This special issue of the Journal of Educational Media, Memory and Society
explores memory practices and history education. The first point of
departure for the texts collated here is that memory (whichever concept
we use from the current range including collective memory, cultural
memory, social memory, connected memory, prosthetic memory, multidirectional
memory, travelling memory and entangled memory) is a site
of political contestation, subject formation, power struggle, knowledge
production, and community-building. Our second point of departure is
that history education is a site where teachers and pupils as members of
distinct generations engage with textbooks and other materials as specific
forms of memory texts that guide what should be passed on to the
younger generation. As editors, we solicited papers that investigate how
what counts as “worth remembering” in a given context is reproduced,
negotiated and/or interrupted in classrooms and other educational practices.
This introduction aims to sketch the overarching understanding of
memory practices which guide the contributions, to point to the purchase
of attending explicitly to the “doing” of memory, to highlight the difference
between our approach to history education and approaches focusing
on historical thinking, and to introduce the six articles.
Negotiating racialised (un)belonging: Black LGBTQ resistance in Toronto’s gay village