Understanding the centenary of the First World War as a 'future making process' helps to explain the substantial focus of state-sponsored commemorative activity in Britain on young people. For it is they, according to many official outlets -as the 'next generation' -who have to bear the responsibility of carrying memory forward. The cornerstone of this activity is the UCL/Institute of Education (IoE) and Equity Travel First World War Centenary Battlefield Tours Programme (FWWCBTP), a national education initiative funded by the Department for Education (DfE) and Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG).Between 2014 and 2019, the FWWCBTP will provide the opportunity for approximately 8-12,000 young people and teachers from every state funded secondary school in England to visit battlefields on the Western Front. Based on research data gathered predominantly from participants in the spring 2015 tours, this article seeks to explore the perspective of the programme participants, rather than the programme creators or accompanying teachers, to understand how they responded to the UK government's unprecedented attempt to engage young people in the history of the First World War via the vehicle of battlefield tourism. It explores possible tensions within the blending of education and remembrance, arguing that despite laudable intentions to encourage critical thinking about the First World War, for pupil participants the tour experience predominately emphasizes particular narratives of 'British' remembrance shaped around sacrifice, duty, and loyalty.

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This article contributes to discussions surrounding the development of 'analytical tools' sensitive to the fluid nature of collective memory and all its 'varieties, contradictions, and dynamism' (Olick, 2008: 159). It explores the methodological challenges of investigating how young people in New Zealand and the United Kingdom negotiate processes and practices of war remembrance and how, as researchers, we can begin to decipher the diverse responses young people have in recalling and making sense of their society's violent past. Examples from earlier research projects in the UK and New Zealand, led by each co-author, are used to problematize the methodological challenges in our respective projects with the aim to encourage discussion around developing youth-centred, inclusive and participatory methodologies that unpack the cultural memories of war and situate young people's voices prominently in the research process.

The field of memory studies tends to focus attention on the '3Ms'museums, monuments, memorialsas sites where memories are constructed, communicated, and contested. Where education is identified as a site for memory, the focus is often narrowly on what is or is not communicated within curricula or textbooks, assuming that schools simply pass on messages agreed or struggled over elsewhere. This article explores the possibilities opened when educative processes are not taken as stable and authoritative sites for transmitting historical narratives, but instead as spaces of contestation, negotiation and cultural production. With a focus on 'difficult histories' of recent conflict and historical injustice, we develop a research agenda for education as a site of memory and show how this can illuminate struggles over dominant historical narratives at various scales, highlighting agencies that educational actors bring to making sense of the past.