History at Stake? Old and New Challenges

The competition organisers visited the Ghetto Heroes Monument sculpted in 1948 and the Museum of the History of Polish Jews, the POLIN Museum.

Afterwards, a guided tour of the remains of the Jewish ghetto provided an opportunity to discuss European history as well as Polish remembrance culture and commemorative politics.

During the opening panel, Jarosław Kuisz, editor-in-chief of the Polish magazine Kultura Liberalna, and Jacek Stawiski, TV journalist (TVN24), discussed aspects of the complex relationship between Poland and Europe since 1989 and the new turn that the Russian invasion of Ukraine has taken for Poland. They also offered different perspectives on the Russian invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022, because besides the isolated Russian propaganda, Western and Eastern European perspectives as well as interpretations from the global South differ regarding the conflict. By pointing out different historical experiences, they created an awareness for the reasons behind the differences and similarities.

The founders of the KARTA Center Foundation, the couple Alicja Wancerz-Gluza and Zbigniew Gluza, gave insights into the concept of their newly founded dialogue centre “WITRYNA – Eastern House for Dialogue”, the venue of the EUSTORY Annual Meeting 2023.

The house offers different Eastern European action groups in exile a space for exchange, project work and events.

Noam Pupko from the organisation Rondine Cittadella della Pace presented experiences with a method developed in Italy for peace education between current and former warring parties.

Natalia Kolyagina and Natalia Konradova presented key points of a pilot project for Russian youth in Europe. It is building on the work of Zukunft Memorial e.V. which was banned in Russia.

Petro Kendzor, Ukrainian competition organiser, and his wife, historian Polina Verbytska, gave insights into the work of NOVA DOBA, the All-Ukrainian Association of Teachers of History, Civic Education and Social Studies in Ukraine, which is continuing during the war.

Petro Kendzor talks about his experience during the first year of Ukraine’s state of emergency

Lusine Kharatyan from the Armenian NGO Hazarashen – Armenian Centre for Ethnological Studies, talked about the experiences with the pilot history competition in Armenia, which Hazarashen launched together with DVV International Armenia in 2021. The focus was on the question of how to empower students to engage critically with history.

Nandina López-Jacoiste Ortiz from the Real Maestranza de Caballería de Ronda in Spain presented the new, comprehensive online platform of the Spanish-Portuguese history competition which implements the digitalisation push during the Covid pandemic, for example, by integrating virtual meeting points as well as installing innovative tools.

Shamir Yeger from Bar-Ilan University in Israel provided the conference participants with first hand insights into a history teaching project that is currently being tested in several Jewish-Arab schools in Israel via several virtual reality goggles installed on site.

With the help of this metaverse, students from different social groups in Israel are provided with new learning opportunities for dealing with identity and shared history, which also involves the use of Virtual Experiences developed together with teachers.

Since 2022, the EUSTORY working group HistEdu has been looking at the topic of “Positioning Contested History in 21st Century Classrooms”. The group was initiated by Zuzana Jezerská from the Slovak Centre for Communication and Development, Bratislava.

At the network meeting, EUSTORY representatives from four different countries presented the pilot projects they developed and which they are currently launching together with trainee teachers and experienced teachers in Denmark, Ireland, Israel and Portugal. The pilot projects focus on methods of dealing with controversial historical issues in the classroom.

To find out more about the project please click here.

Valbona Bezati from the Institute for Democracy, Media & Culture (IDMC) in Tirana presented the successful Albanian history competition “Ask Your Grandparents”, which joined our EUSTORY Network in 2023. More information on the Albanian competition is available here.