Journal of Educational Memory, Media, and Society

This article analyzes the representation of women's history in Canadian digital educational media within an international context. While Canadian research has examined both printed and digital educational media, it has tended to focus on digital literacy or disciplinary teaching with little attention to gender representation. This article aims to fill this gap by exploring how gender is portrayed in Canadian digital educational media. It first defines digital educational media in the context of international debates and then analyzes gender representation via a qualitative content analysis of selected online resources. The results of the analysis show that the shift from textbooks to digital media is primarily methodological and epistemological; students with increased agency and teachers as co-builders work with an understanding of knowledge that is less canonized and less definitive but that is subject to active research.

This article examines national memory construction in Russian foreign language education in the early 2010s via a discourse analysis of two EFL textbook sets. It shows how nationally significant events, personalities, and traditions are presented to pupils as the core of collective national memory. Drawing on the concept of nation-building as a continuous project that links past and present in order to legitimize state agendas, this study finds that both textbook sets embed nationalist narratives in order to shape pupils’ sense of belonging. By incorporating ideological messages, these narratives influence language acquisition and promote localized identities in a way that potentially clashes with global English-speaking culture. This article contributes to education and memory studies by highlighting how memory narratives in Russian EFL textbooks shape national identity and impact pupils’ engagement with English as a global language.

This article examines how educators in Bangladesh teach narratives of the 1971 Liberation War as presented in national social studies textbooks. Since the country's independence, Bangladeshi textbooks have been critical sites of contestation, undergoing politically motivated revisions with each new regime. This article explores how teachers navigate these complex dynamics and reconcile competing narratives in the classroom. Based on six months of fieldwork, we assess the strategies that teachers use to teach these politically contested narratives. Four key themes emerge from our analysis: teaching by the book, teaching “real history,” teaching politicization, and teaching how to comply. This work contributes to the literature by illuminating the gaps between curriculum design and classroom implementation, highlighting the unique strategies educators use to navigate these challenges in a politically charged environment.

This article examines and compares history textbooks at the lower and upper secondary school levels in Germany and Japan by focusing on their treatment of violence in the twentieth century. Based on Johan Galtung's model of direct, structural, and cultural violence, it explicitly addresses the double-layered potential of textbooks, whereby they themselves can report on and yet at the same time exert (or counter) cultural violence. The comparative approach of this study is refined by comparing not only the textbooks of the two countries but also these national textbooks with transnationally produced textbooks. A typological framework was designed by adopting Galtung's extended conception of violence for systematic analysis, and, based on the data gained by applying the framework, a discourse analysis was conducted employing the ten narrative keys developed by Angela Bermúdez and her colleagues in order to examine the extent to which the textbooks foster or impede a critical understanding of violence.

Given the prominence of heroism and Second World War heroes in contemporary Russian public discourse, this article examines how the monolithic Soviet master narrative about war heroes has been reconstructed in Russian history textbooks since 2012, including those coedited by Vladimir Medinsky in 2016 and 2023. Using a multimodal approach, it tests the hypothesis that Russian textbooks on the Second World War employ verbal and visual components that are designed not only to foster national identity and loyalty to the Kremlin and the president but also to militarize the consciousness of younger generations. The study focuses on narratives about war heroes, analyzing them via examinations of portrayals of great men and heroic stories, actions, and institutions. As Russian education policy connects portrayals of the Second World War and the government's demands for support against Ukraine, the focus will be on those narratives that hold a particular epistemological relevance for contemporary discourses.

For this issue, Olga Radchenko has analyzed old and new myths about heroes in the standardized year ten Russian history textbook published in 2023. Focusing on visual representations of the Great Patriotic War, she has uncovered fascinating insights. If I nevertheless take another look at the same book here, this time with a focus on textual narratives, it is because I disagree with her interpretations on one key point.