Convincing Entries for This Year's Difficult Topic
Nearly 120 people gathered on 18 May 2024 in central Chisinau to celebrate this year’s winners of the Moldovan History Competition. Participants and tutors from 35 Moldovan schools were invited to the award ceremony, where they were greeted by representatives of the Ministry of Education and Research, jury members and the competition’s organisers.
This year’s competition asked students to investigate a difficult topic: the history and usage of propaganda in the 20th century. Participants explored how propaganda influenced the daily lives and distorted the history discourse while using sources from local archives and interviewing witnesses. The young researchers not only had to write an essay, but also to present their key findings in a poster.
Twenty-seven posters were chosen by the jury to be presented at the award ceremony. The audience then got the chance to vote for the best posters presented. In the end, the top three works received an additional award.
Of course, also the best essays were awarded with separate categories for participants from middle school and high school. Next to the first, second and third prize, twenty-six further works received an honourable mention.
Valentina Olaru, State Secretary of the Ministry of Education, was honoured to personally hand out prizes for the winners. While all participants received an award and a cap to honour their achievements, the prize winners were awarded books and special prizes. She congratulated all winners of this 4th competition and expressed her wish that it would still be going strong in its 40th year.
The competition is a part of the international project “A Toolkit for Critical History Teaching", financed by the Federal Foreign Office of Germany. The project's main partners are DVV International and Körber-Stiftung. It is implemented jointly by DVV International representative offices and local NGOs: Teachers Association NOVA DOBA (Ukraine), The National Association of Young Historians of Moldova ANTIM (Moldova), Soviet Past Research Laboratory (SovLab) and GAHE - Georgian Association of History Educators (Georgia), and "Hazarashen" Armenian Center for Ethnological Studies (Armenia).