Studies
Popp, Suzanne
History of Mankind – World History – Global History – Big History: International Approaches in History Education
The lecture is related to an international comparative research project that examines the curricula and textbooks of world history. It became clear that the Anglo-Saxon collective term “world history” used in international professional discourse have very different meanings and include different didactic concepts and educational goals.
The four most characteristic concepts are: “history of mankind,” which focuses on milestones in the development of human societies; ‘universal history’, that means everything outside the national history and cultural traditions; “global history”, which examines cross-regional and global interactions and relationships; and finally, the “big history,” which covers the period from the Big Bang to the present day, and sees the history of mankind as only a small part of the history of life on earth.
Clarification of concepts is needed in order to jointly discuss new concepts of world history in school teaching. The most characteristic type in the world, which excludes national history from universal history and contrasts the two without connecting them, in no way meets the challenges of the present and the foreseeable future.
Levesque, Stéphane
Goodbye Trump, goodbye Columbus: Why we need to learn history?
History is a contested field. People not only have different relationships with the past, they may also have radically different visions of the past, and by extension the present and the future. Indeed, we frequently call upon it for validation, for lessons, for analogies. Politicians can sometimes abuse it to fabricate “alternative facts” and muster support for their projects, whether it is in the U.S. or elsewhere around the world.
The challenges that we face in our 21st century pluralistic societies (fake news, racism, right-wing populism, or pandemics) give rise to intensified interest in the study of the past. They make people look for simplified ways of making sense of this complexity by generating usable stories to orient their practical life. But what people need are not additional ways of intensifying historical memory but alternative means for advancing their historical consciousness. If school history is to play a major role in shapingthe historical consciousness of today’s learners, it must find successful ways to orient them in these global times.
Benziger, Karl
History Teaching, National Myths, and Civil Society
How can History teachers and Historians counter the power of national myths, especially in the highly politicized environment that we now find ourselves? How do we encourage and prepare our students to be active members of the civil societies in which they belong?
The author presents a history course developed by him for college students:“Witches, Aliens, and Other Enemies” drawing inspiration from Arthur Miller’s, The Crucible. The course is designed to set moments of mass hysteria and paranoia in the American narrative against the background of reason and rational legal law.
The power of historical mythos and its endless variations call on us to not simply debunk these claims but to explain to the public why they are vacuous. Utilizing methodology in the classroom that turns our students into sleuths who can empower themselves by utilizing evidence and method to challenge authority might be one place to start.
Chapman, Arthur
What is the purpose of teaching history? Difficulties and opportunities
Based on the English curriculum goals of teaching history, the author demonstrates that History as being a way of mastering and developing world knowledge which will empower children as actors in their lives. But also, a lot of things here to do with analysis, because history is a discipline of analysis and we can’t have the content, without understanding how it is produced, so we need to teach both the content and the analysis.
However ‘students do not come to their classrooms empty handed’: children come to school with lots of ideas and their minds already, and many of those ideas will actually get in the way of learning history. They have everyday ideas about how the world works, how to know what happened in the past. So one of the problems is children misunderstanding things because they treat the past as if it was the present. Another challenge, though, is actually building up narratives in children’s minds. Building up structures of knowledge that will be useful to them.
Traditionally, history has been quite narrow: it’s been the history of the nation state, it’s been quite small scale, and it’s covered modern history, often rather than the whole of history. If we want children to be able to make sense of the world that they’re in, we have to acknowledge that that world is global and the processes of change in it are taking place at a scale as a speed, which is unprecedented.
According to the author history teaching need to go beyond conventional political history, which is what we traditionally done. Considering moral relations and aesthetic relations to the past too, so that children understand. The history that’s happening around them in the news and in politics.
Workshop
Schüttler Vera
History workbooks for primary school students with learning disabilities – A story of professional innovation
In my paper, I would like to make a short presentation of the results and developmental process of my efforts to develop teaching tools in the framework of my innovator master program between 2015 and 2020. At the center of the developmental activity was the drafting and testing of history workbooks for differentiated instruction for students with learning disabilities in grades 5-8, based on the core curriculum and tailored to local teaching programs. The motivation for the teaching material development I would like to show is simple and mundane: I had a group of students with whom there was not a chance of making any meaningful progress with the textbooks at my disposal and conventional methods.
Fekete, Áron
A digital evaluation of text comprehension skills in the framework of the subject of history in the 8th grade
This paper concerns a digital evaluation of text comprehension embedded in history content. The primary goal of the research was to evaluate the text comprehension skills of eighth-grade students with the help of digital history tasks adjusted to skill levels based on 2018 PISA results. In addition to presenting the main features of digital text comprehension, the study contains a presentation of the small-scale research groups, the results achieved in the evaluation, and the text comprehension tasks that the participants in the study had to solve on the freely available Redmenta platform. The sections describing the tasks also deal with the possible reasons for errors made by the groups of students who took the tests either at school or at home, as well as the results, in percentages. The paper closes with three hypotheses and then conclusions.
Review
Katona, András
Treaty of Trianon’s “renaissance” in the history books of the democratic Hungary (1990-2020)
2. The treatment of Trianon in secondary school textbooks
Part 2: Treaty of Trianon and its consequences
The Hungarian peace treaty that closed WWI, that dismantled the thousand-year-old historical Hungary, reducing its territory to a third, and forcing about one-third of Hungarians, almost three-and-a-half million of our compatriots, under the rule of successor states, was signed 100 years ago in the Grand Trianon palace of Versailles. At the same time, Hungary – following the Turkish occupation and Habsburg rule – won back its full independence and became a nation state with about 90% of its inhabitants being Hungarian, while most of the ethnic groups who lived here earlier became part of their own existing states or newly established ones. The big question was whether this truncated Hungary would prove to be viable, how would the new leaders of the nation and the country be able to process this new condition, the descent from a middle power in the monarchy to one among the small states, not to mention the loss of a considerable part of our industry, forests, mines, railway network, flourishing cities, significant universities, cultural centres and schools, which was also compounded by serious reparations. Our paper examines the teaching of the topic of Trianon through a probe of secondary school textbooks that have been published since the change of system, while also marking this sorrowful centennial.
