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Realising Roma rights through a high-stakes history test: Secondary school students narrating the Swedish Roma past, present and future

Nolgård, O.; (2021) Realising Roma rights through a high-stakes history test: Secondary school students narrating the Swedish Roma past, present and future. History Education Research Journal , 18 (2) pp. 199-223. 10.14324/HERJ.18.2.05. Green open access

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Abstract

Building on theories of historical justice, reconciliation and transformative change, this article investigates how 293 secondary school students make sense of the difficult past, present and future of the Romani in a national history test. Using qualitative and quantitative text analysis, this study seeks to explore whom students foreground as agents of change in regard to the Roma past, present and future. Considering the past and looking to the future, the inquiry led students to narrate four scenarios: no change; a regression to a past state of no rights; a development for the better; a future free from oppression. While the students underscored the importance of a shared responsibility for Roma rights, they stressed the nation state as the single most important agent of change for Roma rights in the present and future. Against the backdrop of justice and change, this study argues that while students realise and recognise Roma rights through their narrational practices, and thus may become empowered to act for a just future, these narratives also re-establish historical cultural and ethnic group boundaries which potentially may disempower young learners.

Type: Article
Title: Realising Roma rights through a high-stakes history test: Secondary school students narrating the Swedish Roma past, present and future
Open access status: An open access version is available from UCL Discovery
DOI: 10.14324/HERJ.18.2.05
Publisher version: https://doi.org/10.14324/HERJ.18.2.05
Language: English
Additional information: © 2021 Nolgård. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Licence (CC BY) 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/, which permits unrestricted use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Keywords: social studies education, history education, historical justice, difficult histories, historical change
URI: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10138051
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