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The ‘history wars’ in Australia and Japan of the late 1990s and continuing today
have some remarkable similarities, and both indicate a deep ambivalence about their
status as perpetrators and victims, powerful and powerless, colonizer and colonized.
(2003, p. 31)
Even if there is a trend towards transnational and comparative histories, this is not replicated
in school curriculum, which maintains a firm focus on the history of individual nation states,
particularly in the earlier part of the twentieth century, but also extending to the latter years of
the century, with the Senior Modern History topic of race relations being the only significant
departure from this (see, for example, Cowie, 1982). Histories of nations are commonly
presented to students as distinctly compartmentalized (see, for example, Andrews, Hagan,
Lampert & Rich, 1973; and MacKenzie, 1968). It is only in more recent times that different
perspectives are starting to emerge, although this remains firmly on the fringe of curriculum
content and underpinning philosophies of the study of History.
2.7.4 Studies of History curriculum, especially textbooks
Analyses of History curriculum, especially textbooks, is an area of increasing study, with
researchers seeking to explore the hidden assumptions contained within and the ideological
underpinnings of this school subject. The methodologies used to conduct analyses vary in
approach, with common examples including Critical Discourse Analysis (Luke, 1995-1996),
Discourse Historical Method (Wodak, 2001a; Fairclough & Wodak, 1997), systemic
functional linguistics (Cullip, 2007; Coffin, 2000), analysis drawing on the work of Foucault
(Montgomery, 2005; Nicholls, 2005; Parkes, 2006), and poststructuralist discourse analysis
(Halbert, 2006). Research by Cullip, for example, on Malaysian textbooks focuses on
identifying how specific grammatical functions work to construct historical events, in
particular “...to explore how the discourse of history ‘works’ in the Malaysian context”
(2007, p. 195).
It can be seen from the available literature, that many individual nations are concerned with
how national identity is communicated and taught to students through school History (and
related disciplines) curriculum. What follows is a brief overview of some of these studies.
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