Policy, curriculum and the struggle for change in Cyprus: the case of the European dimension in education

This article explores the possibilities of shifting ethnocentric bias in curricula and pupils’ constructions of national and European identities using the concept of ‘Europe’ as a tool. The European dimension was conceptualized as a subtle approach, within the deeply divided society of Cyprus, to alleviate the ethnocentrism of history and geography curricula and to shift pupils’ extreme views. The study showed that there were slight yet important shifts which point towards the potential of education in providing children with a wider range of ‘tools’ with which to construct their identities. It is argued that in a context where ‘Europe’ is a ‘normativity’ and the ‘Other = Turk’ is polarized, the European dimension might be useful to hybridize a European identity so as to include the ‘Others’. Acknowledgements This paper has been drawn from my doctoral thesis entitled The European Dimension in Education and Pupils’ Identity: A Study of the Impact of a Primary School Curricular Intervention in Cyprus. I would like to thank my supervisors Dr Michael J. Evans and Dr Madeleine M. Arnot at the Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge, for their thoughtful guidance and supervision. I would also like to thank the teachers and the pupils who participated in this study for their everyday struggles. Notes 1. However, this issue is debated. Some support the pursuit of parents’ permission to collect data from children. For others, this practice implies that adults ‘know best’ (see MacNaughton et al., Citation2001). 2. The daily timetable of primary education is structured in seven 40‐minute teaching periods. Classes start at 7:30am and finish at 1:05pm. The school year starts on September 1 and ends in the third week of June. School holidays last two weeks at Christmas and two weeks at Easter. The curriculum is structured into separate subjects, which are 13 for Grade 5. 3. Whenever there is a statistically significant change in the means of the answers between pre‐test and post‐test, this is marked with asterisks on the post‐test column of the tables. A single asterisk indicates significance below 0.05 and a double asterisk significance below 0.01. 4. Other researchers record the saliency of Cypriot identity (as compared to the ‘Greek Cypriot’ and ‘Greek’ identities) amongst children even though children variably draw from both Hellenocentrism and Cypriocentrism, as discourses of identity (Ioannidou, Citation2004; Makriyianni, Citation2004). 5. The term is a word used in the Cypriot dialect to refer pejoratively to the Greek language, as opposed to the Cypriot dialect. 6. It was also indicative that religion was frequently used as a criterion to evaluate national outgroups (national outgroup evaluation was used during the broader study but not discussed in this article) according to how similar or familiar pupils perceived their religion with that of a particular national outgroup; religion was more frequently used to this end by the control group during post‐evaluation (Philippou, Citation2006). 7. For self‐categorization theory when identities are construed as in the same typical level of abstraction they are considered as mutually exclusive i.e. that a national and European identity cannot co‐exist. This finding occurred, for example, amongst Cinnirella’s (Citation1997) adult participants. For the Italian respondents, national and European identities function at different levels of abstraction (national and international respectively) and could thus coexist, whereas for the British respondents the two identities were mutually exclusive as they were perceived on the same level of abstraction. In consequence, the European identity was seen as a threat to the national one. 8. However, the Mediterranean identity as such was not important; pupils accepted it because of the undoubtable reality that Cyprus was an island in the Mediterranean, but there was no reference to any cultural, historical or other bonds with peoples around the Mediterranean, despite pupils’ learning of Roman and Byzantine history. The following incident is indicative of the lack of affective resonance for this identity amongst children: Sofia: Mediterranean ‘very’… why this because we are Mediterranean… Gea: Well, yes, but do you feel ‘very’ Mediterranean? (ironically) Sofia: Well, yes, since we do live in the Mediterranean! (Grade 5B, Experimental Group) 9. Analysis of how pupils represented the Turks as a national outgroup during post‐evaluation indicated some interesting shifts which I have described elsewhere and which can be summarized as follows. Pupils’ discussions and ranking of national outgroups indicated that they still positioned the Turks and the Greeks at either end of a bipolar continuum. However, the experimental group ‘interfered’ with the evaluation and hierarchization tasks, to rank the Turks alongside other national outgroups, which pointed to a de‐isolation of the Turks from the rest of the nationalities. In the post‐interviews, the arguments referring to the invasion and occupation of Cyprus, the refugees, the destruction of cultural heritage etc dominated both control and experimental groups’ talk about the Turks, as had happened in the first interviews. The Turkish people were construed as dangerous for Cyprus since they were perceived as an ‘uncivilized’ and strong country. However, the experimental group differentiated its responses applying variability within the ‘Turks’ category: they therefore explained that not all Turks were the same, and that children were different from adults, as well as everyday people different from the Government, the politicians and soldiers, the latter groups still construed in negative ways to represent a hostile Turkey. The experimental group would at times question or alter their answer‐choices and became aware of their use of stereotypical language on the Turks and other national outgroups when having to respond to this task (Philippou, Citation2006).