Workshop leaders: Maarten Van Alstein (Flemish Peace Institute), Emma Ydiers & Anselm Logghe
Learning from the past? History, remembrance policies and citizenship education
‘Twenty lessons we can learn from the twentieth century.’ It might sound like one of those clickbait titles that pop up on your screen and want to teach you worthless things in life without being based on reliable sources. But ‘Twenty things we can learn from the twentieth century’ is different. It is the title of the recent book from Yale professor Timothy Snyder, in which he argues that we must learn from the past to protect our democracy. Our goal of this workshop is to invite participants to think about the nexus between history, politics and education. Can we learn from the past? What is the border line between using history and abusing history in the present-day politics and society?
Within this workshop we focus on two different subthemes. The first focuses on the remembrance politics of the Great War. Which projects are created by governments, policy makers or independent institutions to remember the war? Are these projects comparable to other projects set up to remember historical events or different wars? Who founds and funds those projects? Which messages are these projects underlining? These are possible questions to ask for the situation in your home country. A second subtheme to focus on is the question whether we can draw lessons from the past or not. How do citizens get educated through the history of the war? On which lessons are educators focusing? Can we see differences in the methods that schools, museums and other educative projects use?
More specifically we want each participant to think about one of these subthemes and to prepare a short presentation as a case study about the situation at their home country or region. Regional diversity between the participants will make the discussion after the presentations even more interesting. Possible methods to prepare your case study are: doing an analysis of some history textbooks from school, comparing and analysing recent news articles about political decisions or projects concerning remembrance, doing interviews with policy officers of history museums / war museums, having conversations with history professors or high school teachers etc.
These presentations make the first part of our workshop sessions. For the second part, we’ll visit the "In Flanders Fields Museum" in Ypres, where participants will get the chance to ask questions to an educative policy officer from the museum and see how a renowned museum at the actual World War 1 Front Line organises its expositions. This can be used as an inspiration source before taking matters into our own hands – which forms the third part of our workshop sessions, wherein we’ll reflect and try to create our own ideal international remembrance policy and citizen education.
We’re looking forward to learn about and from each other!
‘Twenty lessons we can learn from the twentieth century.’ It might sound like one of those clickbait titles that pop up on your screen and want to teach you worthless things in life without being based on reliable sources. But ‘Twenty things we can learn from the twentieth century’ is different. It is the title of the recent book from Yale professor Timothy Snyder, in which he argues that we must learn from the past to protect our democracy. Our goal of this workshop is to invite participants to think about the nexus between history, politics and education. Can we learn from the past? What is the border line between using history and abusing history in the present-day politics and society?
Within this workshop we focus on two different subthemes. The first focuses on the remembrance politics of the Great War. Which projects are created by governments, policy makers or independent institutions to remember the war? Are these projects comparable to other projects set up to remember historical events or different wars? Who founds and funds those projects? Which messages are these projects underlining? These are possible questions to ask for the situation in your home country. A second subtheme to focus on is the question whether we can draw lessons from the past or not. How do citizens get educated through the history of the war? On which lessons are educators focusing? Can we see differences in the methods that schools, museums and other educative projects use?
More specifically we want each participant to think about one of these subthemes and to prepare a short presentation as a case study about the situation at their home country or region. Regional diversity between the participants will make the discussion after the presentations even more interesting. Possible methods to prepare your case study are: doing an analysis of some history textbooks from school, comparing and analysing recent news articles about political decisions or projects concerning remembrance, doing interviews with policy officers of history museums / war museums, having conversations with history professors or high school teachers etc.
These presentations make the first part of our workshop sessions. For the second part, we’ll visit the "In Flanders Fields Museum" in Ypres, where participants will get the chance to ask questions to an educative policy officer from the museum and see how a renowned museum at the actual World War 1 Front Line organises its expositions. This can be used as an inspiration source before taking matters into our own hands – which forms the third part of our workshop sessions, wherein we’ll reflect and try to create our own ideal international remembrance policy and citizen education.
We’re looking forward to learn about and from each other!
Dr. Maarten Van Alstein holds degrees of History at the Universities of Ghent and Antwerp, Law at the University of Antwerp and International Politics at the Universities of Antwerp and Bologna. He successfully completed his PhD in political science at the University of Antwerp, with a dissertation on the Belgian diplomatic elite and the origins of the Cold War.
He works as a senior researcher at the Flemish Peace Institute since 2010. Within their research program of "Peace and society", he focuses on war remembrance and the politics of memory, as well as on peace education and the pedagogy of dealing with controversy and polarisation in the classroom. |
Emma Ydiers just finished her bachelor degree in history at Gent University. She is mostly interested in reflection about the role of history and historians within today's society, history education and socio-political history. She strongly believes that open dialogue and alternative methods of education can attribute to a more conscious world - which explains her motivation for participating in the organisation of this ISHA workshop.
Her ISHA story starts at the Summer Seminar 2017 in Helsinki, just one month before she went back there to spend her Erasmus experience in the Finnish capital. |
Anselm Logghe is the first and current President of ISHA Ghent. He is also an ISHA International Council Member for the intermediary term of the second half of 2018. Since his Erasmus experience in Évora (Portugal), he raised his level of internationalisation, not only by travelling a lot, but also by taking more Global History courses, by putting more time and effort in the ISHA project and by creating connections with the International Office of our Faculty.
So far, the ISHA events he participated in are the Summer Seminar 2017 (Helsinki), the Annual Conference 2018 (Maribor / Graz) and the History and Physics Experience 2018 (Bologna). |