Aspects of Students Historical Consciousness in Situations of Crisis. (1st November 2014)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Apostolidou, Eleni
• Is Part Of: International journal of historical learning, teaching and research. Volume 12:Number 2(2014)
• Page Start: 79
• Page End: 96
• Publication Date: 2014-11-01
• Subjects: History -- Study and teaching; History -- Research; Periodicals; 907
• DOI: 10.18546/HERJ.12.2.07
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 1472-9474

Abstract

This paper reports preliminary findings based on an analysis of 151 students' written questionnaires. Students, among several other tasks, were also called to narrate their contry's (Greece) history and the study took place in a period starting from March to July 2013. That was a period when the consequences of the international economic crisis on the Greek economy and on the Greek political culture were ubiquitous. The purpose of the study is to locate the constructs with which students internalized a big crisis within a framework of Greek history. The crisis was prominent in the answers. The findings indicated that the crisis was experienced by students as a traumatic event (Ankersmit, 2001), but the students did not produce new "cultural potentials" (Rüsen, 2007) to account for it. Instead they seem to have been "haunted" (La Capra, 2001) by their highly "particularistic" national identity (Lorenz 2001). The political atmosphere as dominated by the mass media ought to have played a tremendous role in students' experience, since mass media and public political culture have been reproducing a war atmosphere from at least 2010. It is suggested that contemporary history, a history having more clear connections with the present should be explicitly taught in the school classes in order for the students to "historically contextualized" current affairs (Barton, 2004), as a means for critical historical thinking.