The Cold War in the Classroom: International Perspectives on Textbooks and Memory Practices
This book is open access under a CC BY 4.0 license. This book explores how the socially disputed period of the Cold War is remembered in today’s history classroom. Applying a diverse set of methodological strategies, the authors map the dividing lines in and between memory cultures across the globe, paying special attention to the impact the crisis-driven age of our present has on images of the past. Authors analysing educational media point to ambivalence, vagueness and contradictions in textbook narratives understood to be echoes of societal and academic controversies. Others focus on teachers and the history classroom, showing how unresolved political issues create tensions in history education. They render visible how teachers struggle to handle these challenges by pretending that what they do is ‘just history’. The contributions to this book unveil how teachers, backgrounding the political inherent in all memory practices, often nourish the illusion that the history in which they are engaged is all about addressing the past with a reflexive and disciplined approach.This book is open access under a CC BY 4.0 license. This book explores how the socially disputed period of the Cold War is remembered in today’s history classroom. Applying a diverse set of methodological strategies, the authors map the dividing lines in and between memory cultures across the globe, paying special attention to the impact the crisis-driven age of our present has on images of the past. Authors analysing educational media point to ambivalence, vagueness and contradictions in textbook narratives understood to be echoes of societal and academic controversies. Others focus on teachers and the history classroom, showing how unresolved political issues create tensions in history education. They render visible how teachers struggle to handle these challenges by pretending that what they do is ‘just history’. The contributions to this book unveil how teachers, backgrounding the political inherent in all memory practices, often nourish the illusion that the history in which they are engaged is all about addressing the past with a reflexive and disciplined approach.
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Description of The Cold War in the Classroom: International Perspectives on Textbooks and Memory Practices
This book is open access under a CC BY 4.0 license. This book explores how the socially disputed period of the Cold War is remembered in today’s history classroom. Applying a diverse set of methodo
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About the authors
At the Georg Eckert Institute, Dr. phil. habil. Barbara Christophe is the coordinator of the memory cultures research forum. She studied history and Slavonic studies and received her PhD from the University of Bremen in 1996 with a sociological study of current issues in Lithuania. For her habilitation she conducted an ethnographic study of corruption in Georgia at the European University Viadrina in Frankfurt/Oder. Barbara Christophe works as a consultant to the EU and to the Bertelsmann and VW Foundations. She regularly organises summer schools for the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) and has supervised doctoral candidates within the Robert Bosch Foundation's post-graduate programme. MAIN RESEARCH AREAS Her research covers many topics, but focuses on transition studies, peace and conflict research and memory cultures. Her regional research focus has been on the post-Soviet area, in particular on the Baltic States, the Caucasus and Central Asia. Recently she has also been involved with projects examining Germany and Eastern Europe. PROJECTS She uses textbook research as an instrument in a wide range of projects, reflecting a cultural studies-based approach but principally a practice-theoretical approach to research into memory practices. One of these projects, in collaboration with Professor Matthias König from Göttingen University, is titled ‘Europeanisation, Multiple Modernities and Collective Identities – Religion, Nation and Ethnicity in an Enlarged Europe’. As part of this project Barbara Christophe and a small project team are examining concepts of Europe in Polish, Rumanian, Greek and Turkish history textbooks. Another project “Patterns of Cultural Interpretation of Socialism - History Teachers as Mediators between Collective and Individual Memory in Georgia, Kyrgyzstan and Lithuania” is a comparative study exploring the debate in society surrounding memories of socialism through two different kinds of texts: history textbooks and biographical narratives of history teachers. The international joint research project “Teaching the Cold War – Memory Practices in the Classroom” compares Sweden, Germany and Switzerland. Using a complex range of methodologies ranging from interviews with school pupils and teachers to video-supported lesson observations the project aims to examine how schools approach the memories of a period still clearly remembered by contemporary witnesses. In a pilot study on the First World War Barbara Christophe and Kerstin Schwedes developed a teaching unit based on the narratives of textbooks from 18 different countries. The second phase will take the form of an intervention study and will analyse how school classes in different countries react to this targeted application of multiperspectivity.
Barbara Christophe(editor)
Peter Gautschi, Dr. phil. (*1959), Professor für Geschichtsdidaktik, Leiter des Zentrums Geschichtsdidaktik und Erinnerungskulturen der PH Luzern. Unterricht auf allen Volksschulstufen. Seit 1989 in der Lehrerbildung, u.a. als Leiter Ausbildung der PH Aargau. Mitarbeit in Kommissionen, u.a. seit 2006 im Wissenschaftlichen Ausschuss des Georg Eckert-Instituts in Braunschweig. Mitherausgeber von geschichtsdidaktischen Reihen im Wochenschau Verlag. Regelmässig Publikationen, verschiedene Auszeichnungen. Peter Gautschi, PhD (*1959), Professor for Teaching and Learning History at the University of Teacher Education Lucerne; Honorary Professor at the University of Teacher Education Freiburg / Germany; Head of the Centre for Teaching and Learning History and Remembering the Past. Main Focus of Research: Teaching and Learning History in Classes; History Text Books and Media; Teaching the 20th Century. Peter Gautschi also was Vice Rector at the University of Teacher Education Nord-Western Switzerland.
Peter Gautschi(editor)
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