This PhD research explores the ways that the historical and political relationships between settlers and Indigenous people are taught in schools in Australia and New Caledonia, and the ways that power relations and emotions are negotiated within these learning processes.
This research project focuses on the ways that the relationships between settlers and Indigenous people are taught in schools in two settler colonial societies: Australia and New Caledonia. It consists in a long-term political analysis of the dynamics between power relations and history teaching within the public school system. It is based on an analysis of education policies and textbooks used from the late 19th century to the present as well as on interviews with history teachers.
The research project addresses the following questions: What political understandings of settler-Indigenous relationships have been disseminated in schools? What insights can a long-term political analysis give about the articulations of settler colonialism and its persistence in the present? What emotional regime supports the resistant political regime that settler colonialism is? To what extent can or does the teacher – as the ultimate institutional actor, the inheritor of a historiography, and a political and emotional agent – shape the relationships between settlers and Indigenous people in schools?
This project explores the making and unmaking of colonial power structures and emotional regimes within the school system. It traces the evolution of educational policies and political debates about the teaching of history in these two settler colonial societies. It examines how history textbooks reflect these political debates and historiographical changes, and how they prescribe and disseminate specific political and emotional attitudes, or stereotypes, with regard to settler-Indigenous relationships. Interviews with history teachers across Australia and New Caledonia consider how teachers, as the ultimate institutional actors and the inheritors of this historiography, respond to educational policies, engage with the textbooks and perceive their political agency within the institution and the classroom.
Ultimately, this project asks how contemporary settler colonial societies deal with their contentious pasts and presents, how they engage in memory-making, legitimation and reconciliation processes, and what are the issues with, and the limits of, these engagements, and the possibilities beyond them.
Supervisor
Grace Moore
Image: Mr Murray Walker (Designer) & William Barak (Artist) & Tommy McRae (Artist) & Victorian Tapestry Workshop (Maker) 1832, Tapestry - & Now Exploration & Settlement Are Underway, Victorian Tapestry Workshop, 2001, Museum Victoria.
