Childrens educational engagement with

nationalism in divided Cyprus

Spyros Spyrou
Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences, European University Cyprus,
Nicosia, Cyprus

International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy
















Vol. 31 No. 9/10, 2011 pp. 531-542
Emerald Group Publishing Limited
0144-333X DOI 10.1108/01443331111164124
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available at www.em
eraldinsight.com/014 4-333X.htm


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Abstract
Purpose The purpose of this paper is to provide a situated, theoretically
informed account of national identity construction by exploring childrens
engagement with nationalism in the context of the classroom in divided Cyprus.
The paper aims to illustrate how children enter and participate in the cultural
world of nationalism in the classroom by accepting, resisting, and negotiating the
ideological meanings they encounter there.
Design/methodology/approach The research on which the paper draws
used an ethnographic approach. The paper draws primarily on teacher-student
exchanges during class lessons and, to a lesser extent, on interviews with children.
Findings The paper suggests that the process of engagement between
children, teachers, and nationalism often produces powerful senses of belonging
which are, however, always limited and unstable both because of ideological
contradictions and ambiguities and because of childrens access to alternative
knowledge.
Research limitations /implications Though the ethnographic evidence
suggests that nationalism in educational contexts produces powerful senses of
belonging among children, more research is necessary to document the processes
by which children consume nationalistic ideologies.
Originality/value The paper is original because it offers a dynamic
explanation of national identity construction through the application of practice
theory to ethnographic data which takes into account both the powerful
institutional constraints imposed on children at school as well as their agency and
ability to impact their worlds.
Keywords Children, Nationalism, Education, Divided societies, Cyprus
Paper type Research paper






2

Introduction
In this article, I am attempting to delimit the theoretical parameters of
national identity construction as it takes shape in the microcosm of the school and
of the classroom in particular in a divided society where nationalism is the
fundamental underlying logic of educational efforts to manufacture citizenship
among the young (Benei, 2005).
Using theoretical insights from practice theory, I explore both the
reproductive and productive possibilities engendered by the social encounters
which take place in the classroom between teachers and students in the ongoing
process of engaging with nationalism. How do such processes create powerful
senses of belonging to the nation?
And how are such senses accepted, negotiated or even outright resisted
within that same space?
The ethnographic examples I provide come primarily from eldwork
carried out in 1996-1997 with 10-12-year-old Greek Cypriot elementary school
children residing in two communities one urban community near the buffer zone
which separates the capital of Cyprus, Nicosia, and the island as a whole and a
rural community to the southwest of the capital city (Spyrou, 1999).
The data for the study come from participant-observation in schools and in
the communities where the children resided, from in-depth interviews with
children, parents, and teachers, and a number of other approaches where children
played an active role (e.g. essay writing, drawing, pile and sorting, and ranking).
The data were subsequently thematically organized and coded. For the purposes
of this paper, I draw primarily on teacher-student exchanges during class lessons
and, to a lesser extent, on interviews with children.
Following a turbulent history with an anti-colonial war (1955-1959)
against the British, the granting of political independence to Cyprus in 1960, the
eruption of inter-ethnic violence between Greek and Turkish Cypriots in the
1960s, a military coup and a Turkish invasion in 1974, Cyprus remains since then
a divided island with Greek Cypriots living in the south and Turkish Cypriots
living in the north. In this highly politicized context, the islands ethnic division
and Turkeys occupation of more than one-third of its territory, nationalism
3

provides a culturally convenient ideological framework for imagining the nation
and constructing a collective sense of identity.
A number of studies have documented the powerful role of nationalism in
Cyprus both historically and in contemporary times (Papadakis, 1998; Bryant,
2004) and linked educational goals and practices to nationalist agendas (Bryant,
2004; Christou, 2006; Spyrou, 2006; Zembylas, 2007).
Much has happened in Cyprus since the eldwork was completed, not
least of which is the controlled crossing of people from a number of checkpoints
on the buffer zone since 2003, a referendum in 2004 which failed to result in the
islands reunication, and Cyprus entry into the EU shortly afterwards. However,
I draw on this specic case study because it is an in-depth and comprehensive
account of the role of education in childrens national identity constructions which
allows me to provide, in turn, a more nuanced, theoretical account of identity
processes as these unfold in schools.
It is today, widely accepted in academic circles, that nations are
constructed rather than being primordial as their loyal subjects would claim them
to be (Anderson, 1991 [1983]; Calhoun, 1997; Gellner, 1983; Fujitani, 1993;
Hobsbawm and Ranger, 1983).
Within this constructivist framework, nations are seen as erected out of
powerful nationalist narratives circulated through state-controlled institutions such
as schools or the military (Gellner, 1983; Green, 1990; Soysal and Schissler,
2005). In that sense, loyalty to the nation, far from being a deep-rooted sense of
belonging, is an outcome of social processes which inculcate individuals with
nationalistic values and ideals. These processes might be systematic and often
quite explicit as is the case with ofcial school curricula which are permeated
with nationalistic narratives underpinned by an exclusionary logic based on
national identity. But such processes might also operate at a less formal and
mundane level or, as argued by Billig (1995), be more implicit and banal.
Repeated exposure to nationalist narratives and symbolism, constructivists
argue, anchors the otherwise abstract concept of the nation in peoples everyday
worlds and allows for meaningful associations with ones everyday life
(Scoureld et al., 2006, p. 11).
4

Though still a largely under-researched topic, childrens engagement with
nationalism has documented the negative role the ideology may have in childrens
ways of thinking and their emerging relations with others in the world (Byrne,
1997; Burman and Reynolds, 1990). In nationalistic contexts, self and others
are constructed in oppositional and exclusionary ways which are highly
stereotypical and prejudicial (Hengst, 1997; Povrzanovic, 1997; Stephens, 1997)
while in deeply divided societies which have suffered from conict these
processes are even more intense and problematic (Elbedour et al. , 1997; Habashi,
2008; Hart, 2002; Spyrou, 2006).
More than a decade ago, Stephens (1997, p. 11) called our attention to the
need for re-conceptualizing nationalism and the nation-state by situating children
and childhood squarely within the larger debates on these phenomena. The
intimate relationship between children and childhood on the one hand and
nationalist projects on the other provides us with an overall framework for
exploring national identity construction. By being made the target of nationalist
visions, children become a symbolic resource for nation-building and for
envisioning a national future (Gullestad, 1997, p. 21; Koester, 1997, p. 125;
Cheney, 2007). Similarly, the very centrality of children as a constitutive element
of the biological family renders them a convenient discursive resource for
establishing an emotionally powerful symbolic connection with the larger,
imagined family of the nation. So, in this sense childhood provides nationalism
with useful resources for legitimizing its claims while, at the same time,
nationalism itself provides an overall framework for the construction of childhood
and for the kind of children the nation wishes to have.
Education is perhaps the most obvious of the states instruments for
pursuing its nationalist visions through children and childhood (see Helleiner,
2001, p. 189 for the Canadian example). School, unlike the home, frames in a
formal and systematic fashion a worldview where self and other come to be
imagined in a national universe which carves out the world in discreet nations
(Benei, 2005; Soysal and Schissler, 2005); in this sense, schooling is integral to
national identity construction.
5

In ethnically divided societies like Cyprus the ethnographic case study of
this article schools become the primary symbolic spaces for defending and
upholding the nation in the face of real or imagined threats from those others
whose presence in society is deemed a problem. In such contexts, teachers are
called upon to inculcate in the young the ideals of the nation so that they construct
a strong sense of national identity an identity which is invariably constructed
through prejudice, stereotyping and even hatred for the other who, in nationalist
imagination, is and will remain for ever unredeemable (Spyrou, 2006).

Reproductive engagements with nationalism in the classroom.
Thompson (2001) has argued for the need to theorize individual
engagement with discourse for a better understanding of nationalisms role in
peoples everyday lives (Fox and Miller-Idriss, 2008). Practice theories which
recognize the dynamics of everyday engagement with ideology provide
productive alternatives to mechanistic and reproductive formulations by
considering the role of the active subject who is intimately and reectively
involved in an ongoing process of identity construction. Here, I draw on a
theoretical model of identity construction developed by Holland et al. (1998) to
illustrate how children accept, resist, and negotiate the cultural forms of
nationalism that they encounter in the classroom through the development and
enactment of particular identities within shifting elds of power and privilege.
The model seeks to account for the importance of culture in shaping identities as
well as the role of social position which situates individuals in relation to one
another and in ways that both enable and constrain their activity (Holland et al. ,
1998, p. 287).
The classroom, though not the only cultural space within the school that is
privileged with the role of producing national citizens, is certainly the most
obvious one. Children spend most of their school time in classrooms where they
are systematically exposed to the socializing lessons of the curriculum, where they
are expected to make sense of their identities and learn how to properly enact
them. In ethnically divided societies like Cyprus, children will gradually enter the
cultural world of nationalism as this is constructed in the context of the classroom
6

and, together with their teachers, work towards sustaining it and, occasionally,
also towards transforming it through their activity. Here, I attempt to illustrate this
unfolding process using the theoretical insights of Holland et al.s (1998) model
while situating it within the more specic context of my ethnographic work with
children in Greek Cypriot elementary schools.
The cultural world of nationalism in the classroom is socially organized
with different characters occupying different social positions and expected to
perform different cultural roles. The teacher occupies a central, powerful and
authoritative position in the classroom and is expected to be the primary, if not the
sole, bearer of knowledge and truth which she/he, in turn, is called upon to impart
to children.
Children occupy a radically different social position they are student-
learners and what is expected of them is to internalize this knowledge and be
able to bring it forth when necessary. But apart from these obvious two, there are
other characters which might also inhabit this world and they include, among
others, ancestors, national heroes and saints, or friends and enemies of the nation,
all of whom t into this world through their distinct roles and outlooks.
In their daily engagement with nationalism in the classroom, both teacher
and children will make use of the cultural artifacts available to them. Cultural
artifacts (e.g. school textbooks, ags, poems, stereotypes, behaviors, or phrases
and words) are what comes between them as individuals and the discourse of
nationalism; they are, in this sense, mediating devises which come attached with
particular cultural meanings (Holland et al. , 1998, p. 26). As cultural artifacts
they have a history and an intentionality which stems from their previous use.
They can be made to serve new purposes (individual and collective) but their
history is often a constraining factor (Holland et al., 1998, pp. 36-7). Thus, a word
like barbarian or Turk in the Greek Cypriot context constitutes a mediating
devise that a teacher or a child may use to act out the discourse of nationalism and
to substantiate its claims.
As a cultural context of social activity, the classroom is a world where
particular acts are possible while others are not. The outcome of activity in the
classroom is regulated by the institutional and contextual parameters of proper
7

behavior, the discursive resources available to the participants and their respective
social positions.
The latter inuence how the teacher and the children relate to one another, what
they can and cannot say, what claims they can make successfully, in short, how
much power they hold within the space of the classroom (Holland et al., 1998, pp.
127-8).
Children gradually come to learn how to properly position themselves in the
classroom given their subject positions: they readily offer a correct response to
a question such as why dont we like the Turks? and they express the proper
emotion when the teacher comments on all the barbaric acts that they did to
us whether that was several centuries ago or in the recent past (Chyn, 2005, p.
62).
Yet, we need to bear in mind that there is always a performative politics of
identity construction that is not readily obvious but might become apparent as one
examines identity construction across the social terrain. A correct response
might indicate at times a desire to position oneself as a good or
knowledgeable student rather than necessarily a strong identication with a
nationalist claim. Herzfeld (2005, pp. 26-8) has argued that essentialisms (e.g. in
the form of stereotypes) might constitute strategies adopted by social actors rather
than the stable forms they claim to be. In this sense, a stereotype of the other
(e.g. the stereotype of the Turk as a barbarian) needs to be interpreted in context
and we need to ask who, where, when, and why is doing the stereotyping rather
than simply ask what the stereotype implies about self and other. I was alerted
to this performative, situated character of essentializing on many occasions when
in my encounters with children outside of school they provided me with
alternative constructions of identity that differed from the nationalistic,
antagonistic identities that they often constructed with the teacher in the
classroom.
When, on occasion, the normative ow of classroom activity is
challenged, the teacher will have to decide whether to use her authoritative social
position to control what is happening in the classroom, whether to grant or deny
the oor to any particular student, whether to accept or reject childrens responses
8

to her questions, and whether to reward or discipline and reprimand. Thus, when a
student brings into the classroom knowledge that challenges the logic of
nationalism, the teacher more often than not will reject that knowledge as
inappropriate as shown in the following excerpt from a religious instruction class
with the sixth grade (Spyrou, 2000):

Nikiforos: Sir, what about the children and the women if there is war?
Teacher: We said that only those who can ght will ght in a war.
Marinos: Adults say that if war takes place they will go and hide. (Here,
Marinos is referring to cynical statements he heard from some men about
their disillusionment with politics and their unwillingness to ght for their
country.)
Teacher: Marinos, you should not listen to what they say in the
neighborhood.

Here, the students access to an alternative discourse becomes an
opportunity for challenging the nationalist ideal of loyalty to the nation, but the
powerful social position of the teacher afforded to him by the school and his
institutional right to have the last word in any exchange precludes any critical
discussion on the matter (Baraldi, 2008, p. 248).
It is beyond the aims and scope of this paper to provide a comprehensive
account of how identity is natularized in the classroom; my aim is more modest,
that is, to simply highlight how the development of senses of belonging to the
nation takes shape in the classroom.
A common strategy that is very much integral to the ofcial curriculum
but is also ingrained in the practice of teaching is that of deploying socially
familiar metaphors such as those of blood, mother, and family for nationalistic
purposes because they resonate with the social signicance that individuals
attribute to these tropes in their everyday lives. As natural symbols (Douglas,
[1970] 1996), these metaphors constitute convincing bases for exclusion and the
reication of culture, and ultimately for the creation of the imagined community.
9

In fact, it is precisely because they constitute social ties that these tropes can
easily be turned into cultural representations (Herzfeld, 1992, pp. 11, 27, 74, 76).
Thus, when the blood metaphor is deployed in school to essentialize the
nation it is because it is a familiar element of familial ideology which nationalism
can co-opt and use for its own purposes (Herzfeld, 1992, p. 139). Consider, for
instance, the teachers effort in a history class with the fth and sixth grades to
establish a clear biological afnity between Greece and Greekness on the one
hand and the children as Cypriot on the other:
Teacher: With Greece we have the same civilization, the same language,
should I say the same history? The rst settlers on the island were Greeks.
Greek blood runs through our veins. We have the same descent.

The teacher here uses, on the one hand, a strategy of narrativization which
seeks to legitimize the existence of the nation by linking the present with the past
while he also uses a strategy of unication which seeks to symbolize the unity of
the nation across time and space (Thompson, 1990, pp. 61, 64). By taking children
back to the distant past and offering historical evidence about the fundamental
cultural unity between Greeks and the islands inhabitants, the teacher tries to
establish a strong sense of sameness.
But to do so convincingly he also chooses to draw on the metaphor of
blood to resort to the full force of nature in order to establish an undoubted
familial connection (Greek blood runs through our veins) which is based on
biogenetic and not simply cultural evidence. Both the explicit use of the blood
metaphor and the implicit use of the family metaphor essentialize otherwise
disparate relations among the two groups.
Similarly, when the metaphor of motherhood as motherland is used as a trope for
naturalizing the nation, it is because it is such a familiar and emotionally powerful
image which resonates with individuals (and childrens in particular)
experiences.
Thus, when the teacher in a history class with the sixth grade claries to
the children that we are Greeks of Cyprus. Greece is also called the motherland (i
mitera patridha ) he is using the mother metaphor to create an association
10

between Greece (as a mother) and Cyprus (as a daughter) which will resonate with
the experience-near associations that children have within their own families and
more specically their relations to their own mothers. So, in this sense, it is not
surprising that children themselves use this trope in their own understandings of
the homeland. When asked which is the homeland, they often point out that it is
Greece and when further probed to explain what exactly is Greece, they add i
mitera mas (our mother) in a straightforward and matter-of-fact way that
naturalizes the otherwise metaphorical relationship to which they have been
repeatedly exposed. In short, the tropes of blood and kinship aim to substantialize
the nation by establishing relations imbued with sentiment and morality (Alonso,
1994, pp. 384-5).
The mediating role of the school as an institution between the home and
the family on the one hand and the nation on the other provides it with a
privileged and powerful role to exercise its ideological role in relation to
nationalism. As Benei (2008, p. 26) argues, what goes on in school in terms of its
nation-building role might be a continuation of what happens at home at least of
the lived experiences of sensory and emotional bonding (2008, p. 5) so that
values and feelings like love, loyalty and trust which start from the home are often
expanded and built upon in school through their association with the nation
(Benei, 2008, p. 64). The emphasis placed by schooling on socially signicant ties
such as those of the family or community and on their accompanying tropes such
as those of blood and motherhood draws attention to the sensual dimension of
national belonging (often expressed indirectly through language but also more
directly through bodily activity as in national parades or when singing the national
anthem) and its power to inscribe in children an embodied sense of what it means
to be a member of the nation, a sense that is not built out of the obviousness of
nationalisms claims but rather on its banality and its phenomenological and
experiential efcacy (Benei, 2008, p. 24).
The emotionally powerful metaphorical associations of blood,
motherhood, and family become embodied in language and children use such
references to naturalize these relationships in their imaginations. As one girl
explained to me in a conversation we had about Greece, Greece is our mother.
11

She is the one who protects us [.. . ] from the enemies and The Greeks are our
siblings while another girl elaborated further on the signicance of this putative
biological connection for the nation: [... ] if something happens they will help us.
They are our brothers.
Productive engagements with nationalism in the cla ssroom The childrens
different backgrounds and history (e.g. in the case of Cyprus, coming from a
refugee family whose members ed their home in 1974 as a result of the Turkish
invasion and occupation of the island), their knowledge, skill and agency are all
likely to impact their participation and identication with the cultural world of
nationalism in the classroom. Though some will identify to a great extent with this
world, others will only partially do so while a few may even nd this world
uninteresting, boring, or even problematic and disengage from it or outright resist
it. Their identications will often reect their own unique understandings which
stem from their own biographical and social characteristics, the possibilities
afforded to them by the cultural resources they have access to and by their own
social positions in the classroom which are largely dened by their age and status
as students (Holland et al. , 1998, p. 272). Yet, irrespective of the extent to which
they identify with it and despite the constraints imposed on them in the cultural
space of the classroom, both children and teachers will nd some space to create
their own understandings of this world by orchestrating the various voices they
encounter, to (following Bakhtin) author the self, even if such understandings are
still largely informed by the cultural resources available to them rather than being
individual and autonomous (Holland et al. , 1998, p. 272; Benei, 2005, p. 8).
Thus, when a 12-year-old girl re-afrmed in a discussion received truths about the
barbarism of the Turks, she did so by drawing on her one experience of living
right on the buffer zone and having seen the Turkish guards throw rocks at her
house and break its windows, an event which marked her identity through an
intense sense of fear and hatred. Though her understanding of the Turks ended up
reproducing ofcial ideology on the matter, hers was the afrming outcome of an
engagement with nationalistic discourse mediated by her own personal
experiences rather than simply the outcome of passive internalization.
12

On the other hand, children do occasionally resist nationalist declarations
and are able to penetrate discourse by drawing on their own personal experiences,
their local, cultural knowledge or alternative political ideologies. Critical
comments about the national self (e.g. we are also to be blamed for what
happened) which challenge the absolutist orthodoxy of nationalist ideology often
proclaimed in the classroom constitute a certain sense of cultural intimacy a
self critique directed by insiders to insiders (Herzfeld, 2005) only allowed to
surface temporarily and as a means of letting the pressure out of the cooker.
Though the potential for a radical reformulation of received truths afforded by
such opportunities is limited (at least in the context of the classroom) they
nevertheless suggest the ever-unstable foundations of any ideology, including
nationalism, that characterizes the day-to-day practice of identity construction.
When children encounter circumstances for which they have no culturally
set responses, they might improvise producing new identities which have the
potential of altering the course of activity for the future (Holland et al., 1998, pp.
17-18). Consider, for instance, childrens re-classication of Rauf Denktash the
political leader of the Turkish Cypriot community at the time (a much disliked
gure by Greek Cypriots for his role in the Cyprus problem and his extremist
views) from a Turkish Cypriot to a Turk. Greek Cypriot ofcial educational and
political discourse presents Turkish Cypriots much more favorably than Turks.
Turkish Cypriots, despite their ethnic difference from Greek Cypriots, are seen as
also sharing in the common Cypriot identity. Turks, on the other hand, are clearly
marked as the other, associated with the Turkish occupation of Cyprus in 1974
and the accompanying settlement of Anatolians in the occupied territories. Given
these evaluative categorical discourses, it was much easier for children to imagine
and re-classify Denktash as a Turk, a re-classication often accepted by the
teachers despite being inaccurate. In this way, the children with the implicit
consent of their teachers re-dened their own understandings of two categories of
people who are highly relevant to their sense of national belonging in a way that
affected their future understanding and engagement with these categories. Their
re-classication was an improvised response which, however, made cultural sense
given the discourses children were exposed to.
13

Though such radical redenitions might be relatively rare, the reworking
of nationalistic ideology some explicit, some more implicit often characterizes
childrens engagement with nationalism as a result of the ambiguous and
contradictory discourses that children encounter in their everyday lives. Both
within the school and outside of school, children encounter contradictory
discourses, values, and positions which they are called upon to make sense of.
Consider the contradiction that is created in many childrens minds, when the
teachers, following the ofcial curriculum, emphasize the need for ultimate
loyalty to the Greek nation we are above all else Greeks but also tell
children about the political independence of Cyprus (and the civic identity which
it entails) and devote time to celebrate this every year on independence day
(October 1). Or, nally, consider how children become ambivalent when the
teachers (reecting the ofcial curriculum), repeatedly tell them that they should
ght with all means to liberate their enslaved homeland but they also remind
them that we are a peace-loving people and unlike Turkey we do not seek war.
Childrens engagement with such contradictory discourses and voices may
give rise to ambivalences (e.g. not being sure whether the way to liberate Cyprus
should be through war or peaceful negotiations) or situationally specic responses
which they strategically offer (e.g. emphasizing their Greekness and the
superiority of the Greek nation in a history class but resorting to a more
universalist, humanist position (all people are the same or all human beings are
Gods children) in a religious instruction class. How they negotiate or rework
such contradictions and ambivalences constitutes their authoring of the self, their
own unique response to the cultural world of nationalism (Holland et al. , 1998, p.
178). Ultimately, the multivocality and openness of these contradictions and their
accompanying ambivalences provide nationalism with an ongoing anxiety and
need for afrming and reproducing itself however, imperfectly (Bhabha, 1990);
hence, its limited power to become a fully taken-for-granted ideological common
sense.



14

Conclusion
Over time, and to the extent that education serves its intended purpose, it
is hoped that children will submit to a regime of self-regulation (Baraldi, 2008, p.
241) and come to learn how to operate within the cultural world of nationalism in
the classroom in ways that help reproduce the ideology which sustains it. There
are, of course, no guarantees that this world will be reproduced but to the extent
that it is reproduced, it might suggest that children have successfully internalized
the nationalistic worldview and can now effectively participate in that world.
Successful participation in this world might be evidenced, for instance, by
childrens ability to tell a story about the national heroic past the right way or
by their skill in explaining a current event in nationalistic terms. One may readily
notice this kind of reproductive practice during a history lesson where the children
fully afrm the teachers nationalistic logic which divides the world into us and
them and they, as children, are called upon to respond to the teachers rhetorical
questions (e.g. what can we say about the way the Turks treated the Greeks
during the Ottoman period?) with the correct and almost automatic response (e.g.
the Turks oppressed and tortured the Greeks). On the other hand, to the extent
that childrens participation in this world challenges its gured logic (e.g. by
challenging its exclusionary assumptions) or is ambivalent, children are
contributing towards the production of a new cultural world and new
subjectivities. Though such instances might be rare in the regular ow of
classroom life, they do exist and must be acknowledged as part of the active
process of engagement with nationalism which includes both reproductive and
oppositional forces.
The importance of situating identity construction in context is well
illustrated by different studies which look closely at how children construct and
negotiate identity in practice (Connolly, 2006; Morrow and Connolly, 2006).
Through careful ethnographic observation, it is possible to reveal the nuances of
identity construction and to better appreciate both the power of nationalism as an
ideology as well as its internal contradictions and limitations. In divided societies,
processes of identity construction are of particular interest and concern as they
impact upon the current and future trajectories of the groups involved and the
15

relations they are able to build between themselves. In ethnically divided societies
like Cyprus where conict manifests itself in territorial disputes as well,
nationalism often becomes highly antagonistic and oppositional. Teachers,
parents, and children alike may nd in it a well-developed framework for
explaining a complex political situation such as the Cyprus problem which might
otherwise entail contestation, contradiction, and ambiguity.
The role of nationalism in producing powerful senses of belonging among
school children is certainly an under-researched topic especially as it manifests
itself in daily social practice rather than through the analysis of textbooks and
curriculum guides.
Research on the daily practice of nationhood in educational contexts can provide
insights that can inform teacher training (e.g. on how teachers could provide
dialogical opportunities for students to engage critically with naturalized concepts
like nation and identity) and the revision of school curricula (e.g. through the
introduction of more social rather than monumental or grand history which
acknowledges ordinary peoples lives and struggles for meaning). Given the
increasing cultural and ethnic diversity that exists today in Greek Cypriot public
schools much greater than was the case in 1996-1997 the implications of these
ndings are pressing and the need to construct alternative, more inclusive,
pedagogies for identity construction much more imminent.
Theoretically, informed accounts of the dynamics of identity construction
help to de-reify reproductive, homogenizing, and universalizing accounts of the
role of nationalism in identity construction while recognizing, at the same time,
the power and potential for nationalism to create strong and enduring senses of
belonging.
Responding to Stephens (1997) call for making children an integral part
of our debates on nationalism, provides a productive conceptual space for
exploring the production and consumption of one of the most powerful ideologies
of modern times. Undoubtedly, more research is necessary on the educational and
extra-educational processes which create emotionally strong, national senses of
belonging among children and childrens own active participation in such
processes. In divided societies where nationalism is simultaneously naturalized
16

and sacralized and often becomes a guide to collective thinking, feeling, and
acting, understanding how children engage with it can provide us with even more
fertile ground for reconceptualizing the phenomenon from the bottom up.





























17

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About the author
Spyros Spyrou is an Associate Professor of Anthropology and Sociology at
European University Cyprus and the Director of the Center for the Study of
Childhood and Adolescence. His research focuses on the anthropology of children
and childhood and especially on issues of identity, education, and nationalism.
Spyros Spyrou can be contacted at: s.spyrou@euc.ac.cy
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