Education

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 lycees 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, I explore 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.

I focus on the case of a directive, promulgated in 2000 and commonly referred to as the adaptation du programme, which permits certain local adaptations of the national secondary school curriculum for the first time in the French overseas departments.

This examination provides valuable insight into how teachers fulfill their official role of implementing the national curriculum as developed by the Ministry of Education in Paris, while ensuring that students learn regional history and geography.

By employing ethnographic methods rather than relying solely on official records, I find that teachers in Martinique have long had significant influence over the implementation of national curricula.

While the adaptation reform may seem groundbreaking in that it officially recognizes the teaching of regional history and geography, this policy only reinforces a long-standing practice by which teachers have been able to cater national instructions to local needs.

Second, I conclude that teachers do not see national and regional identities as discrete or necessarily oppositional categories, as might be assumed given the nature of ideological debates over identite in Martinique, but rather see these forms of identification as perfectly compatible.

Third, bringing race into discussions of identity and schooling, I find that Martinicans' views of race are reflective of both national and regional understandings of this term.

This query provides further evidence that race is socially constructed and varies across time and space.

Fourth, I argue that teachers' professional identity(ies) must be taken into account when considering how identity is transmitted to students through schooling.