“We Don’t Hear All The Stories”: East Timorese Youth And Education About The Indonesian Occupation

The role of formal and informal education in shaping youths’ historical memories of violence is not well understood (Cole & Barsalou, 2006; Worden, 2014). Few research studies (Bellino, 2017; Russell, 2020; Worden, 2014) have explored how youth engage and negotiate with contested history via formal and informal sources of knowledge about the past and most research has yet to consider education as a site of memory (Paulson et al., 2020). This study responds to these gaps in knowledge by presenting findings from a qualitative case study in which semi-structured interviews and focus groups were conducted with twenty East Timorese youth in Dili, Timor-Leste. In addition, informal observations and textbook analysis were undertaken as a way of triangulating the data from interviews. The data from the interviews and focus groups presented and analyzed in this study demonstrate that East Timorese youths’ postmemories of the Indonesian occupation center on “a struggle for independence” in which Timorese “suffered” “a bitter experience” of “human rights violations”, suggesting a shift away from the heroic resistance narrative as a dominant framework for remembering this period. The study also demonstrates that formal education is limited as a mechanism of postmemory construction in comparison to informal education, with youth drawing largely on family and Centro Nacional Chega! as sources of their postmemories of this history. However, the East Timorese youth who participated in the study are also engaging and negotiating with the Indonesian occupation in different ways by focusing on the future, particularly as it relates to educating future generations about the Indonesian occupation and what justice, peace and reconciliation mean in the context of Timor-Leste’s violent occupation. The findings from this study help to fill a gap in research on the role of formal and informal education in shaping youth postmemories of violence and how youth engage and negotiate with violent historical pasts, transitional justice and peace and reconciliation. This study has significance for educational reform and how the history of the Indonesian occupation is being taught in schools.

Author dc:creator

• Harris, Sheena Marie

• History Education
• Peace
• Postmemory
• Timor-Leste
• Transitional Justice
• Youth

Language dc:language.iso

en

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/11299/279241

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:conservancy.umn.edu:11299/279241