Engaging transitional justice in Australian history curriculum: Times, temporalities and historical thinking

Abstract

Existing research on history education’s role in agendas of transitional justice is focused on societies undertaking regime change or rebuilding after extensive conflict and often centres disciplinary competencies as part of educational reform objectives to support political transition. However, the orientation towards transitional justice in settler colonial democracies such as Australia has prompted debate about the role of history curriculum in transitional contexts where constructivist, discipline-based approaches are already prescribed. While “historical thinking” in Australia has been a pragmatic middle way between polarised single-narrative and deconstructivist paradigms, this article argues that questions of transitional justice return the subjective, contemporary, and political to history education in ways that challenge the scope of disciplinary meaning-making and complicate the civic promises of disciplinary thinking. By discussing examples of how time is presently imagined and engaged using second-order historical thinking concepts, this article engages some key limitations of disciplinary history curriculum vis-à-vis transitional justice. It suggests alternate approaches that stretch the disciplinary paradigm in new directions that carry important implications for other societies engaged in questions of transitional justice.

Keywords:

• History education
• history teaching and learning
• settler colonialism
• reconciliation
• historical theory
• historical injustice

Acknowledgments

I thank Katie Newhouse, Anna Clark, and Beth Marsden for their comments on earlier drafts of this article, and the reviewers for their helpful feedback. Thanks to the team at Curriculum Inquiry for the opportunity to participate in the 2019 Writing Fellowship, and to the CI scholars—Tommy, Muna, Licho, ReAnna, Tianna, Veena, Katie—I am so grateful to have met you.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples are the Indigenous peoples in Australia and are composed of more than 250 language groups (Australian Institute of Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander Studies, 2015).

2 This builds upon the ground-breaking analysis of colonial frontier massacre sites by Lyndall Ryan’s team at the University of Newcastle, Australia (See Centre for 21st Century Humanities, 2019).

3 I recognise that Indigenous-led movements for justice are long-standing and exceed the liberal paradigm of transitional justice (TJ).

4 I have deliberately used the language of transitional justice (TJ) here, rather than cite other historical justice-related projects and goals such as deimperialisation (Cairns, 2020) or decolonization (Tuck & Yang, 2012) as goals of TJ.

5 There is some variance in how the national curriculum has been interpreted in different jurisdictions. In Victoria, Dutch research by van Drie and van Boxtel (2008) influenced the development of the Victorian curriculum, alongside Seixas’ model (See Victorian Curriculum & Assessment Authority, 2016; Whitehouse, 2015).

6 Following Winter (2014), I use “authorised wrongdoing” to signal instances where political authority rendered otherwise wrongful acts permissible.

7 There are critiques of the Uluru Statement including the view that the “symbolic” nature of the Statement subjects the Indigenous “Voice” to parliamentary sovereignty (See e.g., Birch, 2017).

8 In her work on post-genocide Rwanda, Bentrovato (2017) found that reform of history and civic education following state-sponsored transitional justice processes actually fostered a “culture of silence and self-censorship” detrimental to civic rebuilding (p. 411; see also Paulson, 2017, p. 292).

9 Norton and Donnelly (2016) have argued that “historical practices need to be critiqued in terms of their ability to produce or legitimise political effects, and not simply in relation to methodological, formal and other professional criteria” (p. 194).

10 The role of school history education in orienting subjects-in-process in relation to conceptions of past, present, and future has been a focus of the German didatik tradition and is not well-established in Australia. “Historical consciousness” remains a contested concept generally understood in two ways: as an individual competence (the primary focus of didatik scholars) and as a collective phenomenon (See Grever & Adriaansen, 2017; Nordgren, 2019; Rüsen, 2004; Wilschut, 2019). Another adjacent field concerned with history education and temporal orientation stems from Wertsch’s (2004, 2008) work on schematic narrative templates. For recent Australian work that draws on this body of scholarship see Donnelly et al. (2019).

11 den Heyer (2019) has observed something similar, arguing that while

disciplinarians use historical perspective as a condition possessed by those in the past … disciplinarians call for no attention to historical perspectives possessed by students, their teachers, or of the present political state that shapes what is taught and learned as school history and what may be learned about the ethical implications of such delimitations. (p. 2)

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Mati Keynes

Mati Keynes is a doctoral researcher at the Australian Centre for Public History, University of Technology, Sydney. Mati is interested in the many ways that history is used in contemporary societies, particularly in education, as well as the transformative potential of learning history. Their edited book Historical Justice and History Education will be published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2021.