Posts com a Tag ‘International Journal of Research on History Didactics (IJRHD)’
History Education and (Post)Colonialism. International Case Studies – POPP et al (IJRHD)
Susanne Popp. www.researchgate.net /
POPP, Susanne; GORBAHN, Katja; GRINDEL, Susanne (eds). History Education and (Post)Colonialism. International Case Studies. Peter Lang, 2019. Resenha de: HAUE, Harry. International Journal of Research on History Didactics, n.40, p.245-252, 2019.
This anthology on colonialism discusses the reasons for its upcoming in different parts of the world as a fundamental contribution to the development of modern times, and the substantial impact the decolonization process has on the new modern era after World War II. In the introduction the editors make an overview of the content of the book, which has the following structure: Part 1: Two essays, Part 2: Three narratives, Part 3: Five debate contributions and Part 4: Three approaches.
The editors also present the fundamental problems in the study of colonialism and postcolonialism, and quote UN resolution 1514 from 1960: All peoples have the right to self-determination; by virtue of that right they freely determine their political status and freely pursue their economic, social and cultural development. Consequently, one of the questions raised in education is to what extent actual history teaching in schools represents and communicates the items of colonization and decolonization as well in the former colonies and in the countries of colonizers. The process of globalization has in the last decades made this question urgently relevant and moreover inspired to formulate the question of culpability.
In the wake of decolonization and globalization, especially Europe and the US have experienced a migration movement, which inspire classes to reflect on questions of inequality, and the former subordinates right to travel to high developed countries. This challenge to the national history might lead to fundamental changes in syllabus and teaching, which prompt a focus more on global history and postcolonial studies. As the editors point out: history educationalists need to take the issue of the ‘decolonization of historical thinking’ seriously as an important task facing their profession.
It is not possible in this review to refer and comment all 13 contributions in detail. However, I will present a thematic discussion of the four parts.
In part 1 Jörg Fisch, professor of History, University of Zürich, Switzerland, discusses the concepts of colonization and colonialism. He presents and reflect on the conceptual development on from the Latin idea of ‘colere and colonus’, in the late renaissance changed into ‘colonialist and colonialism’. The last concept is ‘aimed at making political, economic, cultural and other gains at the cost of his competitors and is often consolidated into colonial rule.’ Whereas the colonus occupied contiguous territory, the colonialist thanks to his technological superiority conquered land distant from the colonizer’s own country. The result was foreign rule, which required a new theoretical basis: Francisco de Vitoria postulated in 1539 that all peoples had the right to free settlement, trade and free colonization.
Another theory was that the indigenous populations had the right to be fully sovereign. Above those two theories, raw power was to decide to what extent the one or the other should be respected, if any of them. When the national state in the 19th century came into being in Europe and when ideas from the French Revolution gained impact in the Americas, independence was the answer. But this was not the end of colonialism which developed in the same period in the not yet unoccupied areas of Asia and Africa. Colonies became in the period from 1850 to 1914 part of European based empires divided between the big powers at the conference in Berlin in 1884-85. The process was called imperialism. World War I changed this development fundamentally, Germany lost all its colonies and the indigenous elite in the colonies began to question their subaltern status. After World War II the process of decolonization began, and the concept of anticolonization gained momentum in the aforementioned UN declaration form 1960. As Fisch underlines, the postcolonial world was not synonymous with a just world. In ‘Colonialism: Before and After’ Jörg Fisch has written a well-structured presentation of the main lines of this complex phenomenon and the conceptual development. His article is an appropriate opening to the following chapters in the anthology.
Jacob Emmanuel Mabe, born and raised in Cameroon, now a permanent visiting scholar at the French Center of the Free University of Berlin, has written a chapter on: ‘An African Discourse on Colonialism and Memory Work in Germany’. His aim is to demonstrate the significance of the concept of colonialism in intellectual discourse of Africans and to show how the colonial question is discussed in Germany.
It was the intellectuals among the colonial peoples who formed the critical discourse against European colonial rule in Africa, which Mabe calls a ‘ruthless territorial occupation’. The first materialization of this opposition to European rule was the formation of the ‘Pan- African Movement’ maybe inspired by the US-based initiative: ‘Back to Africa Movement’, which culminated in the founding of the Republic Liberia in 1879. On African soil, however in the interwar years a new concept was developed by especially Leopold Sédar Senghor, who was to become one of the most dominant voices among African intellectuals. He and his followers used the concept ‘Negritude’ and the aim was to create a philosophical platform for the promotion of the African consciousness by means of a literary current, a cultural theory and a political ideology. Mabe gives a short description of the reasons for the many barriers for the fulfilment of Senghor’s program.
Mabe ends his article with a discussion of the German attitudes to its colonial past. When the decolonizing process took off after World War II, the Germans were mentally occupied with the Nazi-guilt complex, which in comparison to the regret of the brutal treatment of the Africans, was much more insistent. Nonetheless, Mabe indicates that researchers of the humanistic tradition in the two latest decades have ‘presented some brilliant and value-neutral studies which do justice do (to) both European and, in part African epistemic interest. However, a true discipline of remembering which is intended to do justice to its ethics and its historical task can only be the product of egalitarian cooperation between African and European researchers.’ Florian Wagner, assistant professor in Erfurt, ends his chapter with a presentation of African writers in modern post-colonial studies. In competition with the USSR Western historians invited African writers to contribute to a comprehensive UNESCO publication on the development of colonialism. Wagner’s aim is to underline that transnational historiography of colonization is not, as often has been thought, a modern phenomenon, but has been practiced by European historians over the last century. His main point is that although nationalism and colonialism went hand in hand, transnational cooperation in the colonial discourse has been significant. It is an interesting contribution, which partly is a supplement to the chapter of Fisch according to use of concepts about the colonial development. It brings a strong argument for the existents of a theoretical cooperation between the European colonial masters, notwithstanding their competitive relations in other fields.
This statement can give the history teacher a new didactical perspective, as Wagner emphasizes in his conclusion: ‘Colonialism can provide a basis of teaching a veritable global history – a history that shows how globality can create inequality and how inequality can create globality.’ Elize van Eeden, professor at the South West University, South Africa, has written a chapter on: ‘Reviewing South Africa’s colonial historiography’. For more than 300 years South Africa has had shifting colonial positions, and consequently the black and colored people had to live as subalterns. The change of government in 1994 also gave historians in South Africa new possibilities, although the long colonial impact was difficult to overcome. For a deeper understanding of this post-colonial realities it is important to know African historiography in its African continental context. Elize van Eeden’s research shows that the teaching in the different stages of colonialism plays a minor role in university teaching. Therefore, new research is needed, exploiting the oral traditions of the subaltern people, and relating the local and regional development to the global trends. As van Eeden points out: ‘A critical, inclusive, comprehensive and diverse view of the historiography on Africa by an African is yet to be produced.’ Van Eeden’s contribution gives participant observers insight into especially South Africa’s historiography and university teaching and provide a solid argument for the credibility of the former quotation.
In the third chapter on narratives, written by three Chinese historians: Shen Chencheng, Zhongjie Meng and Yuan Xiaoqing: ‘Is Synchronicity Possible? Narratives on a Global Event between the Perspectives of Colonist and Colony: The Example of the Boxer Movement (1898-1900)’, the aim is to discuss the didactical option partly by including multi-perspectivity in teaching colonialism and multiple perspectives held by former colonies and colonizers, instead of one-sided national narratives, partly teaching changing perspectives, instead of holding a stationary standpoint. Another aim is to observe ‘synchronicity of the non-synchronous’ inspired by the thinking of the German philosopher Reinhard Koselleck. The chapter starts with a short description of the Boxer War, which forms the basis for an analysis of the presentation of the war in textbooks produced in China and Germany, i.e. colony and colonizer. Then the authors provide an example to improve synchronicity in teaching colonialism, followed by didactic proposals.
The Boxer War ended when a coalition of European countries conquered the Chinese rebellions and all parties signed a treaty. Germany in particular demanded conditions which humiliated the Chinese. This treaty is of course important, however at the same time, one of the Boxer-rebels formulated an unofficial suggestion for another treaty, which had the same form and structure as the real treaty, however, the conditions war turned 180 degrees around, for example, it forbade all foreign trade in China. The two treaties were in intertextual correspondence and expressed the demands of the colonizer and the colonized. The question is whether the xenophobic Boxers in fact were influenced by western and modern factors or whether the imperialistic colonizers were affected by local impacts of China? The ‘false’ treaty was used as a document in the history examination in Shanghai in 2010, with the intention of giving the students an opportunity to think in a multi-perspective way, and to link the local Chinese development to a global connection. Nonetheless, the didactical approaches in history teaching in schools are far behind the academic state of the art. It is an interesting contribution to colonialism, but it is remarkable that the authors do not use the concept of historical thinking.
In the third part of the anthology, there are five contributions. Raid Nasser, professor of Sociology, Fairleigh Dickinson University, discusses the formation of national identity in general and its relations to cosmopolitanism. The idea of a global citizenship conflicts with nationalism and the differentiations according to social, economic and ethnic divisions, and Kant is challenged by Fanon.
Nasser’s own research concerns the history textbooks in the three counties where the state has a decisive say in determining the content of those books and therefore it might have a decisive influence on the identity formation of the pupils, in this case from the year four to twelve. How much room is there for cosmopolitanism? This is a question which Nasser has thoroughly addressed in this chapter.
Kang Sun Joo, professor of Education, Gyeongin National University South Korea, discusses the problems with the focus on nation-building in the history teaching in former colonies and the need for new ‘conceptual frames as cultural mixing, selective adoption and appropriation.’ She gives an interesting view on the conformity of western impact on Korean history education.
Markus Furrer, professor of History and History Didactics, teacher training college Luzern, examines post-colonial impact on history teaching in Switzerland after World War II. He has the opinion that we all live in a post-colonial world, including countries with no or only a minor role in colonial development. He emphasizes that there are ‘two central functions of post-colonial theory with relevance to teaching: (1) Post-colonial approaches are raising awareness of the ongoing impact and powerful influence of colonial interpretive patterns in everyday life as well as in systems of knowledge. (2) In addition, they enable us to perceive more clearly the impact of neo-colonial economic and power structures.’ He analyzes six Swiss textbooks and concludes that there is a need in this regard for teaching materials which enable students to understand and interpret the construction and formation process which eventually end with ‘Europe and its others’.
Marianne Nagy, associate professor of History, Karoli Gáspar University, Budapest, has made an examination of history textbooks used in Hungary in 1948-1991 on the period between 1750 and 1914 when Hungary was under Austrian rule. This is an examination of Hungary’ s colonial status seen from a USSR- and communistinfluenced point of view. In the communist period only one textbook was accepted, and in this book, Austria was perceived as a kind of colonial power which controlled Hungary for its own benefit. The communist party had the intention to present Habsburg rule in a negative light, with the wish to describe Hungary’s relation to USSR as a positive contrast. Today the Orbán-led country uses the term colony in relation to the EU.
Terry Haydn, professor of Education, University of East Anglia, has made an explorative examination of how ‘empire’ is taught in English schools. His findings are somewhat surprising. In the history classes of the former leading colonizing country, most schools taught ‘empire’ as a topic, however with emphasis on the formative process of colonization and not ‘the decline and fall’. Haydn has with this short study focused on an item which should be the target of more comprehensive research.
The last three chapters concern the teaching of colonialism in a post-colonial western world. Philipp Bernard, research assistant at Augsburg University in Germany, discusses the perspectives in teaching post- against colonial theory and history from below. His basic assumption is that: ‘No region on the earth can evade the consequences of colonialism’, therefore, ‘A post-colonial approach emphasizes the reciprocal creation of the colonized and the colonizers through processes of hybridization and transculturation.’ The aim of teaching, in this case in the Bavarian school, is to achieve decolonization of knowledge. The author gives interesting reflections from his teaching which could be of inspiration in the schools both of colonized and colonizing countries.
Dennis Röder, teacher of History and English in Germany, writes about ‘visual history’ in relation to the visual representation of Africa and Africans during the age of imperialism. The invention of the KODAK camera in 1888 brought good and cheap pictures, which could be printed and studied world-wide. Soon those pictures could be used in education, and thereby history teaching got a new dimension, and a basis for critique of the white man’s brutal treatment of the natives. These photos were used in the protests against Belgian policy in Congo. Röder emphasises that the precondition for the use of photos as teaching material is the need for some methodological insight both on behalf of the pupils and students. Moreover, it is important to select a diverse collection of photos so that all sides of life in the colonies are represented. Then it would be possible to make a ‘step toward the visual emancipation and decolonization of Africans in German textbooks.’
Karl P. Benziger, professor of History, State University of New York, College at Fredonia, in the last chapter of the anthology has reflected on the interplay between the war in Vietnam as a neocolonial enterprise and the fight for civil rights in the US. Benziger discusses different approaches to teaching those items in high schoolclassrooms. An interesting course was staged as a role play on the theme: The American war in Vietnam. The purpose of the exercise was ‘to develop students’ historical skills through formulating interpretations and analyses based on multiple perspectives and competing narratives in order to understand the intersection between United States foreign and domestic policy from a global perspective.’
The editorial team should be acknowledged for its initiative. The anthology could be perceived as a didactical patchwork which gives inspiration to new research in the subject matter as well as innovations in history didactics. The current migration moveme would prompt to include colonialism and post-colonialism in history teaching and moreover these aspects are part of any pupil’s/student’s everyday life.
Harry Haue
[IF]
Contemplating Historical Consciousness: Notes from the Field
CLARK, Anna; PECK, Carla L. (eds). Contemplating Historical Consciousness: Notes from the Field. Berghahn Books, 2018. Resenha de: APOSTOLIDOU, Eleni. International Journal of Research on History Didactics, n.40, p.253-263, 2019.
- Introduction
Contemplating historical consciousness: Notes from the Field, edited by Anna Clark and Carla Peck revises the effort of Peter Seixas (2004: 4) in analyzing this very interesting concept which ‘implicates historiography, collective memory and history education’. Before proceeding to the structure and the contents of the volume it would be useful to suggest a definition of the concept. Seixas (2004: 10) suggests that of McDonald and Fausser: ‘the area in which collective memory, the writing of history, and other modes of shaping images of the past in the public merge’. It is exactly this merit of historical consciousness that makes it that attractive: it is inclusive of equally disciplinary and ‘lay’ modes of thinking. The latter was appreciated also by the contributors of the 2018 volume, Chapman, Green, and Seixas. Rüsen himself in his 1987 article about history didactics in West Germany seeing historical consciousness as broader then history didactics, explains that: ‘the didactics of history now analyzes all the forms and the functions of historical knowledge and reasoning in daily, practical life’ (Rüsen, 1987: 281).
In relation to the methodology of historical consciousness studies, Rüsen in a 1993 article stated that ‘the proof of theory lies in amassing empirical evidence substantiating its theses’ (Rüsen, 1993: 79). On the same lines, contributors of the 2004 volume like Wertsch, Létourneau and Moisan and Lee exemplified the contribution of empirical research in the theorizing of historical consciousness while Lorenz urged for comparative approaches (Seixas, 2004: 14). Thus, the tradition of qualitative empirical research is adopted also by the contributors of the 2018 volume; all the fifteen contributions relate to empirical research making use of an array of research methods, instruments and types of samples. McCully and Burton conducted qualitative research using a set of images referring to the history of Ireland, and also interviewed students. Chapman used questionnaires for school students and trainee teachers including open questions, Van Nieuwenhuyse and Wils used written history exams, students essays and questionnaires also preferring qualitative approaches, van Boxtel conducted process studies among school students, Wanhalla and Green used oral history approaches, Peck paragraph writing in answer to an ‘open for self-definition’ question and interviews and Silverstein, interviews. The volume also includes research projects similar to the Rosenzweig and Thelen’s 1998 study, specifically Seixas’, Clark’s and Li’s. Finally, Lévesque and Létourneau ‘repeated’ the 2004 Létourneau and Moisan research methodology analyzing students’ narratives.
Clark and Peck distributed all the empirical wealth above in three sections: ‘Historical consciousness, curriculum and pedagogy’, ‘Historical consciousness within and beyond borders’, ‘Historical consciousness and cultural identity’. The distribution above is functional as education or pedagogy and identity constitute elements of historical consciousness. The second part ‘[…] within and beyond borders’ while it implies comparison between different countries and continents, proves to indicate a more intimate relationship of several peoples with their pasts: Canadians, Australians, Chinese.
Insisting on the structure of the volume and the content of the chapters, an editorial novelty was that the contributors responded to specific questions set by the editors. Reading the chapters through the lenses of the first two questions, ‘motives to conduct research in historical consciousness’ and contributors’ ‘conception of memory, history and historical consciousness’, I distinguished the following tendencies: research strategies that address mostly the cognitive part of historical consciousness, the articulation of methodologically valid historical narratives, and others that address existential and political orientation problems. I therefore display the several studies within the latter context which implies possible differences of the contributors in relation to memory. I must admit that despite the above attempted categorization, there are cases where one can only notice emphasis on different aspects of historical consciousness.
- Combining Cognitive and Orientational Approaches
The Dutch curriculum, as Boxtel described it, focuses ‘on the ability to apply – in a coherent way – historical thinking and reasoning skills and a chronological frame of reference […] and did not do much justice to Rüsen’s ideas about the practical function of historical interpretations; how historical knowledge and understanding is used to understand the present and to orientate […]’ (Boxtel, 2018: 62).
Boxtel herself, at the beginning of her contribution, states that she does not approach historical consciousness as a cultural or historical phenomenon, but as an individual’s understanding of the past and from a learning and teaching perspective (p. 61). She locates ‘collective memory’ in education, in students’ and teachers’ ideas about the past, and also in teachers’ and education specialists’ work in informal education and heritage places such as museums. Her earlier reference to the Dutch ‘dynamic heritage’ project (p. 63) exemplifies her attitude towards cultural heritage, the latter considered as a challenge for the students ‘to construct shared historical knowledge and acknowledge different past perspectives.’1 Van Nieuwenhuyse and Wils seem to have a different starting point: the contrast between the Belgian curriculum and teachers’ practices, and also, the transnational narrative templates located in Belgian students as opposed with ethnocentric narratives located in students’ speech internationally. More specifically, Belgian history teachers were found to be ‘past-oriented’ in contrast to the Belgian curriculum guidelines that define the development of historical consciousness as the principal goal of history education (p. 47).
Belgian teachers were also found ‘fostering students’ substantive knowledge rather than their strategic knowledge, and hence their historical consciousness’ (p. 56). The latter tendency developed despite the prevailing education culture in Belgium of following student-centered teaching methods and focusing on skills. Van Nieuwenhuyse and Wils end by suggesting a historical consciousness definition that would emphasize the need for the students to differentiate the past from the present while, at the same time, using the past to orientate in the present and the future. In this way historicist and historical consciousness tendencies would be synthesized.
Chapman admits that whilst the main characteristics of historical consciousness – ‘interests’, ‘needs for orientation in time’ ‘functions’ could be appealing – the English national curriculum has traditionally focused on the past. Nevertheless, historical consciousness research in England referred to students’ orientation in time (p. 35). As Shemilt (2009: 194) put it, ‘the possession of a ‘big picture’ of the human past is a necessary condition for the emergence of more sophisticated and socially productive manifestations of historical consciousness’. Additionally, Chapman refers to his own and his colleagues’ research conducted in 1999, 2009 and 2016. This focuses on the past’s usefulness for 16 to 19 years-old students, the purposes of school history teaching (trainee history teachers), finally on the modes of historical consciousness suggested by the English curricula.
He concludes that historical consciousness research could be rewarding in terms of illuminating problems that did not surface in different research contexts. In relation to the cognition-orientation opposition he finds that the concept of historical consciousness provides at least two affordances: the first is that with the four different types of historical consciousness, one overcomes the tension between heritage-memory and the discipline of history. The second is that, different types of historical consciousness help us to have insight to additional meaning making processes (p. 35).
- Traumatic, ‘Spatial’ and Identity Approaches
Four contributions in this volume seem to originate in the same motives on the part of authors: Wanhalla’s on ‘Mother’s darlings of the South Pacific’, King’s ‘What is black historical consciousness’, Silverstein’s, about teaching the Holocaust, and Marker’s contribution about the Coast Salish Territory. They all refer to processes of identity construction, which could count as processes to form historical consciousness, in cases where people experience trauma and marginalization.
‘Mother’s darlings of the South Pacific’ was a 2010 – mainly oral – history project that referred to the Second Word War experiences of indigenous women and their partners: American army officers that settled in South Pacific islands between 1942-1945. Wanhalla admits that the project above could belong to memory studies, though, ‘uncelebrated, not public, wartime memories’ (Leckie in Wanhalla, 2018: 92). Additionally, the project could be a historical consciousness project since it brought to the fore narratives (of indigenous women, American fathers, ex-soldiers, and their illegitimately born children, now grown-ups), that described a traumatic experience of social exclusion since American military authorities did not permit marriages between Americans and indigenous women, applying the US racial segregation laws extra- territorially. It is also a social history study that reveals unpredicted World War Two and militarization consequences on individuals’ personal lives.
King questions the way black history is being constructed at schools and generally in the public sphere, and consequently forms black historical consciousness and culture. He comments on the uses and misuses of history to construct identities as wished by the prevailing political voices. He focuses not on the space that black history occupies in history textbooks and curricula speaking in quantitative terms, but on the type of narrative developed in relation to the black people. It is a narrative of suffering and victimization, a disenfranchising one. Black people end up agentless while other ‘narratives involving the institutional aspects of racism that allowed racism to prosper for many decades in the U.S.A. remain silenced’ (p.
68). King reports what he calls ‘racial neutrality’ in public sphere that seems to create ‘collective memory ghettos’ (Traille, 2007: 36) for black people and especially youth that form relevant historical consciousness narratives.
Silverstein, starting from her own personal motive, being a Holocaust survivor descendant and having attended Jewish studies in her high school years, conducted research situated in twelve Jewish day schools in New York and Melbourne. Interviewing teachers, she identified common teaching strategies in the form of narratives relating to the future; as she puts it, the main and common concern of all these teachers is to form strategies that will ensure ‘that Holocaust education – a form of lieux de memoire – becomes public facing and acting’. There were teachers that perceived the maintenance of the Jewish traditions as an ‘obligation’ and others that transmitted to their students a chronologically developed narrative of the Holocaust ending with the founding of the state of Israel.
Nevertheless, the prevailing Holocaust narrative bore caveats as regards a possible Holocaust’s repetition even in the USA, a narrative that focused on the factors that made the Holocaust happen.
Silverstein notes that the study brought to the fore ‘how migrant groups, and post-genocide groups, negotiate their marginality, and we can thus grasp some of the pain – and some of the possibilities – imbricated in such marginality’ (p. 183).
Marker, Green and Carretero introduce another perspective as regards historical consciousness, that of space or landscape. Marker, having himself served as a teacher in a Coast Salish high school, referring to the people of Coast Salish. Its characteristics that differentiate it from the European or western historical consciousness are the following: it is articulated through space instead of time, it includes a metaphysical imperative, time is not developing in a linear but rather in a cyclical way, there is no distinction between categories of knowledge, instead a holistic view prevails. Land plays such an important role in the way Coast Salish people narrate their history that instead of referring to people’s history, we rather refer to the history of the land articulated by Coast Salish people. Apart from the space dimension I would count Marker’s contribution as another case of trauma and marginalization (like Wanhalla, King and Silverstein’s contributions): there were immense consequences that the colonization process had in the lives of indigenous people since the latter were alienated from their land and forced into another culture.
Green’s contribution bears no traumatic dimension like the previous ones: though it is similar to Marker’s contribution because of the space dimension, also to Wanhalla’s project because of the use of oral history. It also connects to Rosenzweig and Thelen’s work (the relevant contributions in this volume, too) because it focuses on family memories and their transgenerational transmission. The contribution is also interesting in relation to methodology and theory of historical consciousness. Green, like Chapman in the same volume, recognizes a certain affordance in the use of the historical consciousness concept as opposed to the collective memory one: it allows space for individual differentiation. Green also speaks in favour of the use of the term ‘consciousness’ as opposed to forms of memory that may not be conscious. Finally, she finds that the study of family memories refers to historical consciousness, since family memories are articulated in the form of narratives that connect past, present and future, also anchored to meaningful places as in the case of the Coast Salish people (p. 208).
Carretero, using as a starting point current politics, specifically the wish of Donald Trump to build a wall between the USA and Mexico to prevent prospective immigrants, notes the need for historization of current political problems to make sense of them, actually the creation of a narrative, the need to historize places, territories, displaying also the disputes about them (p. 79). The latter can be easily achieved by the use of historical maps that show political developments in an area. He finally explains how disastrous for the people historical consciousness can be, in terms of the fact that Trump wishes to replace symbolic walls, differentiated identities, as perceived by Americans and Mexicans, with concrete ones, imposing in that way a monolithic way of thinking that won’t allow individuals the possibility to discern other perspectives.
Levesque & Létourneau’s, McCully & Barton’s and Peck’s contributions originate in the relationship between people’s racial, ethnic, self-perception as opposed to school history. Levesque and Létourneau identify historical consciousness with narrative competence, thus their research question was ‘how can French Canadian students create usable stories of their collective past?’ (p.
143). They drew on previous Canadian studies in narrative competence conducted by Létourneau and Moisan and they themselves involved a sample of 635 students with an average age of 16 years and a half. Students were asked to narrate ‘the history of the French presence in Canada’. Influenced by the Howson & Shemilt’s (2011) work on students’ ‘big pictures’ of the past, Levesque and Létourneau found that ‘by the time students graduate from high school, they have acquired an important stockpile of historical information and little pictures of the collective past that vary from one region to another. Interestingly, these little pictures are part of “bigger” pictures organized in narrative templates such as la survivance’ (Levesque & Létourneau, 2018: 155). Unfortunately, students’ collective identification seems to affect the narrative template they finally select. Narrative templates despite being useful tools to organize the past have their limits too.
The latter remark about students’ commitment to their communities take us to McCully’s and Barton’s research question about ‘how history learned in school interacts with history encountered in families and the community’. In relation to motives, they both state that while being aware of several theoretical assumptions, it was school practice that contributed to the initiation of the specific research. Thus, they refer to Wertsch’s idea of ‘cultural tools’, Bakhtin’s understanding of ‘internally persuasive dialogue’, Halpern’s suggestions about how to increase empathetic understanding, ‘collective memory’, ‘imagined communities’, ‘historical consciousness’ (p. 22-23). All the above helped them to make sense of the data and to meditate on the development of a history curriculum that would help Irish students to overcome their country’s traditional political and religious division. As in Levesque & Létourneau study above, the main findings of their research were the constraining role of the communities’ narratives on students’ historical thinking, and teachers’ resistance as regards the teaching of the national controversial issues in history classes or their tendency to teach controversial topics in noncontroversial ways.
Likewise, Peck is interested in the connections between students’ ethnic identities and their historical thinking about Canada’s past (Peck, 2018: 216). Levesque & Létourneau, Peck and McCully & Barton seem to be interested in the relationship between school history and community narratives. Peck and Levesque & Létourneau, also share the experience of living in ‘settler’ states, where there are ethnic divisions and subdivisions, e.g. English speaking and French speaking Canadians, also a complex relationship with indigenous people, the ‘First Nations’. Her argument and thinking context remind me of Epstein’s ‘old’ research about ‘students’ racial identities and experiences and their historical perspective taking’ (Epstein, 1997: 29). In the same way Peck is interested in how students ‘situate’ themselves in the country, from the racial and ethnic point of view, and how they therefore connect to Canadian history, also its school version. In the end, she notes how important it is for teachers to know how students think of themselves (their identity) in order not to make teaching choices that may ‘exclude’ students not feeling any relevance to history.
- Intimate Approaches
Seixas, Clark and Li share similar historical consciousness and methodology approaches: they study the intimate, family and popular past of Canadians, Australians and Chinese people, as opposed to the formal, public past. Seixas referring to previous literature concerning the concept of progress in historical thinking exclaims, ‘Who we are to judge, how people understand and use the past […]’ (p. 105). Thus, in 2006 he conducted a 3419 participants telephone survey with the title ‘Canadians and their past’ drawing on the Rosenzweig and Thelen one ‘The presence of the past’. There were findings similar to the 1998 survey of Rosenzweig and Thelen.
Clark conducted the project ‘Private lives, public history’ in Australia, also inspired by the Rosenzweig and Thelen survey but following another methodology: she conducted small affinity group interviews from a sample of 100 participants originating in five different Australian communities and exercised ‘situational analysis’ (Clarke, 2005). Her research question was: how would the Australians engage with the nation and how would they articulate their own historical consciousness in the context of powerful public historical narratives? The findings indicated that official narratives did not speak to Australians’ experiences while they engaged with more intimate parts of the past.
Li drawing on all the above, USA., Canadian and Australian studies, conducted a similar survey in China under the title ‘Chinese and their pasts’. The sample comprised the main Taiwan sample of 425 participants and additional subsamples originating in different Chinese cities. The method of data collection was interview surveys.
Her findings were similar to the studies referred to above in the current section: places and sites of public history were highly evaluated in Chinese people’s learning about the past while there was ‘a strong push towards personal, family and local history’ (p. 138).
- Can We Discern Periods in Historical Consciousness?
Rüsen (1987: 281) saw in the turn of history education to historical consciousness in the 1970s’, the realization on the part of historians and history educators that if history were to remain in the curriculum, it should also serve extra disciplinary criteria. In Ahonen’s (2004) words ‘The progressive pedagogy of the 20th century required personal and social relevance from history. Thus, in addition to their pursuit of “literacy”, Americans have traditionally expected ethical and citizenship education from history’.
As for the 2004 volume about historical consciousness, Ahonen also notices that ‘the organization [of the chapters] reflects well the underlying idea – that people’s relation to the past is not only a matter of formal education but a broad social phenomenon’ (Ahonen, 2004: 3). The same is noted by Clark & Peck in the introduction of the 2018 volume (p. 2): ‘Taken together, this corpus of work into history-making, from the most powerful public narrative to the most intimate memoir, has come to be defined as “historical culture”’. On the other hand, according to Nordgen (2016: 481), ‘historical consciousness guides the use of history and is influenced by historical culture’. In a way historical culture facilitates historical consciousness, especially as the latter is seen as ‘uses of the past’ (Lévesque in Clark & Peck, 2018: 2).
In other words, and as Chapman and Green have also noted in this volume, historical consciousness was conceived to be something ‘more than historical literacy’ (Ahonen, 2005: 697). Despite the fact that Rüsen differentiated between disciplinary and non-disciplinary uses of the past, and even though Lee (in Clark & Peck, 2018: 4) noted that ‘Indeed, people may hold different types of historical consciousness in tension simultaneously’, one can note on the 2004 volume a tendency on the part of the authors to display their own stance as regards the dilemma historiography-memory. Thus, we have the dialogue among Simon, Lee, Rüsen and Seixas about historical consciousness and its relation with narrative and memory (Den Heyer, 2004).
In this volume, the focus rests on the different uses of the past, cognitive, political, intimate, while new dimensions occur as the ‘spatial’ one. The sections ‘Historical consciousness within and beyond borders’ and ‘Historical consciousness and cultural identity’ are indicative of the latter tendency. I would suggest that the contributors to this volume are immersed in different possibilities of making sense of the past, possibilities enabled by historical consciousness, while the contributors of the 2004 volume are more hesitant and yet focused in defining the concept, thus the references in memory’s relationship with historical consciousness and the discipline of history.
As for the ‘third period’ of historical consciousness, it may not have happened yet according to both Ahonen and Grever. Ahonen ends his 2005 review saying that ‘The culture of history is a strong shaper of people’s historical experience and consciousness: the structure and meaning-attribution in the culture deserve a coordinated study’. Grever instead refers to ‘the expanding field of virtual popular historical culture with huge audiences: video games, augmented reality, selfies, instagrams, and YouTube vloggers. These new media stimulate what Jerome de Groot calls historioglossia: a multiplicity of hybrid discourses accruing around a single historical person or event, with overlapping genres all of which might be simultaneously in operation’ (p. 228). Nordgen, when referring to ‘culture’, means the different ways and environments in which one comes in touch with the past. He therefore refers to Rosenzweig and Thelen’s research about the family experience. The latter more intimate relationship with the past is materialized in three different contributions of this volume (Seixas, Clark and Li). Grever’s reference to the means that nowadays allow contact with the past, and mediate it, the new technologies, would need another volume to discuss.
Notes
1 https://www.eur.nl/en/eshcc/research/centre-historical-culture/researchprograms- and-projects/nwo-program-heritage-education-1 (15.06.2019).
References
Ahonen, S. (2005) ‘Historical Consciousness: A Viable Paradigm for History Education?’, Journal of Curriculum Studies, 37 (6), 697-707.
Den Heyer, K. (2004) ‘A Dialogue on Narrative and Historical Consciousness,’ in P. Seixas (ed) Theorizing Historical Consciousness, Toronto: Toronto University Press, 203-211.
Epstein, T. (1997) ‘Sociocultural Approaches to Young People’s Historical Understanding’, Social Education, 66 (1), 28-31.
Lee, P. (2004) ‘Walking Backwards into Tomorrow: Historical Consciousness and Understanding History.’ International Journal of Historical Learning, Teaching and Research 4 (1), 1-46.
Nordgen, K. (2016) ‘How To Do Things in History: Use of History as a Link Between Historical Consciousness and Historical Culture’, Theory and Research in Social Education, 44 (4), 479-504.
Rüsen, J. (1987) ‘The Didactics of History in West Germany’, History and Theory, 26 (3), 275-286.
Rüsen, J. (1993) ‘The Development of Narrative Competence in Historical Learning’, Studies in Metahistory, Pretoria: Human Sciences Research Council, 63- 83.
Eleni Apostolidou
[IF]
Textbooks as Propaganda: Poland under Communist Rule: 1944-1989 – WOJDON (IJRHD)
WOJDON, Joanna. Textbooks as Propaganda: Poland under Communist Rule: 1944-1989. Routledge, 2018. Resenha de: VAJDA, Barnabas. International Journal of Research on History Didactics, n.40, p.265-260, 2019.
How did a Communist political system, the Polish one, deal with primary school textbooks? How did it try to influence teaching and learning through Marxist political messages? How did it deliberately distort the content of all school textbooks in order to make an impact on the minds and thinking of future generations? Joanna Wojdon’s Textbooks as Propaganda. Poland under Communist Rule, 1944- 1989 gives us a thorough and detailed explanation which goes well beyond Poland’s historical experience. Even if her starting point is that ‘schools were supposed to install communist ideology and a positive attitude toward the Soviet Union’ (p. 140), in fact, I am convinced that the lessons we can learn from this book stretch far beyond the post-Communist countries.
Certainly, we have already known many things. In fact, there is no need to prove that communist regimes wanted schools to indoctrinate young people even from the very first grades. And Joanna Wojdon’s book gives us a substantial amount of proof that neither the Polish nor other Eastern European communist regimes even tried to hide their intentions. On the contrary, they openly declared their ideological goals. She rightly touches upon a general rule as an overall context for communist textbooks: ‘The term “doing a textbook” was coined to characterize the flow of many lessons’, i.e.
to follow the book step by step, and she reaches an extremely important conclusion that ‘textbooks, not curricula, were what teachers and pupils actually “did”’ (p. 1).
It has also long been known that Eastern European communist school systems used to have a significant amount of teaching content in textbooks inserted purely for political reasons. Anybody with just the slightest experience form those pre-1989 years could remember the achievements of the Soviet natural sciences and especially space research, the presentation of workers’ achievements of those times – and not only in history textbooks! And this is one of the features that places Joanna Wojdon’s book on the top of our bookshelves, i.e. ‘She explores the ways in which propaganda was incorporated into each school subject, including mathematics, science, physics, chemistry, biology, geography, history, Polish language instructions, foreign language instructions, art education, music, civic education, defense training, physical education, and practical technical training.’ (p. i) Joanna Wojdon has rightly chosen primary textbooks as the source and subject of her research since she reconstructs the universal message of the communist regime aimed at ‘the youngest citizens’ who as the youngest readers are vulnerable and ‘therefore more susceptible to propaganda messages’ (p. 2). The author who is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Wroclaw, Poland, and who follows in the steps of her earlier book The World of Reading Primers: The Image of Reality in Reading Instruction Textbooks of the Soviet Bloc’(2015), nicely explores the most significant ideological strategy of the times, the all-present and omnipotent workers’ perspective which used to be the foundation of mass-oriented communist indoctrination. This one-sided world view, where the imaginative ‘worker’ was the alpha and the omega of all arguments, produced for instance ‘in the history of the Roman Empire the reason for its collapse was reduced to, the characteristics of its social classes and the rebellions of its slaves’ (p. 111).
Since Joanna Wojdon has researched almost all Polish textbooks of the selected time period (from 1944 to 1989), we can be curious to know if there was a special ideological stress in history textbooks? There certainly was. I regard as extremely fascinating how the author explores the great variety of distortions and biases in the books surveyed. Completely distorted topics such as ‘the imperialist First World War’ (p. 111) and the fact that WW I was dealt with from the universal perspective of the constant struggle of the working class rather than from the Polish national(ist) view, perfectly fits into a general pattern typical of most Eastern European communist textbooks. It is no surprise that in these textbooks, often written from the Soviet point of view (p. 118), little attention was paid to Polish national(istic) ideology (p. 114). More precisely, the nationalist layer in the textbooks was intentionally selective. One only needs to look at the fact that while on the one hand the Polish textbook omitted any trends of Russification, on the other hand they massively stress Germanization. But the most interesting discovery by Joanna Wojdon is the constant appearance of pictures of the enemy in communist Poland. It was ‘the Christian church as general, and Jesuits in particular, as exploiters of the workers’ society’ and as stubborn representatives of ‘retrograde conservativism’ (p. 115).
To measure the quality of propaganda is not an easy task, and to research the specific means and methods of propaganda in school textbooks is a huge scientific challenge. Many propaganda tricks are hidden in the language. Selective language (and branding) for national affiliation of some historical personalities was typical. It concerned for instance Charles Darwin as a ‘famous English biologist’, Dmitri Mendeleev as a ‘great Russian chemist’, and Wilhelm C. Roentgen who was left without a nationality (p. 117).
It is even more difficult to spot and identify latent language structures, i.e. deliberate omissions, or as I call them, the ‘structures of silence’. Let us be no naive, language tricks happened on purpose, deliberately and in a systematic way (p. 140). In Polish textbooks researched by Joanna Wojdon there are many well-known omissions, such as the system of Gulags or the Katyn massacre, eastern borders of Poland, as well as dozens of other ‘sensitive’ issues. As the author puts is: ‘The textbooks’ narratives […] did leave out certain historical facts, figures, processes and phenomena’ (p. 108). The same tendency to deliberate omission is true for the imagological apparatus. As a result one would rarely see church buildings as illustrations is many Eastern European textbooks. And I think that all these ‘structures of silence’ contribute to the general amnesia and harmful silence about social and historical problems.
Probably the greatest challenge for any researcher identifying the ideological burden in a history textbook is of a semiotic character, as the author puts it, ‘propaganda motives, topics and techniques intertwined in the text’ (p. 119). In other words, spotting covert messages, and especially those which are hidden not in the text but in the didactical apparatus (questions, tasks, photo captions, etc.) of the textbooks, that make both descriptive text and didactical apparatus almost cognitively indigestible. In this field Joanna Wojdon rightly states that in methodological terms, Polish communist ‘textbooks made clear judgements on everything from the past, and left children with no doubts or ambiguity’ (p. 109). It may sound weird but it is my own experience that the Marxist ideological burden was palpable in the text, nevertheless it is very, very difficult to prove it scientifically. And yet, it was a pre-calculated effect which contradicted the true nature of history as a science because for professional history ‘either – or’ situations, disquieting questions and constant doubts are fundamental. What can we say about a school textbook which entirely switches off critical thinking or multiperspectivity over people and their deeds in the past, and compels a one-sided worldview? No contradictory opinions were allowed (p. 143) in order to change societal opinion en masse, and in order to attempt to change cognitive structures from where divergent thinking is excluded (p. 143).
Since the time period selected by Joanna Wojdon is the era of the Cold War, it is worth asking how did these textbooks handle the superpower rivalry? To what extent did Polish communist textbooks present anti-Western orientation or indoctrination? What about anti- Americanism? As the author states, ‘The world as presented in geography textbooks was thus bipolar, black and white. It was an arena of battle between capitalism and socialism’ (p. 78), and there is no doubt that ridiculous comparisons between the USA and the USSR were present: ‘What monstrous amounts of pollution New York, Chicago and Los Angeles must produce each year!’ versus ‘On the wide and clean streets of Moscow there is much traffic at all hours of the day’ (p. 76). And this leads us to a contemporary question regarding current East-West cultural tensions. Was the Communist ideology in the textbooks intentionally anti-Western? If it was, has it contributed to the tensions that can be observed between current Western and Eastern Europe? Joanna Wojdon’s book is a very valuable contribution to general and international textbook research, reaching well beyond the Polish experience. In fact, she gives us a clear list of typology of the specific means of ideological indoctrination: Marxism, socialism, enemies of the system, presentist interpretations, politechnization, etc. (These are Joanna Wojdon’s expressions from pages 109-110.) I would be curious to know if these are common Eastern European patterns? There are surely subtle similarities that strongly offer themselves for international comparative textbook research. There is evidently much to offer for Eastern European readers, especially for those who are engaged in comparative analysis of history textbooks. Giving just one example: On the level of phraseology, for instance, in Poland the abbreviations ‘Before Christ’ and ‘Anno Domini’ were replaced with ‘before our era’ and ‘of our era’. The same kind of de-Christianized terminology in communist Czechoslovakia used ‘before’ and ‘after our time’. Joanna Wojdon’s typology is surely a useful ‘toolbox’ for coming-soon textbook researchers. Clearly the author is well aware of less of those textbooks research involving Tatyana Tsyrlina-Spady & Alan Stoskopf (2017), Milan Olejník (2017), Karina Korostelina (2009), Ibolya Nagy Szamborovszkyné (2013a, 2013b) and others, who have produced very valuable books and papers on textbook propaganda in the Soviet Union and its political orbit.
Joanna Wojdon’s book ends with a short and poignant Conclusion (p. 140-148) in which she raises one of the most neglected section of textbook research, i.e. ‘the question of the effectiveness of textbook propaganda is most problematic’ (p. 145). For many pupils textbooks are ‘boring’; formal schooling is not omnipotent; and education has never been only limited to schools. What’s more, we know that quite a lot of contemporary teachers did refuse to follow senseless ‘ideological rules’ (p. 147), and this kind of disobedience has had a rather strong impact on many pupils – as it is shown in some rare interview based research materials. If one considers the deep and general social apathy in Soviet bloc countries in the 1970s and 1980s (p. 145) (definitively in Czechoslovakia and Hungary), the failure of overwhelming indoctrination at schools seems to be quite clear.
There might be no doubt that the communist school textbook system, with its no-choice and competition-free textbook regime, all around Eastern Europe, was an integral part of a carefully designed social engineering system. Similar propaganda content and similar patterns ‘can be observed in other countries of the Soviet Bloc’ (p.
143) which leads us to a very contemporary problem: How should we consider those European countries where the state is the major (sometimes exclusive) sponsor of school textbooks; where there is a limited (if not entirely closed) textbook market; and where the teachers’ choice is limited to the one and only available textbook? And I think Joanna Wojdon knows this exactly. For in places she winks at us when she writes that ‘school history is notorious for being used as a tool of indoctrination, not only in Poland and not only under Communism’ (p. 108).
At least one extremely illuminating message of Joanna Wojdon’s book is clear: Democratic school systems have to maintain the power of schools (in fact, teachers) to choose their textbooks because this is the only real and significant professional force in and around schools that can compensate for any ideological push that may occur from time to time.
References
Korostelina, K. (2009) ‘Defining National Identities – The Role of History Education in Russia and Ukraine’, Lecture at Woodrow Wilson Institute, Washington, D.C., 9.02.2009.
Olejník, M. (2017) Establishment of communist regime in Czechoslovakia and an impact upon its education system, Košice: Centrum spoločenských a psychologických vied SAV, Spoočenskovedný ústav Košice.
Szamborovszkyné Nagy, I. (2013a) Oktatáspoitika és történelemtanítás a Szovjetunióban és Ukrajnában. I. rész, Szovjetunió 1945-1991 [Education policy and history teaching in the Soviet Union and Ukraine. Part 1., The Soviet Union 1945-1991], Ungvár: Líra Poligráfcentrum.
Szamborovszkyné, Nagy, I. (2013b) Oktatáspoitika és történelemtanítás a Szovjetunióban és Ukrajnában. II. rész, Ukrajna 1990-2010 [Education policy and history teaching in the Soviet Union and Ukraine. Part 2, Ukraine 1990-2010], Ungvár: Líra Poligráfcentrum.
Tsyrlina-Spady, T. & Stoskopf, A. (2017) ‘Russian History Textbooks in the Putin Era: Heroic Leaders Demand Loyal Citizens’, in: J. Zajda, T. Tsyrlina- Spady & M. Lovornet (eds) Globalisation and Historiography of National Leaders: Globalisation, Comparative Education and Policy Research, Dordrecht: Springer, 15-33.
Barnabas Vajda
[IF]
Geschichtsunterricht. Ein Handbuch zur Unterrichtsplanung [Ensino de História: manual para o planejamento das aulas] – GIES (IJRHD)
GIES, Horst. (in Zusammenarbeit mit Michele Barricelli und Michael Toepfer): Geschichtsunterricht. Ein Handbuch zur Unterrichtsplanung. Köln, Weimar, Wien 2004 (UTB), 307 S. Resenha de: MÜTTER, Bernd. International Journal of Research on History Didactics, n.31, p.285-287, 2010.
Horst Gies’ jüngste Buchpublikation, an der seine früheren Assistenten Michael Toepfer und Michele Barricelli mitgewirkt haben, lässt das Vorbild des bewährten „Repetitorium Fachdidaktik Geschichte“ (Bad Heilbrunn/Obb. 1981), das schon seit langem vergriffen ist, deutlich erkennen – trotz der im Titel signalisierten thematischen Fokussierung „Geschichtsunterricht. Ein Handbuch zur Unterrichtsplanung“.
Disposition und Darstellungsduktus beider Werke decken sich weitgehend, nur dass die großen Kapitel zu „Voraussetzungen und Bedingungen des Geschichtsunterrichts“, zu seinen Zielen, Inhalten, Methoden und Medien des Geschichtsunterrichts jetzt als „Bausteine“ für die Unterrichtsplanung bezeichnet werden. Neu sind Einführung („Warum ist Unterrichtsplanung notwendig?“) und Ausblick („Von der Planung zum Plan“): Sie geben, dem neuen Titel entsprechend, den Rahmen für die fünf geschichtsdidaktischen Hauptkapitel vor. Neu ist auch die Fokussierung der Kapitelzusammenfassungen auf die unmittelbaren Planungsaufgaben von Geschichtsunterricht.
Aus der Vorgängerpublikation sind die dortigen Rahmenkapitel „Begriffsbestimmung ‚Fachdidaktik der Geschichte’“ und „Leistungskontrolle im Geschichtsunterricht“ entfallen, also mit anderen Worten die wissenschaftstheoretische Grundlegung der Geschichtsdidaktik und die Evaluation der Unterrichtsergebnisse. Lässt sich der erste Verzicht im Hinblick auf die Verschiebung der Themenstellung durchaus begründen, so ist der Verzicht auf das Kapitel „Leistungskontrolle im Geschichtsunterricht“ bedenklich: Er steht nicht nur quer zu den neueren empirischen Bemühungen in der Geschichtsdidaktik, sondern lässt tendenziell auch den zentralen Zusammenhang von Unterrichtsplanung und Unterrichtsevaluation aus dem Blick geraten – jedenfalls auf der Ebene systematischer Reflexion. Jede Unterrichtsplanung muss bewusst auf den praktischen und empirischen Ergebnissen vorangegangener Unterrichtsplanungen aufbauen und geht ihrerseits in das Bedingungsgefüge der nachfolgenden Unterrichtsstunden ein.
Ein „Handbuch zur Unterrichtsplanung“ ist kein geschichtsdidaktischer Forschungsband, sondern es soll den werdenden Geschichtslehrerinnen und -lehrern eine übersichtliche und pragmatische Handlungsanleitung im Kernbereich ihrer künftigen Berufskompetenz bieten. Es ist auch kein Spezialwerk zu bestimmten „Strukturmomenten“ des Unterrichts, wie etwa Methoden oder Medien, sondern muss in einer für den Anfänger überschaubaren Weise den gesamten Unterrichtsplanungsprozess ins Auge fassen.
Wer die Probleme von Berufsanfängern in Praktikum und Referendariat aus eigener Erfahrung kennt, wird ein Handbuch dieser Art für hilfreich halten – das galt auch schon für das alte „Repetitorium Fachdidaktik Geschichte“. Dass dabei viele Wünsche des professionellen Lesers offen bleiben, der die Entwicklung der Disziplin Geschichtsdidaktik in den letzten Jahrzehnten verfolgt hat, liegt auf der Hand. So sind die neueren Konzepte von Geschichtsbewusstsein und Geschichtskultur nicht berücksichtigt, die durchaus Folgen für die Unterrichtsplanung haben können und haben sollten.
Dasselbe gilt für historisches Lernen außerhalb und nach der Schule: Die Bemerkungen zum Besuch außerschulischer Lernorte reichen hier bei weitem nicht aus, und schließlich darf auch Geschichtsunterrichtsplanung den erwachsenen Menschen nicht außer Acht lassen, denn der Schüler lernt ja auch Geschichte nicht für die Schule, sondern für das Leben.
Gleichwohl: Trotz solcher weitergehenden Wünsche hat eine auf bewährten Grundlagen aufbauende Orientierungshilfe und Handlungsanleitung für angehende Geschichtslehrer und -lehrerinnen, wie sie hier vorliegt, im Gesamtfeld der einschlägigen Literatur durchaus ihre Berechtigung. In verständlicher Übersichtlichkeit wird dem Anfänger das unterrichtsplanerische Rüstzeug vermittelt. Dabei werden die geschichtsunterrichtlichen Spezifika allgemeindidaktischer Planungsmodelle herausgearbeitet. Desweiteren wird vor allem die Scheinsicherheit vordergründiger Rezepte vermieden: Alle Planungsentscheidungen müssen eigenständig aus der spezifischen Unterrichtssituation gewonnen und in einem permanenten Abstimmungsprozess sinnvoll aufeinander bezogen werden, es gibt keine immer und überall „richtigen“ Ziel- und Auswahl-, Methoden- und Medienentscheidungen. Gerade das macht Unterrichtsplanung für Anfänger so schwierig. Auch dieses Handbuch kann und will die eigene Analyse und Planung nicht abnehmen, aber es macht doch verständlich, was alles zu berücksichtigen ist und miteinander vernetzt werden muss. Und es spart auch nicht mit einigen handfesten Einsichten, ohne die es in der Praxis nicht geht.
Bernd Mütter
[IF]
Fenster zur Vergangenheit 2. Bilder im Geschichtsunterricht [Janela para o passado: Imagens no Ensino de História] – BUNTZ; ERDMANN (IJRHD)
BUNTZ, Herwig; ERDMANN, Elisabeth. Fenster zur Vergangenheit 2. Bilder im Geschichtsunterricht, Band 2: Von der Frühen Neuzeit bis zur Zeitgeschichte. Bamberg 2008 (C. C. Buchners Verlag), 224 S. Resenha de: HAUE, Harry. International Journal of Research on History Didactics, n.31, p.287-290, 2010.
This second volume follows “Fenster zur Vergangenheit from Antiquity to Medieval Times,” which appeared in 2004 (review in Yearbook 2005 by Patrick Minder) and contains 51 images from Early Modern Times until today, e.g., from the embankment of Columbus to 9/11 in 2001. Patrick Minder called this chain of epochal images for “balisage” indicating the choice of images as a system of buoys, which should guide the learner through history. The 51 images are an appropriate mixture of German, European and oversea items. There are good reasons to develop the learner’s knowledge about learning from images, because the late modern society is overwhelmed by a constant stream of pictures, which indicates an “iconic turn” from text to images. This turn is a challenge to the teaching of history at any level, and the aim must be to strengthen the reflective abilities of the learner when inferring reality from image. Therefore, the book in question can have an important function in teaching and learning history.
The initial part of the book describes the power of images and emphases some fundamental methodological problems; among others Panofsky’s views are brought forward and the concepts of iconology and iconography are mentioned. As many of the newest images are photos, some considerations on their interpretation and use is elaborated, and the research of Karin Hartewig and Gerhard Jagschitz is mentioned. Hartewig finds Panofsky’s theories very useful, but as they are developed in connection with interpreting early modern paintings, it is necessary to supplement them with theories, which are useful when analyzing photos, and the reliability of this presumable trustworthily media is discussed. Jagschitz has developed four levels of interpretation: 1. the evident which is recognizable, 2. the ability to reconstruction, 3. the mute and not immediately understandable, and 4. the effect on learners. Buntz and Erdmann recommend teachers to use a mixture of methods, and the book is especially meant for the teacher as a guide to plan and carry out lessons. The book contains also a useful explication of keywords.
The structure of each item is as follows: a description, interpretation and presentation of the sources in question, supplementary material, and some suggestions for the lessons and finally biographical notes. The selected images are exemplary illustrations of innovative events, such as the landing of Gustav Adolph in Penemünde in 1630, paradigmatic changes in society like the Declaration of Independence in 1776 or symbolic rendering of fundamental institutions as the Declaration of Human Rights in 1789.
The descriptions are necessarily short, and loaded with information; however, the most fundamental facts about pictures are presented, such as the period, place, composition, and the observer’s viewpoint, the identity of the persons and their positions and relations, clothing, the artifacts, decorations, inscriptions and symbols. The descriptions often begin in the center of an image, for example a person is the starting point and then the perspective is widened and ends in a specification of the landscape/horizon or the peripheral framework. The descriptions give a necessary background for fulfilling Jagschitz’ first level: the evident recognizable.
The interpretations are short, too; however, important for learners to know, in order to move to the second level in Jagschitz’ model, is: the reconstruction. For example, in connection with the copperplate of the embankment of Columbus we are informed that it represents different, not simultaneously occurring events. The image is a construction, which compared to the description in the log book of Columbus, on several points is misleading. Another example is “The Spring in Prague”, which is represented first with a photo of Czech dignities from March 30th 1968, among them Alexander Dubcek, and then a manipulated photo with the omission of Dubcek. A combination of the description and the interpretation give the learner knowledge of what has happened as well as why. When comparing the two different editions of basically the same photo, students are trained to be aware of photo manipulations and to learn and use methods to detect it. Buntz and Erdmann have also chosen to show the Lenin-Trotski-photo from 5. May 1920, and explain the new edition of it from 1927 and onward. The aim of the lessons must be to learn that a photo does not show history, but different forms of visualizations of history, or as Jean Magritte formulated it: Ceci n’est pas une pipe – but a representation of a pipe.
The presentation of the source material and supplementary explications, which also follows each image, is important for the next step in understanding images, and brings the learner to discern the mute and not immediate recognizable content of it and its representation. In connection with the Lucas Cranach-painting of the changes brought about by the Reformation “The Fall and the Grace” from 1529, some useful biographic notes are given and an explication of Cranach’s attitude to the concepts of “law and grace.” In connection with a copperplate from around 1640 representing a noble man and a peasant, the supplementary material is a “Cahiers de doléance” from 1789, which depicts the miserable situation of peasants and farmhands 150 years later, and hereby indicates that the French Revolution had a long fuse.
Each image has a short paragraph on how to use it in lessons, for example Francisco de Goya’s painting of the execution of the Spaniards in 1808. For the learners reception of this dramatic image the authors recommend an interdisciplinary collaboration between the subjects of art and history, and the aim of the teaching must be to let the learners reflect on the timelessness of the sufferings of war, not least those of the civilians, and for instance to compare Goya’s painting with Eduard Mannet’s “The Execution of Kaiser Maximillian” from 1867 and Pablo Picasso’s “The Massacre in Korea” from 1951. The didactic recommendations may lead to enlarge the learners’ knowledge, abandon prejudices and develop critical reflectivity, also when interoperating images outside the school. For further reading three or four books are recommended for each image.
All image representations are black and white, and this is not a problem for instance in the case of the photo of Lenin and Trotski from 1920, but it is a deficiency when working with David’s “Marat à son dernier soupir” or the above mentioned painting of Goya. Of course, teachers can find representations in color, and the Internet makes it easy to find good reproductions; however, it would have choice of the 51 images is no doubt in accordance with the general rules for teaching history in the different German federal states; however, many teachers will surely ask the question: Why have the authors just chosen those pictures? This question is quite appropriate because the selection might be a hidden argument for a canon, and it would have made a good book better, if the reasons for the actual selection had been explained and substantiated.
“Fenster zur Vergangenheit” is a meticulously and useful instrument for the teaching of history. Teachers will find much valuable and useful inspiration in the combination of different elements of explication and suggestions for each of the 51 representations and thereby, further the qualification of learners’ historical consciousness in our modern and global society, where images, pictures, photos and electronic representations of events and conditions are so dominant in the culture of pupils and students.
Harry Haue
[IF]
Edukacja historyczna w szkole: teoria i praktyka [Educação histórica na escola: Teoria e prática] – CHORAZY; KONIECZKA-SLIWINSKA (IJRHD)
CHORAZY, Ewa; KONIECZKA-SLIWINSKA, Danuta; ROSZAK, Stanisław. Edukacja historyczna w szkole: teoria i praktyka. Warsaw 2008 (Wydawnictwo Naukowe PWN), 401p. Resenha de: WODJON, Joanna. International Journal of Research on History Didactics, n.31, p.290-294, 2010.
“Edukacja historyczna w szkole: teoria i praktyka” (Historical Education At School. Theory and Practice) by Ewa Chorąży, Danuta Konieczka-Śliwińska and Stanisław Roszak is the first Polish academic textbook in the field of history didactics published by Wydawnictwo Naukowe PWN (Warsaw, Poland) in the last fifteen years. Significant changes have taken place in the education system in Poland, in school curricula and in teachers’ professional profile since, the previous work of this kind was written by Czesław Majorek, Jerzy Maternicki and Adam Suchoński in 1993. The two-level system of primary and secondary education (8+4 years) was replaced by the three-level one (6+3+3 years) in 1999, when lower secondary schools (gimnazja) were introduced. External exams are held after each education stage; their results influence future educational chances of young people and are a significant factor in school rankings. Practical skills gained priority over encyclopedic knowledge in the national curriculum. Requirements for entry to the teaching profession grew significantly, as well as those for advancing in teacher’s career.
Graduate status is minimum in all cases, and new students of pedagogical specializations had to acquire competences to teach at least two subjects (of their choice). All teachers are encouraged to progress proficiency in Information Technology. School, and even a single teacher, has much more autonomy than before in choosing teaching and assessing methods. At the same time, they need to keep more detailed record of their demands and activities. The material basis of historical education at Polish schools has also changed. Much more pedagogical tools and of much better quality are available today than under the communist regime (when e.g., historical maps had been published by only one publishing house, and there was only one set that had to be used by both 10-year olds at primary schools and by university students). On the one hand it helps teachers make their educational process more attractive and better addressed to their pupils’ needs. On the other hand however, making the best choice may be a big problem, especially for beginners in the teaching profession. The authors try to deal with all those questions answering the present and prospective teachers’ needs and interests.
The history didactics in Poland has also developed significantly within those fifteen years. It adopted new trends of modern pedagogy, psychology and general didactics, many of which had already been present in European and American concepts of historical education. International contacts of teachers, academic didacticians, and ministerial officers broadened their experiences and encouraged to introduce foreign solutions into their practice.
“Edukacja historyczna” tries to reflect all those changes and challenges. One of the book’s advantages is its solid theoretical background. Both Polish and foreign pedagogical research has been taken into consideration. Different visions of historical education and of education in general are presented, from classical approach of teaching as transmitting traditional values and standards to teaching how to learn (no matter what). Relations between history teaching and research are discussed and different ways of transposing academic history into school curricula are described emphasizing criteria used in this process (philosophical, political, psychological and other). The objectives of teaching history and the ways of introducing its key concepts (time, change, space) have been thoroughly discussed. The French concept of “places of memory” has been introduced. The authors show their open attitude toward alternative history, toward the problems of myths and stereotypes as well as toward the subjectivity of historical sources and narrations, which is new to Polish history didactics. They present different approaches towards history teaching but promote the one that laid ground to the present school curricula and that gives priority to developing pupils’ skills. The book covers the role of history education in developing key competences formulated in the national curriculum.
A lot of space is devoted to presenting active methods of learning, unfortunately to the detriment of traditional ones, like a lecture or a Socratic method. Of course, those traditional methods have been carefully studied in older literature of the subject, but they are so popular in school practice and so useful in history teaching that they should not be omitted from any textbook. Other things that are missing in “Edukacja historyczna” are the ways of working with pedagogical tools that are commonly used in the classroom, i.e., different types of text, graphic and symbolic materials. As of a history textbook, the authors concentrate on how to choose the most appropriate one. They neglect, however, to show how a teacher can use it.
The possibilities of using music, films and broadly defined historical sources in history teaching are presented by Chorąży et al.
while older literature is often ignored. Information Technology is also introduced much more carefully than ever before, with a special stress put to Webquest as an IT-oriented pupils’ project. A list of useful web pages dealing with history will be helpful to many readers (though, as every Internet-based resource will require updating in future editions of the book).
Using Information Technology is one of the priorities of the present reform of education in Poland. Dealing with pupils with Special Educational Needs (SEN) is another one. There are more and more children diagnosed with SEN and they become a real challenge to their teachers. The authors of “Edukacja historyczna” recognize the problem and describe different kinds of “special needs” with forms of pedagogical therapy available in Poland. They do not advise, however, how to work with such pupils during regular history lessons, while this is where those kids exercise their teachers’ skills.
How to meet the needs of able pupils is described much better, also in the chapter about extra classes for those passionate about history.
A bit more attention could be paid to different historical contests and “olympics” that are organized for pupils on different levels. Those competitions enjoy considerable popularity as they often open new educational perspectives for participants: Their winners are admitted to a secondary school of their choice or to particular university studies, not to mention material awards.
There are examples from foreign schools in the “practical” parts of the book. A separate chapter is devoted to presenting the British and Polish model of historical education, and readers are invited to try and adapt some British solutions into Polish practice.
“Edukacja historyczna” answers many questions and problems that teachers and students face in their everyday school practice.
There is a step-by-step guide how to formulate teaching objectives, how to write lessons plans, how to choose and adapt syllabi available on the market or how to prepare one. Such advice is very helpful for beginners in the teaching profession, who have to document their lessons in order to progress in their career. Successive levels of the career are described, together with advancement procedures. The book can be helpful in dealing with other types of school documentation, including the one referring to assessment, which becomes more and more complex according to legal requirements.
Finally, the authors present the problem of a teacher’s position in relation to his headmaster and colleagues, but also to pupils and their parents. These are actually no matters of history teaching, but their presence in the book is fully justified as most students are interested and even anxious about these issues. The way in which they are presented can be discussed, however. Legal acts are cited in full extent in the book, although they are easily available both in printed form and on the Internet and appropriate references, plus the authors’ comment would suffice to introduce them. Any revision of those documents will make parts of the book obsolete (and already today new school curricula are being introduced, including those for teaching history, cited on page 66–70 of the book; new standards of external examinations are being prepared as well). Another type of documents presented in full length is an individual example of school and teacher’s documentation. Of course, they can be used as an illustration of how the documents can be prepared, but the citations should not be the only way of presenting this kind of materials.
Unfortunately, there is no discussion about alternative ways of preparing them, no results of comparative analyses of documentation from several schools and/or teachers, almost no comments at all.
Answering the readers’ needs has been successfully achieved, not only in the process of selecting material but also in the way in which it is presented, both in practical and theoretical parts of the book.
The book meets all standards of an academic work, but at the same time the text is clear and easy to understand. The authors take position of student’s and teacher’s assistants and advisers, rather than authorities. They try to present many options to choose from, different points of view to discuss and even if they eventually reveal their own views, they leave readers an opportunity to disagree.
Accompanying the main text with examples of good practice (fragments of lesson plans, school documents and commentaries by other authors) deserves high appreciation. Moreover, they are usually supplemented with questions and/or suggestions for discussion at academic classes – and this is their further advantage. Many of those materials can be easily introduced into the reader’s lesson plans.
“Edukacja historyczna w szkole: teoria i praktyka” is a well-written contemporary academic textbook of the history didactics addressed to students who prepare to teach history, and to active teachers who wish to refresh and enrich their pedagogical competencies.
Introducing new pedagogical trends into the mainstream of the academic history didactics seems to be one of the two most important factors in selecting material presented in the book. The other one is meeting the students’ and teachers’ needs, problems and interests. Rich contents and clear presentation must be appreciated by the readers. The way of combining theory and practice should be a model for other publications of this kind.
Joanna Wojdon
[IF]
Edukacja historyczna w szkole. Teoria i praktyka [Educação histórica na escola: Teoria e prática] – CHORAZY; KONIECZKA-SLIWINSKA (IJRHD)
CHORAZY, Ewa; KONIECZKA-SLIWINSKA, Danuta; ROSZAK, Stanisław. Edukacja historyczna w szkole. Teoria i praktyka [Historische Bildung in der Schule. Theorie und Praxis]. Warszawa 2008. Resenha de: KUBIS, Barbara. International Journal of Research on History Didactics, n.31, p.294-297, 2010.
Um das erforderliche Bildungsniveau auf den verschiedenen Schulstufen zu erhalten und zu steigern, muss man konsequent mit Hilfe gesellschaftlicher Einflussnahme Verbesserungen herbeiführen.
Der Staat, der die Bildung junger Menschen fördern will, soll durchaus die Ausgaben für Schulwesen und Wissenschaft steigern.
Dies darf aber nicht der einzige Weg bleiben. Es ist auch wichtig, die Motivation der Wissenschaftler und Universitätsmitarbeiter dadurch zu heben, dass man die Publikation der Forschungsergebnisse und die Popularisierung des erarbeiteten Wissens stetig steigert. Die an den Hochschulen geleistete Forschung bestätigt beispielsweise die Sorge, dass die didaktische Ausbildung der Lehramtsstudierenden an den Hochschulen nicht optimal ist, was sich im Endeffekt auf das ganze Schulwesen auswirkt. Darin liegt ein wichtiger Grund, dass das Buch „Edukacja historyczna w szkole“ auf dem polnischen Buchmarkt so gut aufgenommen wurde: Es nimmt die gegenwärtigen Probleme der historischen Bildung genauer unter die Lupe.
Die Verfasser Ewa Chorąży, Danuta Konieczna-Śliwińska und Stanislaw Roszak, die zugleich wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiter an polnischen Universitäten und Praktiker im Bereich der historischen Bildung sind, haben ein sehr wichtiges Werk vorgelegt, das unter anderem deshalb große Aufmerksamkeit verdient, weil es während des Reformprozesses des polnischen Bildungssystems entstanden ist.
Das Buch stellt somit ein Beispiel für die Suche nach neuen Inhalten, Fragestellungen und Methoden der historischen Bildung dar. Die Inhalte des zu vermittelnden historischen Wissens werden heute in der Fachliteratur nur noch selten synthetisch reflektiert; im Allgemeinen standen und stehen elementare Regeln der Vermittlung des historischen Wissens im Mittelpunkt. Diese Autoren aber gehen von den Bedingungen des Geschichtsunterrichts bzw. der historischen Bildung in der heutigen polnischen Schule aus und suchen nach anderen Lösungen, die über das übliche deduktive „theoretisch-praktische“ Verfahren hinausgehen, das eine Regel formuliert und ein praktisches Beispiel hinzufügt. Dieses Buch ist vielmehr als ein Grundwissen-Kompendium für die unterrichtsbezogene Geschichtsdidaktik gedacht. Damit richtet sich das Werk an Geschichtsstudenten, die das Teilfach „Didaktik der Geschichte“ im Masterstudium wählen. In Polen kann man heute nicht mehr von historischen Bildungsprozessen sprechen, ohne auf die Problematik der neuesten „Bildungsstandards“ für Lehrer einzugehen. Auch an sie, die Pädagogen, wendet sich das Buch, um deren Reflexion über die eigenen Arbeitsmethoden anzustoßen und somit eine systematische Fortbildung zu ermöglichen. Meines Erachtens sollte jeder Geschichtslehrer dieses Werk sorgfältig studieren und darüber hinaus ist es auch sinnvoll für Lehrkräfte anderer geistes- und sozialwissenschaftlicher Fächer.
Die Arbeit ist in drei Teile gegliedert: historische Bildung, Geschichtslehrer im didaktischen Prozess und Geschichtslehrer als Akteure. Jeder Teilbereich weist Kapitel und Unterkapitel auf, die stets in hohem Maß auf die Lehrkraft, ihr Wissen und die Praxis eingehen. Der erste Part führt den Leser in die theoretische Betrachtung der historischen Bildung ein. Immer sind die Autoren bestrebt, die aktuellen Bildungstrends zusammenfassend zu analysieren und zu präsentieren und anhand von Beispielen aufzuzeigen, wie man die theoretische Analyse mit Studierenden durchführen kann. Erwähnenswert ist die Tatsache, dass sich die Buchautoren auch über das Fach hinaus mit Fragen befassen, die in der Gesellschaft aktuell sind und helfen, wesentliche gesellschaftliche Erscheinungen und Prozesse zu verstehen. Ein solches Vorgehen trägt dazu bei, auf Irrtümer gegründete Meinungen und „Mythen“ zu dekonstruieren, die in der Gesellschaft weit verbreitet sind.
Über die Inhalte des Geschichtsunterrichts entscheidet, unabhängig von den Anforderungen der Schulverwaltung, vor allem der Geschichtslehrer in der Klasse. Daher ist der zweite und umfangreichste Part des Buches den Fragen der Schulpraxis gewidmet. Dabei ist zu betonen, dass die Verfasser den didaktischen Prozess in einem sehr breiten Kontext situieren und als eine Form der zwischenmenschlichen Kommunikation und Interaktion betrachten. Dennoch findet man hier auch einen Überblick über die klassischen Elemente des didaktischen Prozesses, wie etwa die Ziele und Aufgaben des Geschichtsunterrichts, das Spektrum der Unterrichtsmethoden und -medien, den Unterrichtsaufbau und die Sozialund Arbeitsformen.
Der dritte Teil ist schließlich den Aufgaben und Möglichkeiten des Lehrers in der alltäglichen Unterrichtspraxis gewidmet. Hier geht es nicht nur um die Arbeit mit Schülern im Unterricht, sondern auch in dem – sehr weit aufgefassten – Schulmilieu. Hier findet man zahlreiche Bezüge zu curricularen Fragen, zur Auswahl der Bildungsinhalte, zur Unterrichtsplanung sowie zur schülergemäßen Passung und inneren Differenzierung. Die Lektüre dieses Buches hilft dem Leser zu verstehen, wie man den Geschichtsunterricht als authentischen Dialog zwischen Lehrenden und Lernenden gestalten könnte.
Die Verfasser haben einen Versuch unternommen, vor allem Lehramtsstudenten und jungen Lehrkräften die Bedeutung einer authentischen, intellektuell anspruchsvollen und emotional ansprechenden Interaktion mit Jugendlichen aufzuzeigen. Sie gehen auch auf mögliche Unterrichtsstörungen im Geschichtsunterricht und deren Ursachen ein, die u. a. auch von neuen Inhalten und der Tendenz zur offenen Interpretation herrühren können. Zusammenfassend kann man festhalten, dass sich dieses Werk optimal in die neueren Studien über die Reform und Modernisierung der historischen Bildung in Polen einfügt. In knapper und gut lesbarer Form bietet es eine Fülle von Informationen aus polnischen und ausländischen Quellen, die sonst nur verstreut zu finden oder sehr schwer zugänglich sind. Die Autoren haben in großem Umfang geschichtsdidaktische und andere Literatur aufgearbeitet. Obwohl eine Reihe von Fragen zur historischen Bildung in Polen in diesem Werk nicht behandelt wird und verschiedene Formulierungen strittig sind und genauere Forschungen erforderlich machen, bleibt herauszustellen, dass diese geschichtsdidaktische Publikation einen bedeutsamen Schritt auf dem Weg zur Verbesserung des Geschichtsunterrichts darstellt.
Barbara Kubis
[IF]