Journal of Educational Memory, Media, and Society

This article investigates the role of Islam in representations of the self and the other in the contemporary Albanian national discourse, on the basis of an analysis of history textbooks published in postcommunist Albania between 1990 and 2013, focusing specifically on texts used in pre-university education. Even after the dissolution of the Socialist Republic of Albania in 1991, Islam in Albania continued to be associated with concepts derived from the socialist era, including the primacy of the nation as well as Eurocentrism and secularism, which were seen as the pinnacle of modernity.

This study examines the year-to-year development of militaristic discourse in Indonesian secondary education history textbooks since 1975. Historical descriptions written since the fall of Soeharto’s military regime and its replacement by a civilian government in 1998 tend to emphasize Indonesia’s military history and pay little attention to its civilian leadership. To what degree did political change influence the production of historical discourse in recent textbooks in Indonesia? This article attempts to answer this question by applying Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) to textual sources, in order to expose their historical and socio-cultural dimensions. The results show that in the post-Soeharto era, militaristic perspectives continue to dominate discourse production in history textbooks, denying the role of civilian leadership. This glorification of the military demonstrates that the Indonesian army continues to influence the country’s history textbook production in the modern era.

Civic education has always been an ancillary subject in the Italian school system. Introduced at the end of the 1950s as a sort of appendage to the history programs, it has recently been subject to multiple reforms although little or nothing has changed in reality. The analysis of a sample of civic education textbooks in use in schools explains some reasons for this breakdown. Even though they apply the new legislation, these textbooks retain the most blatant defect of civic education in the Western world—the lack of a clear and convincing model of the citizen.

In this article we analyze knowledge about economics conveyed via primary school textbooks published during the late Franco dictatorship and the years of transition to democracy in Spain. Starting from the premise that the process of political socialization and identity construction is based partly on economic factors, we examine the evolution of the content of economics in textbooks during and after the technocratic phase of planning and development. We elucidate ways in which economic culture is transmitted in schools, identifying certain values, principles and patterns of sociopolitical thought that this culture upholds and projects.

In this article I explore the ways in which migrants from other parts of Spain to the Basque Country are portrayed in Basque social science textbooks published in the Basque Country between the end of Franco’s dictatorship and the period of the transition to democracy. I elucidate the role attributed to immigrants, who were culturally and linguistically distinct from Basque society, by educators concerned about the survival of Basque culture and the Basque language. In addition, the article addresses strategies proposed by members of the Basque education sector and adopted in order to facilitate integration during this period.