—alternative, that is, to the presumably partisan and
sectarian histories they encounter outside school. The social purposes of
history education remain largely tacit at present. Two of the key criteria
underpinning proposals for a new curriculum, presently at the consultation
stage, are those of social relevance and establishing links across subject areas
that are explicit to students. For example, the contribution that history
might make to a new Local and Global Citizenship programme (Council for
88 K. C. BARTON AND A. W. MCCULLY
outside school (Barton et al. 2003). Yet, research with students in the primary
grades suggests their understanding of the past is not dominated by politicized
historical narratives and that they recognize the role of evidence in construct-
ing historical accounts (Barton 2001a, b, c). This lack of congruence among
curricular objectives, teachers’ perceptions, and research with younger chil-
dren points to the need for clarification of the nature of students’ historical
understanding, particularly the ways in which group identity may affect their
views of the past and how those views change—if at all—during their encoun-
ter with the secondary curriculum. Although previous research has investi-
gated issues of history and identity in Northern Ireland, none has focused
directly on the development of such perspectives among children.
history and identity have been part of a separate tradition, largely historical
and/or interpretive in nature. McBride (1997), for example, examined how
the Protestant ‘siege mentality’ has been perpetuated over the past 300 years
by historians, artists, politicians, and clergy. Other historical studies of the
role of the past in creating a distinctly Protestant/Unionist identity include
Hill (1984–1985), Jackson (1992), Kelly (1994), and Walker (1996, 2000).
Most of this work is based on analysis of historic documents—books,
pamphlets, published speeches and sermons, and newspaper articles—
although it often refers to contemporary practices as well. A more ethno-
graphic approach is found in works by Jarman (1997) and Buckley and
Kenney (1995), who attend to the use of historical symbols in parades, visual
displays, and public rhetoric to develop and maintain collective identities,
both Nationalist and Unionist.
The qualitative nature of these historical and ethnographic approaches
contribute significantly to an understanding of the complex ways in which
people in Northern Ireland use history as a way of creating and maintaining
collective identities. However, the open-ended nature of such research
makes it difficult to develop generalizations or comparisons across groups.
In addition, this work has focused almost entirely on the ‘production’ of
historical identity—the use of historical references and symbols in
speeches, books, banners, murals, and so on. Much less attention has been
paid to the ‘consumption’ of such history—that is, how people react to and
make sense of the historical representations to which they are exposed
(Rosenzweig and Thelen 1998, Wertsch 1998). And almost none of this
research focuses on the development of children’s ideas about history and
identity. Yet, studying children should be an essential component of under-
standing identity, because—as the early studies of social psychologists in
Northern Ireland recognized—identity is a social construction that devel-
ops over time. This concern leads to the principal research questions in this
study:
Theoretical framework
Methods
Design
children think about history is still at such a rudimentary stage that we could
not reasonably hope to identify the range of concepts they would consider
meaningful. A repertory-type technique, thus, seemed an appropriate way of
eliciting the ideas that students found salient. This approach has not been
used previously in studies of historical thinking, however, and we hoped that
our study might make an initial contribution toward establishing its advan-
tages and limitations.
II. Our goal was to provide students with the greatest possible range of items
to work with, so that the categories they developed would not be artificially
limited to only a few areas of the past, and so that we would gain information
on patterns that might cut across diverse elements. Although supplying
students with such materials undoubtedly limited the range of possible
responses, previous research with children’s historical thinking suggested
that a set of visual images would provoke a greater range and depth of
response than asking them to verbally identify historical items on their own
(Levstik and Barton 1996, Barton and Levstik 1998).
We presented students with a set of 27–28 pictures (an additional
picture was added during the research project, for reasons to be explained
later) and asked them to arrange them into groups they thought went
together. We also explained that they might have only a few groups or
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several, that each group might contain only two pictures or many, and that
some pictures might not go into any group at all. We then allowed several
minutes for students to work together on the task, and after they had
completed their arrangement, we asked them to explain why they had put
each group of pictures together. The interview that followed the picture-
arrangement task was designed to gather information on several elements of
the participants’ understanding of history and its role in Northern Ireland
society. First, we asked students which of the categories, or which individual
pictures, ‘have the most to do with you or who you are’. We phrased this
question as broadly (and vaguely) as this because we suspected students
might not have a clear understanding of the phrase ‘identify with’, and also
so that our wording would not over-determine their responses and would
allow them to read their own interpretations into the question. We then
asked which pictures they considered most important in historical terms
(whether or not they were related to their own identity), which they had
learned about in school and which out of school, how learning history had
changed their ideas about various topics (if at all), why they thought history
was important to people in Northern Ireland, why it was a topic they studied
at school, and whether and why people had differing ideas about history.
Because the questions were open-ended, we invariably probed students’
answers, asking for examples or clarifications and often drawing their atten-
tion to specific pictures or other historical topics in order to examine how
they applied their ideas to concrete instances.5
Interviews were conducted away from students’ classrooms, usually in
spare rooms, libraries, or offices. To generate richer data, we interviewed
students in groups, most of which consisted of same-sex pairs from a single
grade level, although scheduling irregularities sometimes led to groups with
three students or a combination of genders and/or grades. 6 A potential
disadvantage of using interviews as a way of gaining insight into students’
thinking derives from the ‘culture of politeness’ that operates in most public
settings in Northern Ireland. Because it is usually not possible to determine
quickly the political position or religious membership of strangers, discus-
sion of controversial issues in potentially mixed company is often tacitly
avoided. It is possible, then, that these students discussed sensitive issues
more cautiously than they would have in other settings. In most cases,
however, they would have been unable to determine the religious or political
HISTORY, IDENTITY, AND THE SCHOOL CURRICULUM 93
we identify students whose schools differed in at least three ways. The first
was religious affiliation: most students in Northern Ireland attend schools
that are predominantly either Protestant or Catholic. The former are known
as ‘Controlled’ schools and are under the management of regional education
boards, whereas the latter are referred to as ‘Maintained’ schools and are
governed by boards established under the auspices of the Roman Catholic
church. ‘Integrated’ schools represent a further category; ∼ 5% of students
in Northern Ireland attend these schools, which enrol approximately equal
numbers of Catholics and Protestants and are governed by individual boards
chosen by parents. For this project, we interviewed students at four Main-
tained, five Controlled, and two Integrated schools. It should be noted,
however, that the religious affiliation of individual students cannot be
derived directly from school attendance, because local circumstances some-
times result in students’ attendance at schools of the ‘other’ community.
Thus, although we can identify differences among students who attended
Catholic, Protestant, and Integrated schools, we cannot reliably draw
conclusions about differences based on the religion of students themselves.
A second characteristic was selectivity. Most post-primary schools in
Northern Ireland are either ‘grammar schools’, with admission limited to
about the top 30% of students (based on a selection test taken in the final
year of primary school), or ‘secondary schools’ (sometimes known as ‘high
schools’), open to all students but usually attended by those unable to gain
admission to the more prestigious grammar schools. All Integrated schools
are ‘comprehensive’, meaning they enrol students from the entire range of
achievement levels, although in practice competition from grammar schools
may limit this range somewhat. In this study, we interviewed students at four
grammar schools (two Maintained and two Controlled), five secondary
schools (two Maintained and three Controlled), and two comprehensive
(Integrated) schools.
The final characteristic was geographic region. Political sentiments,
community relations, and experiences with violence or extremism are
unequally distributed within Northern Ireland. Some areas are sites of
continuous and ongoing conflict and rancour, and others are relatively
peaceful locations where obvious sectarian disputes are infrequent (though
usually not entirely unknown). Given our focus on informal sources of
historical learning and the use of history as a basis for identity, we expected
94 K. C. BARTON AND A. W. MCCULLY
Interviews Students
Grade level
First year 37 0.31 81 0.32
Second year 42 0.35 89 0.35
Third year 41 0.34 83 0.33
Mixed 1 0.01 N/A N/A
Gender
Female 53 0.44 116 0.46
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conducted with students in each grade level, of each gender, and in each
school type, selectivity type, and region, as well as the number and portion
of students we interviewed in each category.
Analysis
The analysis that forms the basis for this paper consists of two parts. The
first involves a summary of the frequency with which students choose group-
ings or individual pictures in response to the question, ‘Which of these have
the most to do with you or who you are?’ These responses are further classi-
fied into broader analytic categories and time periods, and they are broken
down by grade level, gender, school type, selectivity, and region. Responses
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that included multiple answers (as when a student identified with more than
one picture or grouping) are included more than once and, thus, the number
of responses does not correspond directly to the number of students inter-
viewed. In addition, students occasionally identified with pictures from
different time periods, but for the same reason, or identified with a picture
but gave no explanation, and as a result the number of responses in each
table differs slightly. Finally, the portion of responses in each category refers
to the portion of total responses, rather than the portion of interviews in
which it occurred or the portion of students who responded in that way.
Because multiple responses were common, this procedure gives a better
picture of the relative importance of each type of response than calculations
based on the total number of students or interviews.
The second component of the analysis includes a larger qualitative
component and is based on a process of analytic induction. Students’ expla-
nations of why they chose particular pictures (or groupings) were analysed
inductively to identify recurring patterns, and these are presented both
through illustrative quotes from students’ responses and through tabulations
of the number of responses exhibiting each pattern.
Results
The findings from this study indicate that secondary students in Northern
Ireland do not identify solely with a limited set of politicized historical
themes, and that their identifications cannot easily be predicted by their
community backgrounds. When given the chance to identify and categorize
their own historical themes, students responded by selecting a wide range of
people, events, and trends, and, in many cases, students of varied back-
grounds demonstrated similar patterns of identification. There were,
however, important differences among groups of students, of which the most
noticeable were related to grade level: over the course of 3 years of secondary
schooling, their historical identifications narrowed considerably, and
community divisions became increasingly important. Students’ tendency to
identify with community-based historical themes, or with the contemporary
troubles, also varied according to gender, selectivity of school, and
geographic region. These findings raise important questions about the way
96 K. C. BARTON AND A. W. MCCULLY
Table 2 displays the responses students gave when asked, ‘Which of these
pictures has the most to do with you, or who you are?’ One of the most nota-
ble characteristics of these answers is their diversity. In 200 total responses,
students selected at least 42 different individual pictures or groupings, as
well as frequently declining to select any at all. Moreover, several of the cate-
gories in table 2 represent more than one distinct answer, because some
closely related responses have been collapsed; the groupings labelled Trou-
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their choices, students’ responses closely mirrored these categories (see table
4). At both Maintained and Controlled schools, for example, students most
often justified their choices by explaining how the pictures related to their
national or religious communities, such as one boy at a Maintained school
who grouped several pictures into a category he described as ‘Republican’
and explained, ‘I come from a Republican background. … I’m interested in
Irish history’. More often, students explained their identification with
specific images rather than larger groupings. The mural of Bobby Sands was
a particularly popular choice at Maintained schools, and students explained
its significance to them by noting, ‘He fought to get Ireland free back in his
time’, ‘Most Catholics believe in what he did and other stuff because he
fought for his country and he ended up dying’, ‘He’s a Catholic, just like I
am’, ‘He was a Catholic, and we’re Catholic, and he fought for us … like he
was fighting with the Protestants to save us and stuff like that there’, ‘It is an
important part of Irish history because they were trying to move forward, by
changing prison conditions, and they had to suffer’, and ‘It’s more sort of
Irish, if you know what I mean’. Similarly, students who choose the Easter
Rising explained, ‘They tried to fight for a united Ireland’, and ‘I was born
in Ireland and this happened in Ireland’.
selected the picture of William ‘because just my religion, and just all the
different photos and all, of marching, just go down and watch the people
marching, and to do with my religion and all’, and one girl pointed out that
‘we have marches and all for him, so, and a whole lot of people go to them’.
Again, responses at Integrated schools were identical to those at either
Maintained or Controlled schools: students who responded in this way did
not give explanations that reflected a national identity apart from National-
ist/Catholic or Unionist/Protestant perspectives.
The second most popular set of responses was related to the Troubles
and appeared more as a commentary on life in Northern Ireland than as a
statement of particular loyalties. One girl at an Integrated school, for exam-
ple, identified with a group of pictures she had categorized as ‘the Troubles’
and explained, ‘That’s the biggest thing in our lives, and you can’t go
anywhere without being reminded of that’. At Maintained schools, students’
explanations sometimes referred to sets of murals, at other times to political
rallies or marches, and at still others to military troops, but the explanations
themselves were very similar: one girl identified with a set of pictures because
of ‘the fighting in Northern Ireland, because we live in Northern Ireland’,
another noted that ‘it’s the way our life is now you know, everybody’s like
painting things on walls’, and still another explained, ‘They’re still fighting
in Ireland, and we live here’. Similarly, one boy chose a set of pictures
because ‘we’re living through an age where there’s still fighting’, and another
explained, ‘We live in Ireland, and it’s still going on, the Troubles’. At
Controlled schools, explanations in this category most often related specifi-
cally to murals. Students described these as elements of the environment
that could not be ignored, and they often saw them as emblematic of the
Troubles more generally. One boy, for example, commented, ‘I think the
three murals have most to do with us, because, since we live in Northern
Ireland and there’s a lot of things going on, all the UVF (i.e. Ulster Volun-
teer Force) and the IRA (i.e. Irish Republican Army) and all’. Others noted,
‘It’s to do with our country, and how it is today, and it affects how we live
today’, ‘It’s all like happening, it’s not like over or anything’, and ‘Sometimes
it’s just to annoy other people … and it sort of destroys the scenery and
everything’. As this quote suggests, students sometimes identified with
images related to the Troubles, even when they condemned them. One boy,
for example, noted that he identified with a paramilitary mural ‘because it is
100 K. C. BARTON AND A. W. MCCULLY
depriving us of peace and things like that’, and his interview partner agreed,
adding, ‘Well, ’cause it’s affecting us, it’s making our country not as free as
it should be, and more dangerous’.
In the third most popular type of explanation, particularly common at
Integrated Schools, students justified their choices on the extent to which an
event in the past had affected life in the present. One boy, for example, noted
that ‘the war changed everything’, and another suggested that if Britain had
lost World War II, ‘we might have been like in a German school or some-
thing’; similarly, one girl explained that if Germany had won, ‘we wouldn’t
be talking English’. Sometimes these explanations overlapped with identifi-
cations related to the Troubles or to national history, particularly at the other
types of schools. At Maintained schools, for example, one girl noted that she
identified with pictures related to Home Rule and the Easter Rising because
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‘it like changed the religions around here’, and a boy identified with the same
group because ‘we’s were affected by the religion like and the different like
wars and stuff between them’. More specifically, one boy identified with a
group of pictures related to Home Rule by noting ‘Ireland was all one once,
and then we, or Northern Ireland, gets split up from Republic of Ireland,
and we live in Northern Ireland’. His interview partner chose the same set
of pictures and explained, ‘If it wasn’t for Carson, then Ireland would still
be all one, and if it wasn’t for like people like Daniel O’Connell, they
wouldn’t have Home Rule in Dublin’. Similarly, one student at a Controlled
school identified with King William because ‘if he hadn’t come over Protes-
tants wouldn’t have come over and there wouldn’t be no trouble’, and
another noted that the Home Rule crisis ‘sort of determined whether we
would be Protestant of Catholic and stuff like that, because if that there
didn’t happen … the history would have changed’. Although such explana-
tions overlap with those in the first two categories (and were coded as repre-
sentative of more than one category), they differ in that they emphasize not
just national history or the Troubles, but the origins of current perspectives
in the events of the past.
Three other explanations were given by at least 10 students each. First,
some explained their choices on the basis of physical proximity. Several
students who identified with the Mountsandel archaeological site, for exam-
ple, noted that it was close to where they lived. Similarly, students who chose
murals sometimes talked not about their political or historical significance
but simply about having seen those particular murals near where they lived.
Secondly, several students explained that they identified with the pictures
they chose because of the involvement of family members or ancestors in the
events depicted. At both Maintained and Controlled schools, for example,
several students noted the involvement of grandparents or great-grandpar-
ents in the World Wars, and a small number explained that relatives had
either sailed or worked on the Titanic (built in Belfast). Finally, several
students at Controlled schools explained their identification in terms of the
importance of rights or social justice, even when not specifically linked to
their own religious/political community. These responses focused on Nelson
Mandela, soldiers in the World Wars, or other pictures that students
perceived as being relevant to co-operation for desirable social ends.
HISTORY, IDENTITY, AND THE SCHOOL CURRICULUM 101
single explanation in this category was given more than five times, except ‘we
studied it at school’, given by nine students.
Grade level A clear pattern emerged when students’ responses were broken
down by grade level: the portion of responses related to Protestant/Unionist
or Catholic/Nationalist history, religion and culture differed dramatically
from first to third year. Fewer than 25% of responses fell into this category
among either first- or second-year students, but nearly 50% did so in the
third year (see table 5). The increasing popularity of these choices for iden-
tification came at the expense of several other categories, including those
National history, 0.23 0.20 0.47 0.23 0.34 0.25 0.37 0.19 0.38 0.20
religion, culture
Troubles in Northern 0.11 0.39 0.22 0.30 0.28 0.30 0.27 0.47 0.21 0.33
Ireland
Wars 0.14 0.18 0.10 0.06 0.19 0.13 0.11 0.25 0.14 0.13
Ireland/N. Ireland, 0.23 0.14 0.10 0.20 0.09 0.17 0.12 0.22 0.12 0.19
local heritage
None 0.12 0.02 0.07 0.09 0.05 0.06 0.07 0.06 0.04 0.09
Leaders 0.07 0.06 0.02 0.08 0.03 0.05 0.05 0.06 0.05 0.04
Miscellaneous 0.02 0.03 0.02 0.03 0.02 0.05 0.01 0.00 0.02 0.02
n 57 66 58 79 98 64 84 32 91 91
a
Grammar, Secondary, Comprehensive (all Comprehensive schools in this study were also Integrated).
b
Conflict, non-conflict.
102 K. C. BARTON AND A. W. MCCULLY
National or 0.21 0.21 0.35 0.21 0.30 0.21 0.29 0.26 0.32 0.19
religious
community
Related to the 0.08 0.27 0.17 0.21 0.19 0.23 0.15 0.23 0.14 0.25
Troubles
Miscellaneous 0.24 0.13 0.12 0.29 0.06 0.21 0.14 0.06 0.15 0.14
Had an effect on 0.10 0.11 0.12 0.08 0.13 0.08 0.08 0.26 0.11 0.12
the present
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Physical proximity 0.09 0.10 0.04 0.07 0.08 0.07 0.08 0.09 0.06 0.10
Rights, freedom, 0.04 0.10 0.03 0.04 0.10 0.08 0.09 0.00 0.10 0.05
social justice
Family 0.09 0.07 0.04 0.04 0.08 0.05 0.08 0.06 0.08 0.06
connections/
ancestors
No strong 0.12 0.01 0.09 0.11 0.05 0.07 0.08 0.06 0.06 0.09
identification
n 68 71 69 90 108 73 99 35 103 104
a
Grammar, Secondary, Comprehensive (all Comprehensive schools in this study were also Integrated).
b
Conflict, non-conflict.
related to Ireland, Northern Ireland, and local heritage, wars, leaders, and
‘no identification’.
Students’ explanations for their choices revealed a similar pattern:
among first- and second-year students, 20% of explanations were phrased in
terms of the importance of national or religious communities, but in the final
year 35% of their explanations related to such issues (see table 6). This was
accompanied by a clear decrease in the frequency with which students
explained their choices in terms of physical proximity, family connections,
and miscellaneous factors. Among the most common choices and explana-
tions, only those related to the Troubles did not decline from first to third
year. These increased dramatically in the second year and then fell back to
levels slightly above those of the first year.
The decline in the portion of ‘miscellaneous’ responses is particularly
noticeable. Several first-year students, and some in the second year, said
they identified with pictures because they knew about them, were interested
in them, or had studied them in school. One girl identified with the Mount-
sandel archaeological site because ‘we done that in history at the start of the
year and learned about it’, and she noted that other students might identify
with different pictures because ‘they might not have learned about it when
they done history; they might have done other stuff’. Another first-year
student identified with archaeological remains ‘because you see an awful lot
of them around when you go and visit the National Trust places’, and still
another explained, ‘I like old stuff about archaeologists and stuff’. Other
first- and second-year students identified with the Titanic because they had
HISTORY, IDENTITY, AND THE SCHOOL CURRICULUM 103
Where I used to live there was loads of them and I just like looking at them
because of all the Catholic ones; there was one where I used to live that had
Irish dancing on them and I like looking at them and what they say about
everything.
Similarly, a second-year student noted that such murals were ‘all like
cultures of Ireland, and I live in Ireland’, and another said of Bobby Sands,
‘He’s a Catholic, just like I am’. Third-year students, however, included
much more historical detail. One girl, for example, identified with the Easter
Rising ‘because they tried to fight for a united Ireland’, and another noted
that it was ‘a big part of Irish history and that led up to a lot of stuff about
Partition and Michael Collins’ (Irish Revolutionary leader, 1890–1922). A
third-year boy, meanwhile, identified with Daniel O’Connell ‘because of the
way he fought for Home Rule and because I would like Home Rule for
Ireland’. Similarly, at Controlled Schools, many students in the first and
second years commented on the presence of the Union flag in the picture of
Edward Carson, but few mentioned him by name or showed an awareness
of his role in history. However, in the third year, seven students identified
him by name, and several more articulated his role as a figure of Ulster resis-
tance. One boy, for example, identified with Carson because ‘he didn’t want
a united Ireland when it was wanted, so I agree with that, so he would be to
do with me’. As noted in our discussion of the study’s design, its cross-
sectional nature prevents us reaching firm conclusions about changes in
individual students’ ideas, but the consistency of these changes across a vari-
ety of schools suggests that they may be generalized to individuals. If so, this
trend has important implications for the design of the history curriculum at
school, and we will take up this issue further below.
Gender Some clear patterns also emerged when students’ responses were
broken down by gender (see tables 5 and 6). Boys and girls were nearly
equally likely to identify with pictures or groupings that related to the Trou-
bles, and their explanations for these choices also demonstrated a close
equivalence. However, a higher proportion of boys’ choices and explana-
tions related to Protestant/Unionist or Catholic/Nationalist history, religion,
and culture. In addition, the choice of ‘wars’ as a subject of identification
was nearly three times as common among boys as among girls, and the
percentages of explanations related to family connections, gaining rights or
104 K. C. BARTON AND A. W. MCCULLY
self-determination, and the effect of the past on the present were higher
among boys than girls. Higher portions of girls’ responses, on the other
hand, related to Ireland, Northern Ireland, and local heritage, as well as to
leaders, and their explanations more often revealed no strong identification
or fell into the miscellaneous category. At first glance, these findings are
hardly surprising: surely most educators—or people on the street—could
have predicted that boys would be more likely than girls to identify with
national history and culture or with wars. Less obvious, however, is the fact
that girls suggested no consistent set of alternative historical identifications,
but instead gave a wide range of responses that indicated few clear tenden-
cies. Again, this pattern has curricular implications that will be taken up in
our discussion section.
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Before Plantation 0.16 0.06 0.07 0.12 0.04 0.05 0.08 0.19 0.01 0.17
Plantation through 0.35 0.32 0.34 0.30 0.35 0.36 0.33 0.28 0.38 0.28
World War II
After World War II 0.12 0.32 0.34 0.28 0.29 0.29 0.31 0.17 0.33 0.22
Unclassified 0.37 0.30 0.25 0.29 0.31 0.30 0.28 0.36 0.28 0.33
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n 57 69 61 82 99 66 87 36 94 95
a
Grammar, Secondary, Comprehensive (all Comprehensive schools in this study were also Integrated).
b
Conflict, non-conflict.
students from non-conflict areas. Both these groups were less likely to iden-
tify with the period from Plantation through World War II, and students in
non-conflict areas also identified less with the modern period.
The most striking pattern in these chronologically grouped responses is
the much greater frequency with which students at Controlled schools iden-
tified with the period from Plantation through World War II: 44% of these
response related to that time period, compared with only 24% at Maintained
and 28% at Integrated schools. The difference between students at
Controlled and Maintained schools became clear during our earliest inter-
views and ultimately led us to modify the set of pictures we used. As already
noted, in choosing pictures we tried to select a balance of those with which
Catholic and Protestant students might identify. We included many of the
people and events most important from an Irish Nationalist perspective—a
Round Tower (a symbol of the Celtic past), a church named after St.
Patrick, a picture of the ‘Native Irish’, Daniel O’Connell, Charles Stewart
Parnell, the Easter Rising, a 1960s Civil Rights march, a mural commemo-
rating the Irish Famine, and another representing the United Irish move-
ment. And yet we noticed that Catholic students did not seem particularly
engaged by any of these choices. Protestant students, presented with simi-
larly iconic images from the Unionist past, were much readier to choose
those they felt were related to their own identity, and many of these came
from the period of Home Rule and Partition. As a result, we chose to add
one further picture, the mural of Bobby Sands (partly because several
students misinterpreted a famine mural as commemorating the 1982 hunger
strike), and this immediately became the favoured and enthusiastic choice of
students at Maintained schools. Not only did students specifically identify
with this picture, but it became a focal point around which they organized
larger groupings relating to hunger, civil rights, or the Troubles. None of the
traditional icons of Irish Nationalism had provided them with this level of
interest or conceptual focus. Had this picture been available in all interviews,
the proportion of students choosing it obviously would have been higher. It
HISTORY, IDENTITY, AND THE SCHOOL CURRICULUM 107
Discussion
These findings lead to two important conclusions. The first is that commu-
nity conflict in Northern Ireland is a strong influence—although not the only
one—on students’ perceptions of who they are and what is important to
them. Readers familiar with Northern Ireland will hardly be surprised that
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students were most likely to identify with pictures that related to their
national, religious, and cultural backgrounds, or that they consciously
explained their choices in these terms. After all, such issues are a constant
feature of public discourse and play an important role in the division
between the two communities. However, students’ responses contradict any
simplistic generalizations about their historical identifications. Although
items related to their national, religious, and cultural backgrounds were the
most common sources of historical identification, fewer than 30% of
students’ responses involved such choices, and only 25% of their explana-
tions were phrased in these terms. In other words, 70% or more of the
responses involved identification with events other than those related to
Protestant/Unionist or Catholic/Nationalist history.
Most notably, nearly as many responses indicated a general identifica-
tion with Northern Ireland’s Troubles: at all three types of schools, a large
portion of students chose pictures that suggested identification with the
community conflict that surrounded them rather than (or in addition to) any
of the specific parties to that conflict. And nearly 50% of students’ choices
had nothing whatever to do with the conflict but related instead to the World
Wars, local heritage, leaders, or other historical items. Their explanations,
meanwhile, indicated the importance of physical proximity, family connec-
tions and ancestors, a concern with rights and justice (beyond their own
community), the effect of the past on the present, and a range of other
factors. As our theoretical framework suggests, students were not passively
absorbing established historical narratives but actively constructing their
historical identifications from a range of sources. Among the students in this
study, at least, we must conclude that, although national, political, and reli-
gious issues were important, they did not dominate their conceptualization
of their connection to history.
However, such issues increasingly moved toward such dominance over
the 3 years during which students studied national history. After just 1 year
of study, students had a wide range of historical identifications (including
archaeological sites, the Titanic, the World Wars, and castles and other old
buildings) and they explained those identifications in a variety of ways—
noting personal knowledge and interest, physical proximity, and school
study. After the third year of study, however, their choices and explanations
had narrowed considerably, and they were much more likely to focus on
108 K. C. BARTON AND A. W. MCCULLY
since World War II—suggests that this would be a highly motivating topic of
study. Although the present rhetoric of official documents related to the
history curriculum in Northern Ireland advocates such practice, in reality
students are often left to make the link between past and present on their
own. In many classrooms, history is presented in a chronological format that
addresses events relevant to the current political situation, but students have
little opportunity to engage directly the relationship between past and
present. Our interviews suggest that students do make such connections on
their own; and without teacher mediation those connections are likely to be
highly selective and uncritical. As students study elements of the national
past, many of them incorporate those elements into an increasingly politi-
cized historical perspective. Their experiences with the required curriculum,
then, may actually supply raw material for the partisan narratives that their
study of history is meant to counteract. More directly addressing connec-
tions between past and present might help students develop the alternative,
contextualized, and evidence-based views that form the rationale for history
education (McCully et al. 2002).
Many teachers are hesitant to support such efforts, however, both
because they fear the emotional responses that might occur in their class-
rooms, and because, as we have noted previously, they believe students’
historical perspectives are so entrenched that little can be done about them
(Smith and Robinson 1996). Their apprehension of emotional reactions
may well be justified, but their perception of unshakeable ideas among
students is not. Previous research with younger students indicates that their
ideas about history are not dominated by contemporary political issues, and
the findings reported here suggest the first 3 years of secondary school is the
time during which such perspectives become important. Moreover, many
students in our interviews had adopted, to varying degrees, a critical stance
toward the significance of past events, whatever the perception of those
events within their own communities; thus, identification with issues related
to community conflict did not equate with support for particular political
positions. This presents a tremendous opportunity: students enter second-
ary school with varied and diffuse ideas about their relationship to the past,
and teachers could play a critical role in helping them expand on previous
identifications or providing opportunities to develop new ones grounded in
tolerance and mutual respect. As the curriculum review in Northern Ireland
HISTORY, IDENTITY, AND THE SCHOOL CURRICULUM 109
enters its final consultation phase, the Local and Global Citizenship
programme (Council for the Curriculum, Examinations and Assessment
2003), which emphasizes critical thinking and active engagement, is being
advanced as a core component. Further, it is envisaged that more established
subject areas will be oriented toward informing that contemporary debate,
thereby demonstrating their relevance to students’ everyday lives (Council
for the Curriculum, Examinations and Assessment 2003). The contribution
that history might make to this is being debated, but our findings suggest
that new approaches may be required to ensure that connections between
the study of the past and the exploration of the present are systematically
bridged.
The second important conclusion derived from this study is that
students’ identification with history varies by school type, gender,
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differing identifications of the two groups may have major educational and
social consequences. Protestant students (whether at Controlled or Inte-
grated schools) may consider the curriculum to be a tacit legitimation of their
own cultural and political backgrounds, and Catholic students who do not
proceed to elective courses may perceive an official rejection of historical
topics (such as Bobby Sands) close to their own identities. Alternatively, if
teachers attempt to challenge students’ community-based historical perspec-
tives, they may find their efforts more meaningful among Protestant students
than among Catholics, because the latter have such low levels of identifica-
tion with the topics found in the curriculum. In other words, a challenge to
conventional wisdom about Protestant leader Edward Carson would be a
challenge indeed, whereas a similar effort focused on Charles Parnell would
have little resonance among Catholics. Ironically, then, the curriculum as it
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stands may both fail to legitimize the interests of Catholic students and fail
to challenge their positions on contemporary historical events.
These differences among groups of students suggest that the curriculum
might be more equitable if it spoke to a wider variety of themes and time
periods, rather than being limited to a chronological progression that chiefly
addresses major political events up through the 1920s. The study of North-
ern Ireland’s post-1960 period—currently an elective course for students
past age 14—seems particularly crucial to providing Catholic students with
topics of study they consider relevant to the experiences of themselves and
their communities, as well as helping all students better understand the
Troubles and the connections between past and present. Meanwhile, more
emphasis on social history (including its relevance to the present) might
provide a source of identification for students unmotivated by wars and
other political events, and attention to the experiences that cut across the
two communities might provide alternatives to identifications based on
national, cultural, and religious background. Finally, differences among
groups call into question the ‘symmetrical’ approach to teaching history,
whereby all schools follow the same curriculum. The prevailing assumption
is that history should be taught in a common, multi-perspective way in all
schools, and evidence from Department of Education Inspectorate reports
indicates that this is overwhelmingly the case (Department of Education,
Northern Ireland 2004). However, students’ differing identification with
that curriculum suggests history departments should perhaps be allowed
greater freedom to design programmes that take account of individuals and
their needs in the communities in which they live. Different strategies may
be needed for students in different settings (McCully et al. 2002).
Conclusions
explicit goals of the history curriculum. And yet, this study also suggests that
schools may not always succeed in this task, because as students move
through the required curriculum, their identification with Unionist or
Nationalist history actually intensifies, and they appear to draw selectively
from the school curriculum in order to bolster their developing understand-
ing of partisan historical narratives. This process seems more salient for
some students than others, as Protestants, boys, and students from areas of
conflict identify more closely with the political history they study at school
than do others. These findings imply that if educators hope to reduce the
extent to which history is used to justify ongoing community conflicts, they
may need to challenge students’ developing ideas more directly, as well as to
provide a clearer alternative to the histories they encounter elsewhere
(Barton and McCully 2003). Such efforts would also require greater sensi-
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tivity to the specific beliefs and assumptions that students of varied back-
grounds bring with them to the classroom. Despite the best of intentions, a
balanced and neutral course of study, standardized for the entire region, may
not be up to the task of dealing with the emotionally charged uses of history
in Northern Ireland.
These findings also have implications that reach beyond the specific
circumstances of Northern Ireland. They demonstrate, first of all, the
importance of directly and systematically inquiring into students’ perspec-
tives on history, rather than relying on anecdotal or untested assumptions
about the nature of their beliefs and ideas. When students are asked what
they think, they often demonstrate a range of complicated understandings,
and this is as likely to be true in other countries as in Northern Ireland.
Secondly, this study suggests that history educators need to examine more
closely the unintended consequences of their choice of content, particularly
the ways in which students from diverse backgrounds may interact differ-
ently with the same curriculum. Does studying particular topics or time peri-
ods appeal to some students more than others, even when the curriculum
aims at neutrality and inclusiveness? In the USA, for example, one might ask
whether the repeated attention given to the Colonial Era and the New
Republic—a time when most North Americans of African descent were
slaves—alienates African-American students today, even if examples of their
experiences during that time are regularly included in the curriculum. At the
broadest level, this study suggests the need to examine how the enacted
curriculum supports—or fails to support—the intended goals of historical
study. If part of history’s purpose in schools is to develop critical and
informed citizens—a controversial goal in itself—educators will need to
develop clearer and more explicit links between programmes of history and
citizenship. Without closer attention to such issues, school history is unlikely
to have a significant impact on the developing political perspectives of young
people.
Acknowledgements
Ulster, Coleraine, with funding provided by grants from the Royal Irish
Academy, Dublin, and the University Research Council of the University of
Cincinnati.
Notes
1. For a brief description of the principal events, persons, and locations in Northern Ireland
history mentioned in this paper, see British Broadcasting Corporation (2003).
2. See also Muldoon and Trew (2000).
3. See also McBride (1997).
4. Some students worked with only 27 images; as discussed below, a further image was
added during data collection.
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5. This paper focuses only on issues related to identity. Data on the settings in which
students had learned about history, and their ideas about the purposes of history in and
out of school, are part of a separate analysis and are not reported here.
6. Interviews with groups that included both genders or more than one grade accounted for
only four of the 121 interviews conducted, and data from those exceptions has been
excluded from the corresponding analysis. For example, data from interviews in which
both boys and girls participated has not been included in the analysis of gender differ-
ences.
7. The Shankill Road runs through the Protestant area of west Belfast, and many of its resi-
dents support Loyalist groups; the Falls Road runs through the Catholic area of the same
part of the city, and many of its residents are Republican supporters. These two roads
and their surrounding areas often are regarded as emblematic of hard-line political posi-
tions and community conflict in Northern Ireland.
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