Seeing beyond the local context: the understandings of slavery and the slave trade of students in Reunion Island schools

Abstract

In the new millennium model of low definition curriculum, teachers have professional latitude to deliver prescribed disciplinary content through a range of pedagogical and assessment orientations. The rhetoric is that with carefully crafted practice, the goal of high quality/high equity learning outcomes can be achieved for all students. This paper is focused on the experiences of teachers and students from one large multicultural, multilingual, low socio-economic status community from Reunion Island, a remote French department in the Indian Ocean. In their history and geography lessons, the topic of study is a contentious one and closely connected to the students’ personal histories, that of slavery in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Using an analytical lens that combines the sociological work of Bernstein and Maton, and utilises ranking questionnaires, this study examines the complexity and tensions inherent in teachers’ choices and the implications for students’ short- and long-term learning outcomes.

Keywords:

• Reunion Island
• history and geography curriculum
• minority group students
• contextualised knowledge
• semantic gravity

Acknowledgements

I am very grateful to Dr Beryl Exley (Queensland University of Technology), Professor Brian Davies (Cardiff University) and Dr Karl Maton (University of Sydney), for their readings and helpful comments.

Notes

1. ‘Départementalisation’ is the process of becoming a department. A department is an administrative and political division within France. There are 101 departments in the mainland (‘Métropole’) and five overseas (‘Départements d’Outre Mer’ – DOM): Guadeloupe, Guiana, Martinique, Mayotte, Reunion. These five departments are also ‘regions’ – territorial collectivities with subnational entities and dependent areas which have an elected local government and local administration. These five overseas entities are the so-called DROM ‘Départements et Régions d’Outre-Mer’.

2. Briefly, in Reunion Island, Comorians (from the Comoros, an archipelago in the Indian Ocean located to the north-west of Madagascar and to the south-east of Africa at the entrance to the Mozambique Channel) are perceived negatively by a part of the local population. They are accused of securing jobs that are not deemed to be rightfully theirs and of weighing upon the island’s economy.

3. Axis of ordinates: i.e. axis 2 or vertical axis. Axis of abscissas: i.e. axis 1 or horizontal axis.