Conquest or Reconquest? Students’ Conceptions of Nation Embedded in a Historical Narrative

Abstract

This article focuses on university students' understanding of the concept of nation. First an analysis of this concept from a historiographical point of view is presented. This allows for distinguishing between different conceptions of the nation related to 3 main approaches: the romantic, the modernist, and the ethnosymbolic approaches. Based on this analysis and also taking into account present research about history education and the construction of national identities, 5 different dimensions of the concept are presented: (a) historical subject, (b) identification, (c) territory, (d) legitimate claim, and (e) general concept scheme. Qualitative individual interviews were carried out with 31 Spanish college students about a Spanish foundational historical narrative, embedding the concept of nation, called the Reconquest (711 AD-1495 AD). Results indicated that although students showed tensions in their narratives, romantic conceptions dominated most of them. Possible reasons for the Correspondence should be addressed to Mario Carretero,

The Teaching of Recent and Violent Conflicts as Challenges for History Education

“…Our results indicate that after years of history instruction both Spanish and Argentinean high school and university students tend to consider the national "people" as a clear a definite historical subject, which already existed even before the political birth of their nations by the beginning of nineteenth century. For example in the case of Spain (Lopez et al 2015a), our participants think that the Spanish people were fighting against the moors for several centuries, but it is not the case at all because at that time in the territory of the Iberian Peninsula there were several kingdoms as Castille, Aragon and others. Spain did not exist until several centuries later.…”

“…This dimension is related to the previous one but is focused on a distinctive aspect. For example in one of our studies (Lopez et al 2015a), students were asked about the presence of the Arabs in the Iberian Peninsula for about 800 years. In many cases, these students used the pronoun "us" in their narrative even though they were referring to events, which happen several centuries ago.…”

La Dimensión territorial de las narrativas sobre el pasado: un estudio piloto

“…Se han realizado investigaciones empíricas, tanto en la Argentina (Carretero y Van Alphen, 2014) como en España (López et al, 2014a), que se centraron principalmente en el análisis de las cuatro características mencionadas en primer lugar. Como resultado en común, las investigaciones encontraron que los sujetos tienden a repetir la narrativa maestra, cuando se les pregunta sobre el evento que para ellos marca el origen de la nación.…”

Outgoing Editors’ Note: The Journal of the Learning Sciences as a Mirror of Trends in the Field

“…Herrenkohl and Cornelius (2013) examined relationships between epistemic cognition and classroom argumentation in history contrasted with science. Lopez, Carretero, and Rodriguez-Moneo (2015) used clinical interviews to study the formation of historical concepts. Matthews (2016) investigated affordances of an informal online environment for developing historical thinking skills.…”