Workshop: History Teaching and Public Memory in the Recent Past

Public memory, understood as shared and official interpretation of the past, plays a crucial role for the coherence of contemporary societies. History teaching and school curricula in history are among the key tools through which societies attempt to convey knowledge, understanding and reflections about the past to their future citizens. Thus, history teaching also serves to endorse public memories that may contribute to shared values and societal coherence.

While public memory and the role of history teaching are important concerns to most contemporary societies, they pose a particular challenge to countries characterized by difficult, painful or divisive recent pasts, such as many of the countries of South East Europe.

This workshop aims to bring together educators, administrators and scholars to discuss the role of history education in public memory in South East Europe.

They will explore questions such as:

· How do we teach history?

· What are the challenges in teaching recent and difficult history?

· What kinds of learning outcomes are students to take with them from the teaching?

· What are students to understand by the concept of ‘history’?

· What can we learn from studying history education and public memory in South East Europe?

· What are the effects, models, and implications of history teaching to conflict transformation and reconciliation from a social-psychological and anthropological perspective?

· What kind of pedagogical classroom practices of history teaching can contribute to better intergroup relations?

· What are the social representations and narratives that connect past, present, and future, and what factors shape adherence to specific versions of the historical narrative?

· How do historical narratives, attachments to place, and individual and social identity feed into and reinforce each other?

· Which relevance do concepts of perpetrator and victim, and the dynamics between these, have for intergroup relations in post-conflict settings?

The workshop is organized by the collective research project Postwar Memory Generations at the University of Copenhagen. They hope to see you in Podgorica in October.

They invite contributions and proposals from organizers and political planners of education programmes, from teachers and informal educators in the public sphere such as museums staff and NGOs, and from scholars working with history education and public memory in South East Europe. They aim to include researchers from a wide range of disciplines such as history and other humanities, anthropology, psychology, social and political sciences, and education studies.

Please submit an abstract (200-300 words) and a short bio (50-100 words) Marija Krgović (svt331@hum.ku.dk) and Tea Sindbæk Andersen to (tea.s.andersen@hum.ku.dk) no later than the 21st of April 2024