After World War I, peace and reform pedagogues urged a revision of textbooks in the subject of history. To prevent violent conflicts, all forms of militarism and nationalism as well as distorted portrayals of neighboring peoples and foreign cultures were to be banned from textbooks. As early as the early 1920s, the Scandinavian countries developed a system of mutual analysis of history textbooks, including the handing over of manuscripts. This system later served as a model for the League of Nations, UNESCO, and the Council of Europe.
Since 1945, numerous regional and bilateral projects on textbook revision have been carried out under the auspices of UNESCO and the Council of Europe. In recent decades, international reform efforts have reached beyond history textbooks to include the perspectives and methods of history education.
Aims
The aim of the project was to gain new insights into the development of history textbook revision in Scandinavia and Europe, as well as into the internationalization of educational cultures, the transformation of history as a school subject in Sweden, and the development of history didactics as an academic discipline in Sweden and Europe. In doing so, they should also contribute to clarifying current and future controversies about history textbooks.
Methodology
The project "History Beyond Borders" investigated this history of international textbook revision, with transnational communication and transfer processes between different history and educational cultures playing a central role. Four subprojects addressed organizational, educational, didactic, and scholarly aspects of the international revision of history education and textbooks.
Two subprojects investigated the structure, the concept, the actors - here mainly international organizations - and the effects of textbook revision in Scandinavia (University of Umeå) and in the rest of Europe (GEI), analyzing regional and transnational relations via a network analysis. The third subproject dealt with the influence of international textbook revision on Sweden's educational policy, textbooks, and school teaching in the postwar period (University of Umeå/Karlstad University/University of Gävle). The fourth subproject focused on the significance of international textbook revision for the development of textbook research and history didactics as a scientific discipline (University of Umeå/Karlstad University).
Subproject II: Textbook Revision in Europe (GEI)
The second subproject, for which the Georg Eckert Institute was responsible, dealt with the revision of history textbooks outside Scandinavia since the 1920s, focusing in particular on the role of inter- and transnational organizations. The focus was on the League of Nations, UNESCO, the Council of Europe, and selected transnational organizations such as the International Association of Historians. The study, which uses relevant methods of historical research and here in particular textual and network analyses, is based on unpublished sources located mainly in the archives of UNESCO in Paris and the Council of Europe in Strasbourg. Much of the project work was carried out at the Georg Eckert Institute in Braunschweig, which has extensive holdings of textbooks and specialized literature.
Publications and lectures
Publications
- Romain Faure, "From International to Historiographical Conflict. The First World War in the Franco-German Textbook Commission," Eckert. Bulletin 11, Summer 2012, pp. 11-14.
- Romain Faure, "Connections in the History of Texbook Revision 1947-1952," in Education Inquiry 2 (2011), pp. 17-31.
- Romain Faure, "Textbook Revision as Transnational Action - A Look at the Years between 1945 and 1989," in Eckert. Bulletin 8, Winter 2010, pp. 25-26.
Papers
- Romain Faure, "Réseaux Est/Ouest et circulation des pratiques en temps de Guerre froide. Quelques réflexions à partir de l'exemple de la révision des manuels scolaires," International Symposium "Internationalizing Science. New Perspectives on the History of Cold War Culture," Berlin, June 16, 2012.
- Romain Faure, "What is textbook revision and what is it for? A Debate in 1950s Europe," Annual Meeting of the Working Group on Historical Peace Research, November 6, 2011.
- Romain Faure, "Shaping International Educational Action: The Emergence of a Transnational Field of History Textbook Revision," Third European Congress on World and Global History, London, April 14, 2011.
- Romain Faure, "Towards a histoire croisée of History Textbook Revision in Europe," Workshop Researching History Textbooks and International Textbook Revision, Umea, May 19, 2010.
- Romain Faure, "The History of a Transnational Forum - International Textbook Revision in Europe after 1945," International PhD Workshop A Europe of Experts, Cologne, February 26, 2010.
- Romain Faure/Eckhardt Fuchs, "Transnational Networks of History Textbook Revision," Conference of the International Society for History Didactics, Braunschweig, September 15, 2009.
