“History teaching today should not only deal with the transmission of factual knowledge but with the competence to participate in the negotiations of the past within societies.”

This statement was made last Monday by Prof. Andreas Körber during the opening of the first seminar within the framework of the project “TeacMem. Developing Competence-Orientated Teaching on Historical Memories”.

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.

Several seminars will be held in the participating countries to work inter-professionally on  the question of how to learn and to teach about memorial cultures in contemporary European societies.

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. Thus, questions of identity building social cohesion and democratic participation are crucially linked to historical thinking and history cultures.

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 higher relevance than a high score in canonized fact knowledge.

The first seminar in Germany brought together a range of professionals such as teachers, teacher trainers, museum and memorial educators from the participating countries and provided the necessary conditions for learning about, through and because of existing differences. Taking the own experiences as a starting point, the participants got aware of the decisive function of historical thinking in the development of intercultural and democratic competences.

The capacity to engage in a dialog about different narratives and interpretations related to certain eras of the past is essential for sustainable democratic societies, not least when facing differences which are related to former or continuous hostility.

For more information, please view the project website