Teachers' conference on images of Israel in textbooks

Teachers' conference on images of Israel in textbooks

A teachers' conference on images of Israel in textbooks and classroom practice took place in the north German town of Neustrelitz on 5 March. The event, aimed at providing information and training to teachers of subjects related to social studies in the state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, was organised by the Institute for Quality Development of the state's education ministry, the state's Agency for Civic Education, and the Embassy of Israel.

The Georg Eckert Institute organised and conducted the part of the conference which looked at depictions of Israel in German textbooks. In the neo-classical hall of the town’s Carolinum secondary school, Dr Dirk Sadowski of the GEI presented interim findings of an investigation conducted by the German-Israeli Textbook Commission into over 400 history, geography and social studies textbooks currently approved for use in German schools. The presentation was followed by workshops in which Dirk Sadowski and Mirjam Körner of the GEI and the Textbook Commission members Prof. Gabriele Schrüfer (Münster) and Frank Langner (Cologne) discussed selected samples of text from textbooks approved for use in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern with teachers of history, geography and social studies. The discussion centred upon issues relating to the depiction of the conflict in the Middle East, imbalances in the textbooks‘ use of sources, and the polarising effects of some of the images from the Middle East conflict used in the books. Debate developed on the pros and cons of using images, sources and headings to allow students to access the issues at an emotional level; while this certainly attracts pupils‘ attention and interest, it runs the risk of generating bias and therefore requires teachers using such materials to possess thorough knowledge of the issues and pronounced skills in working with and interpreting the material. A number of participants in the discussions viewed the depiction of Israel in the context of the conflict in the Middle East as unsatisfactory and lacking in balance; they made suggestions, with a view to the German-Israeli recommendations on textbooks which are due to be issued in 2015, on how these problems might be successfully tackled in practice.

The event’s venue, the Carolinum secondary school in Neustrelitz, was particularly appropriate in view of the fact that the school, led by headteacher Henry Tesch, has been running an extremely successful exchange programme with institutions in Israel for many years now. As then education minister of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, and chair of the Standing Conference of the Ministers of Education and Cultural Affairs of the Länder in the Federal Republic of Germany, Henry Tesch played a key role in the discussions which took place in 2009 on the resumption of Israeli-German consultations on textbooks.