ABSTRACT
Northern Ireland offers a chance to examine the impact of social context on students’ understanding, both by contrasting Catholic and Protestant students’ ideas and by comparing them to those of students in the United States. Americans are held in higher regard in Northern Ireland than in many other countries, but people there are keenly aware of the attention their region receives in the international media, and they are troubled by the misconceptions and simplistic ideas held by outsiders. If researchers from Northern Ireland were to ask students what they meant by a term like “marching season,” even young students would be skeptical about their intent. Students saw it as a valid occasion to help out an uninformed foreigner. The school curriculum had no connection to national history, and students never brought it up on their own, either in formal interviews or informal conversations.
