On November 28-29, a meeting of the COMENIUS project “TeacMem. Developing Competence-Orientated Teaching on Historical Memories” was held in Oslo.

The project is jointly organized by institutions in the fields of History Didactics, Research in Public Memory Culture, Teacher Training and Secondary Schools in Denmark, Germany and Norway.

The project is funded by the COMENIUS program of the European Union. It runs from October 2009 to September 2012. Claudia Lenz from the EWC is among the organizers of the project.

The project is based on a historical learning approach saying that individual backgrounds and perceptions are essential for the way people make sense of the past, even more when dealing with traumatic pasts. Still, the question, which aspects of the past are regarded to be relevant and in which ways they are interpreted, is highly influenced by cultural, social and political contexts.

For historical learning, competences related to

• the capacity to autonomously get interested in and engaged with questions related to history,
• the capacity to reflect about one’s own historical perceptions,
• the awareness and capacity to understand differences between collective memory cultures and,
  
• the capacity to reflect about political uses of the past,
  

seem to be of high importance and teaching approaches and resources fostering these competences are needed.

The TeacMem project sets out to produce learning and teaching resources to be used in formal and informal education as well as in different local, national and international contexts.

In the framework of the project, which is entering its last year, seminars have been held in Hamburg and Copenhagen in which educators and researchers have developed and tested learning and teaching methods to foster reflection on how the history of World War II is presented, interpreted and used in museums, memorial sites and media in Denmark, Norway and Germany. This also includes a reflection how individual and collective identities and senses of belonging are interrelated with the transmission of memories.

At a seminar to be held in Oslo in March 2012, the preliminary products – teaching methods and materials – will be related to Norwegian memory sites. Teacher training students from the three countries will be invited to test and evaluate these resources.

At a final conference in November 2012 in Hamburg, the project will present its “material pack” to the public.

Contact: Prof. Andreas Körber/University of Hamburg: Andreas.Koerber@uni-hamburg.de