This pilot project focusses on the design and creation of digital teaching materials that address transnational and transregional interrelationships, using specific locations as examples. The project employs innovative approaches and available material on memory culture to develop participative, multilingual and digital educational materials, based on oral and local history, for use in schools and other institutions. The focus is particularly on source material designed for educational practice that is either multilingual or in the relevant original language. The bilingual teaching materials on the history of diversity that are created through the pilot project can be used in native language education programmes in Turkish, Polish and Ukrainian, as well as in traditional history lessons or in non-school settings. The three linguistic contexts reflect the two largest migrant groups in Germany as well as current requirements due to recent immigration and memory-culture controversies in the context of a current conflict. German-Turkish materials address diversity stories against the backdrop of the Treaty of Lausanne, which marks its centenary in 2023.
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Aims
The aim of this pilot project is to produce bilingual teaching materials on the history of diversity that can be used in history lessons in German schools as well as in educational programmes in native languages (Polish, Turkish, Ukrainian), and which can stimulate historical learning in non-school education provision. Such bilingual materials could also be used in German schools abroad and their extra-curricular teaching programmes.
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Methodology
The starting point for developing materials in each case is an inventory of curricula and textbook content and of the framework conditions for history teaching in Germany, Poland, Turkey and Ukraine, as well as an overview of promising historic examples of individual stories with real-world references that interweave the historical perspectives. The inventory primarily identifies controversies within memory cultures and provides approaches for transnational and transregional European narratives. It also exposes the gaps in the narratives with regards to social diversity in the past or present.
Workshops and training units for teachers and educational media producers will be offered with the aim of embedding the approach in educational practice; specific consultations will also be provided for educational media publishers in order to pass on the relevant expertise. The creation of teaching materials and the provision of workshops in Germany, Poland, Ukraine and Turkey will be organised by the GEI and carried out by those with relevant expertise in the respective regional memory cultures and with proven knowledge of the relevant languages. They will make use of long-standing contacts with people involved in remembrance initiatives and teaching organisations as well as historians and history educators in Germany and the three countries on which the project focusses.
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Results
The project will develop six digital lesson concepts based on an examination of German, Polish, Turkish and Ukrainian curricula and textbooks as well as local approaches to memory-cultural initiatives. These lesson plans will be published on www.zwischentoene.info (and possibly also on reflections.eduskills.plus or hi-storylessons.eu, hosted by the GEI and its partners). Three online workshops will also be carried out involving teachers, historians and representatives of memory culture initiatives. The local history approach and the materials developed as a result of those workshops will be made available for teachers and publishers through a minimum of six training units. Publishing consultations for relevant text passages and textbook units can be provided for teachers, authors and editors in educational media publishing houses and other educational practitioners, if required. The project team will also use a range of formats such as interviews and articles in newspapers and specialist journals in order to convey the didactic findings from the project to the wider public.
