Teaching national and regional cultures: the role of teacher identities in Martinique

Abstract

Schooling is widely considered to be vital to the development of modern nation-states, yet little is known about how teachers might go about transmitting national culture within schools. Using the case of history–geography lycée teachers in the French overseas department of Martinique, this article makes the argument that teachers’ professional identities must be taken into account when considering the ways in which teachers implement curricula and understand their role in passing on national and other collective identities to students. Through local-level research in schools – comprised of interviews with teachers, school administrators, local officials and others, classroom observations and archival research – it becomes evident that teachers on the island, as elsewhere in France, enjoy considerable autonomy in implementing curricula. By training students to think critically, teachers encourage students to consider new meanings of ‘French’ and ‘Martinican’ identities on an everyday basis.

Keywords:

• teacher identity
• national identity
• regional identity
• history education
• geography education
• French Antilles
• French schooling
• everyday nationalism

Acknowledgements

A version of this article was presented at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, 14 March 2008, at a panel chaired by Fernando Reimers. Special thanks to Elizabeth Anderson Worden and Susan Carol Rogers, who provided comments on various drafts of the article, as well as to Susan E. Pratt for editorial assistance.

Notes

1. In France, history and geography are taught together, creating one class in which teachers alternate between the two subjects.

2. Obligatory schooling was instituted through the 28 March 1882 law for students between six and 13 years old. The law of 9 August 1936 raised the minimum school leaving age to 13. It was only in 1959 that the Berthoin reform pushed the statutory age to 16.

3. The French colonial empire was generally disbanded over the 1950s and early 1960s, in some cases peacefully and in others quite violently. The Martinican case was relatively early and peaceful.