306 p., While it has long been assumed that schooling is integral to the construction of modern nation-states, surprisingly little is known about whether and how teachers actually go about transmitting national culture in the classroom. Relying on ethnographic research conducted in lycées on the French island of Martinique, including classroom observations, semi-structured interviews with teachers, informal interviews with school administrators and regional policymakers, and archival research, the author explores the ways in which history-geography teachers negotiate the construction of national and regional identities on an everyday basis, and in doing so become active participants in the formation of these identities within schools. The author finds that teachers in Martinique have long had significant influence over the implementation of national curricula.
Compares curricular, ceremonial and pedagogical practices with how students and teachers make sense of racial identity and discrimination at the Jaime Hurtado Academy in the city and province of Esmeraldas, Ecuador, which is the only region of the nation where Afro-Ecuadorian people comprise a majority of the population. Finds that schooling was structured as a regime of equality, where social science textbooks make invisible the concepts of race and Blackness while school ceremonies enforced membership to the nation. Shows through an examination of how students and teachers make sense of racial identity and discrimination that race was a significant factor shaping teaching and learning at the research site and argue that schooling practices are implicated in this process by attempting to submerge racial and cultural differences.
