This article analyzes textbooks and curricula for primary schools in Poland published between 1944 and 1989 to show how the communist regime attempted to influence Polish history education via political change and educational reform. The article focuses on five aspects of this influence: Marxist methodology of history, portrayals of political parties, promotion of a “scientific“ worldview, justification of new boundaries and alliances of the People's Poland, and a new pantheon of national heroes. In conclusion, the article investigates the effectiveness of history education in shaping Polish collective memory under the communist regime.
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The Impact of Communist Rule on History Education in Poland
Joanna Wojdon
Memory Practices in History Education about the 1947 British India Partition
Opportunities and Challenges to Breaching Hegemonic Remembering
Meenakshi Chhabra
This article is an epistemological reflection on memory practices in the construction, deconstruction, and reconstruction of collective memories of a historical event involving collective violence and conflict in formal and informal spaces of education. It focuses on the 1947 British India Partition of Punjab. The article engages with multiple memory practices of Partition carried out through personal narrative, interactions between Indian and Pakistani secondary school pupils, history textbook contents, and their enactment in the classroom by teachers. It sheds light on the complex dynamic between collective memory and history education about events of violent conflict, and explores opportunities for and challenges to intercepting hegemonic remembering of a violent past.
Mobile Learning in History Education
Alexander König and Daniel Bernsen
Mobile devices enable pupils to decode edificial remains and symbols by spontaneously accessing additional information electronically. This article provides guidelines for mobile learning in history on the basis of mobility and enquiry- and design-based learning. The authors explore ways in which pupils may use their mobile devices to create innovative forms of collaboratively generated products like digital stories or geocaches. By drawing on social networks in order to promote discussion and publications, such products entail social participation and commitment. Mobile history learning also helps pupils to understand public debates about history, memory, and identity.
Reflections on History Education
Easy and Difficult Histories
Ed Jonker
History education inevitably is a thing of the present. During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries it has always answered to problems that were urgent at the time of discussion. This has mostly taken the form of explaining and thus smoothing over painful ruptures in the past. Although nowadays we generally acknowledge this contemporary character of history education, the professional ideal of doing proper, authentic history remains—a desire that is understandable, but compatible neither with epistemological standards nor with public expectations. While teaching instrumental history is not an option, history education cannot live on criticism and deconstruction alone, we need a reflexive presentism that self-consciously confronts the present day—“difficult“ rather than “easy“ histories.
History Education and the Claims of Society
An Historical Approach
Tom Verschaffel and Kaat Wils
The political use and instrumentalization of history is a central theme within the historiography of history education. Neither history nor education is a politically neutral domain; history education is and has always been a highly politicized phenomenon. For his recent article on the development of history education in England, Germany, and the Netherlands throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the Dutch history didactician Arie Wilschut chose the significant title, “History at the Mercy of Politicians and Ideologies.” History education, Wilschut argues, has, in all three countries, continually—with a short break in the 1960s and 1970s—been instrumentalized by national politics to the detriment of unbiased interpretations of the past.
Memory Practices and History Education
Felicitas Macgilchrist, Barbara Christophe, and Alexandra Binnenkade
This special issue of the Journal of Educational Media, Memory and Society explores memory practices and history education. The first point of departure for the texts collated here is that memory (whichever concept we use from the current range including collective memory, cultural memory, social memory, connected memory, prosthetic memory, multidirectional memory, travelling memory and entangled memory) is a site of political contestation, subject formation, power struggle, knowledge production, and community-building. Our second point of departure is that history education is a site where teachers and pupils as members of distinct generations engage with textbooks and other materials as specific forms of memory texts that guide what should be passed on to the younger generation. As editors, we solicited papers that investigate how what counts as “worth remembering” in a given context is reproduced, negotiated and/or interrupted in classrooms and other educational practices. This introduction aims to sketch the overarching understanding of memory practices which guide the contributions, to point to the purchase of attending explicitly to the “doing” of memory, to highlight the difference between our approach to history education and approaches focusing on historical thinking, and to introduce the six articles.
Visual Literacy in History Education
Textbooks and Beyond
Mischa Gabowitsch and Anna Topolska
use of images in history education is regularly discussed by teachers and scholars alike. 3 And yet there are still hardly any monographs or collective works dedicated specifically to the visual dimension of history textbooks. 4 When the topic is
Experiencing, Using, and Teaching History
Two History Teachers’ Relations to History and Educational Media
Robert Thorp
teaching methodologies are certainly important components in the study of history education, it can be argued that personal experiences and beliefs originating outside the history classroom are equally relevant. The aim of this article is thus to analyze
Empowering Critical Memory Consciousness in Education
The Example of 22 July 2011 in Norway
Alexandre Dessingué and Ketil Knutsen
of memory work rather than of passive memory transmission, is one that memory studies has yet to fully embrace.” 13 Agreeing with Paulson, our assumption is that history education provides a partial answer as to what a critical memory
Militaristic Discourse in Secondary Education History Textbooks during and after the Soeharto Era
Hieronymus Purwanta
the semester system into a quarterly system. Second, the History Education of the National Struggle ( Pendidikan Sejarah Perjuangan Bangsa (PSPB), which had been added to the 1984 curriculum, was removed. Third, the lessons were restructured to