Schools and National Identities in French-speaking Africa

Linda Gardelle is maître de conférence HDR (Reader) in Educational Sciences at the École Nationale Supérieure des Techniques Avancées (ENSTA Bretagne) in France. She is interested in the construction of national and professional identities through the curriculum. In Africa, her research is mainly conducted in Mali, Algeria and Morocco.Camille Jacob is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Portsmouth, working on discourses and practices of English in Algeria and Mauritania. She is particularly interested in how the politics of language at the global level interact with local and national understandings of decolonisation, identities, security and "development" in countries historically considered as "French-speaking".

• National identities and the curriculum: socio-cultural legacies and contemporary questions Part 1 Continuities and discontinuities in the intermeshing of schools and identities 2. The emergence of the national in Francophone West African teacher education: the case of the normal school of Dabou, Côte d’Ivoire (1937-1975) 3. Conditional belonging to the Senegalese nation-state? School, state and society in Casamance (19th-20th centuries) 4. The role of schools in nation-building in Djibouti 5. Giving a Senegalese identity to education: issues, challenges and aims of nationalist demands, from independence to today 6. An examination of Negritude in textbooks: A content analysis approach to the textbooks of History-Geography and French in upper primary school in Côte d’Ivoire Part 2 Language and nation-building: classroom practices, policies and research paradigms 7. Teachers’ curriculum contextualisation in an overseas French territory: how can local specificities be acknowledged within the education system? 8. Defending national identity or improving learning outcomes? The ELAN initiative to introduce national languages in primary school in Benin, between pedagogical and political issues 9. Arabic teaching in state schools in Morocco: identity literacy and the endeavour to construct a unified national and religious identity among pupils 10. Identity (re)construction and the culture of resistance in Algerian textbooks of French and English 11. Colonial languages: an appropriate lens to drive educational reforms? The case of the islands of the Indian Ocean