Mark Sheehan

The place of ‘New Zealand’ in the New Zealand history curriculum

The article provides a historical perspective on the debate over a New Zealand senior history curriculum that emerged in the 1980s and has remained largely intact over the subsequent 20 years. While the contested nature of history education is an international phenomenon, New Zealand stands apart: there school history is largely Eurocentric in orientation, narrowly topic‐based, and few students engage with significant and controversial aspects of the national past. This avoids the ‘history wars’ of the international arena by not requiring students either to focus on contested features of New Zealand history or to include a local perspective on international events. An historical perspective on history education is timely. In 2010 a non‐prescriptive, competency‐based curriculum with a citizenship focus and influenced by the ideas of the ‘knowledge society’ is being implemented in New Zealand. This has significant implications for history education.

A question of bias? Politics, assessment and the New Zealand history curriculum

Purpose – Stakeholders groups in the educational community are not immune to wider socio‐political events when responding to educational concerns and the purpose of this paper is to use a case study approach to examine how questions over teaching, learning and assessment can become the focus of wider political debates. In particular, this article focuses on the New Zealand Education and Science Parliamentary Select Committee investigation into the 2004 history examination, that was set up in the wake of increasing dissonance over the place of the Treaty of Waitangi in New Zealand and the newly‐implemented senior secondary school standards‐based assessment system.Design/methodology/approach – The contestation of the curriculum is a highly political process that works to reproduce social class patterns and keep particular elite groups in control of the official curriculum. This paper draws on a range of documentary sources to provide a socio‐historical perspective, as well as interviews with key participant...

We Need to Remember They Died for Us: How Young People in New Zealand Make Meaning of War Remembrance and Commemoration of the First World War.

This article examines the extent to which young people in New Zealand share the dominant beliefs and assumptions that inform contemporary notions of war remembrance concerning the First World War. In particular, it considers how they make meaning of the ANZAC/ Gallipoli narrative. Informed by two empirical studies, it questions whether young people uncritically accept the dominant cultural memory messages about the First World War that shape commemorative activities or whether they share a wider range of perspectives on war remembrance. While the purpose of commemorative activities is to convey particular memory messages about appropriate ways to remember the First World War, young people are not passive in this process. Although they typically do not demonstrate a firm grasp of all the relevant historical details about the First World War, when given the opportunity to do so they appear to be engaging critically with the production of cultural memory messages about war remembrance.