‘THIS IS ALL MINE, MY HOMELAND’: TEXTBOOKS AND SCHOOL LOCAL STUDIES OF THE 1960S–1980S

Abstract

Kraevedenie (local studies), as a practice of local knowledge production, has been unevenly researched. To address the lack of research on school-based local studies, the authors turn to a comparative analysis of a corpus of local studies manuals for secondary schools published between the 1960s and 1980s. The analysis begins by examining the relationship between the reha- bilitation of local studies in the post-war period and the transformations in school education. Combining qualitative and quantitative research methods, the authors characterize the formation of the corpus of local history teaching aids and investigate how narratives about the region and its history are constructed. Relying on the image of a great country formed by Soviet school cartography, local history textbooks of this period develop the discourse of a ‘small homeland’, emphasising the role of the region attachment in citizens’ emotional belonging. Unlike their pre-revolutionary and early Soviet counterparts, these manuals focuses primarily on the historical narrative of the region. This narrative makes relies minimally on the discourse of heritage and concentrates not on antiquity but on heroic modernity. These manuals are also poorly embedded in the system of local history institutions and practices and equipped with references to opportunities for active learning of local material and interaction with the environment.

Keywords: textbook studies, local history, secondary education, late Soviet period, image of region, historical narrative, modernity, heritage