Learning the Colonial Past in a Colonial Present

Students and Teachers Confront the Spanish Conquest in Post-Conflict Guatemala

Bibliographic Data

ID8923606
AuthorsDeirdre Mayer Dougherty (0000-0001-8519-5748, Rutgers Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights, corresponding author), Beth C Rubin (Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey)
Year2016
Volume52
Issue3
Pages216-236
Publication date2016-05-03
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueEducational Studies (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0013-1946 • E-ISSN: 1532-6993
PublisherTaylor & Francis (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/00131946.2016.1169184
OpenAlexW2377973005
LanguageEN
Citations received4
References cited29

In Guatemala, three centuries after Spanish conquest and in the wake of more than three decades of internal conflict, the framers of the 1996 Accord for a Firm and Lasting Peace placed educational reform at the center of efforts to make peace with this contentious past. This article, based on a multisite qualitative study, describes how Guatemalan teachers, working within an ostensibly standardized national curriculum aimed at creating a common historical narrative, differed in their presentation of Spanish colonialism. In the social studies classrooms of two different settings, a private school serving affluent Ladino students and a public school serving low-income indigenous students, young people constructed usable pasts amid distinct approaches to this era. In the first, a static, fixed version of colonial history distanced these young people from their indigenous cocitizens; students described the colonial era as part of a completed and distant past. In the second classroom, the teacher framed colonialism as an enduring part of students’ lives; students articulated the continued reach of the colonial era through language loss, structural inequality, and cultural devaluation. In this postconflict setting, curricular attempts to use historical study to create a new, unified, national identity were met with local challenges embedded in distinct historical memories

Aesthetics · Colonialism · Curriculum · Historical trauma · Identity (music · Indigenous · Narrative · Pedagogy · Political science · Sociology · Educator Training and Historical Pedagogy · Gender Studies · Global Education and Multiculturalism · History · Law · Peace and Human Rights Education · Psychology

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