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citizenship and its content area has long been a point of debate, controversy and interest.
However, this project does not cover the topic of citizenship as a distinct area of the
curriculum. Where this study diverges from other such published studies, is that it covers a
longer time period, concentrates on Queensland schooling contexts, and examines the History
curriculum through two particular exemplar topics, British heritages and Indigenous
representations, which act as case studies to illustrate the ideological constructions of
knowledge. In addition, rather than a focus solely on literary-theory based analysis that does
not necessarily contextualize the curriculum outside of the school setting, this project extends
existing knowledge by linking directly to the historical context of each era, incorporating
historical methodology approaches to the data collection, analysis and reporting of findings.
2.7.4.3 Studies of constructions of identity and myth making through national history in
History curriculum.
Just as citizenship is an area of interest for education researchers, so too is the impact of
national history in constructing students’ national identity. Four examples of the disparate
nature of History curriculum studies include Eggins, Wignell and Martin’s summary of how
history narrative is used to teach students, writing “through our study of junior high school
history textbooks we have tried to develop a description of the ‘discourse of history’: i.e. how
language is used to represent and teach ‘the story of people’” (1993, p. 75). Second, Gilbert,
draws on social studies textbooks from England that “…traces developments in ideological
critique through analysis of curricular texts” (1989, p. 61). Third, Lévesque (2005) reviews
school history research that highlights instances of dominant and celebratory perspectives of
school history curriculum. Fourth, studying the socialization processes of History teaching
and learning, Coffin analyses pedagogical practices in senior high school History classrooms,
that seek to engage students in learning processes of becoming an historian, or as Coffin
describes, “…how learning to mean like a historian is a process of socialization whereby a
particular subject position is constructed” (2000, p. 197).
Studying the explicit way the ‘nation’ is constructed in History textbooks published for
Canadian school students (and not dissimilar to an Australian context), Montgomery writes:
…textbooks help to constitute the imagined community of the nation by, first,
positioning the nation as a subject with a narrative to be told and as an organizational
device for the study of the past, and, second, by representing the nation, its citizens,
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