Öykü Gürpınar

As a part of the PhD Project entitled “Narrations of the Armenian Genocide in Schools on 2015: Comparative Study on the History Textbooks in Turkey, Armenia, and Diaspora (France, Lebanon)”,  this paper illustrates the complexity of the debate on the politics of historiography from a pedagogical perspective. The aim of the thesis project is to determine the differences between historiographical approaches, modes of narrative, historical interpretation and contextualization, and above all, transmission of a catastrophic and traumatic event onto next generation of Armenians. In an attempt to explore the different historiographical and pedagogical approaches to the Armenian Genocide, from denialism to recognition, from contextualization to historicism, from nationalism to human rights, this paper focuses on the national history curriculums of three countries (Turkey, Armenia, France). These three countries were selected in order to demonstrate the variety of historiographies according to the different socio-political and ideological contexts: Turkey for its denialist historiography, Armenia for its affirmative historiography, and France for its emphasis on human rights education. In this sense, there exist two levels of comparison: i) the general approach towards history education, along with human rights education, framing the national history curriculum, the publications and instructions of the Ministry of Education determining its implementation; ii) peculiarities concerning the case of the Armenian Genocide, involving the given historical context, its ideological position and interpretation, and its dis/connection to the claimed stance in the national curriculum. By comparatively analysing the curriculums, the paper aims to revisit the problematics of the divergence concerning the education of history, particularly in the case of a crime against humanity.