“Historical Thinking and Social Emancipation. Students between Past and Present. A Critical Approach” (original) (raw)
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My paper refers to historical memory, as embodied in public sculptures and monuments. This research takes place in Kavala, a city in northern Greece, and concerns the ways that the local community, and especially the adolescent students are related to and interact with these symbolic places, which are related to national anniversaries or to collective memory. Which are the historical events and persons that are identified as landmarks, "traveling" from the past to the present? In which terms and in which context? Which narratives do they serve, confirm or contradict? What is their relation to the master narratives? In what way do they relate to the lives of students? What is the emotional impact of these historical models/examples? Are they related to school history? We will attempt to deal with these questions by listening to the "voices" of students, as reflected in the questionnaires they filled in about their city monuments. We are interested as well in the local newspapers' informations that captures the history of the monuments during the 20th and in the early 21st centuries. In order to accomplish our goal, we are going to use the methodological tools of public history, archival research and critical discourse analysis.
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Gatsotis, P. & Kokkinos, G. (2021). The Street-Child: History education meets social history in the withdrawn Greek history curriculum of 2018-19. Posted on 29/07/2021
This article deals with educational reform and counter-reform in the Greek school history subject. The authors advocate for the history curriculum which was introduced in the Greek compulsory education in 2018-2019, and briefly present a sample of its didactic material, the "Street-Child", i.e. a "thematic file" aiming to link the artistic representation of a labour-child's story with the "difficult" social and political history of Interwar Greece following the "traumatic" Minor-Asia Catastrophe. The authors share the opinion that, in the face of the prevailing presentism and the trans-humanistic hyper-reality of the times, the history subject has to be revised, both in its epistemological and methodological scope. This can be done with the building of "history-lab" communities, with the systematic use of disciplinary "second-order" historical concepts and multimodal didactic approaches, with the development of children's capabilities of critical importance, such as historical empathy and respect for the absent othersespecially for those who pained and suffered, with the development of awareness regarding social inequalities, cultural differences, and ethical dilemmas. Overall, the desired goal is to constantly redesign adequate learning environments, teaching strategies and cognitive practices, in order to render historical learning more attractive, effective, and substantial. To deserve his/her name, the history teacher has to deal also with the traumatic and controversial past. In this case, once more, a redesign of the teaching process is needed. A redesign which might transform the pedagogue into a critical ethnographer able to observe the others and, at the same time, to participate in their actions, interact with them, reflect on his/her own behaviour, and develop a democratic historical and social consciousness, as well as political responsibility. With such orientations in mind, the educational reform of school history could be directed to the pursue of the common good.
History Education Research Journal, 2013
An historical education that helps students understand the present and contributes to their civic and political training should, in our opinion, include treatment of 'sensitive' and controversial historical facts, that generally correspond to defeats or traumatic situations suffered by the nations and are usually rejected by the collective memory. As for the approach to these historical facts in the frame of a history class at school, it obviously cannot have any real result without efforts to build a proper educational environment, based on a new learning methodology. Cinema could probably be part of this new methodology as it is considered to be a constructive teaching tool and provides wide possibilities for the teacher. We have carried out and described in our paper a research programme with our students that identifies the extent to which the participants have familiarized themselves with the ways of decoding the messages of cinema as a medium, as well as demonstrating the ability to connect these messages with the difficult issues of constructing collective memory and historical truth. Based on this theoretical perspective, our research intends to: a) define the extent to which the participants, who have received systematic historical education, have a comparative advantage to those who have not; and b) define the effectiveness of cinema as a medium of learning, blended with other methods for in-depth teaching.
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