Conference on History Education in Germany and Poland

Conference on History Education in Germany and Poland

The Polish city of Gdańsk was the venue for a conference, held on 10 April, on "History Education in Germany and Poland: Selecting, Interpreting and Presenting Teaching Content", organised by the GEI, the Institute of History at the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, and the European Solidarity Centre. The conference was the key and closing event of the project "The Interpretation of Socialism within the Politics of History and the Will of Individual Educationalists. A German-Polish Comparison", which launched in 2012 and was funded by the German-Polish Academic Foundation (Deutsch-Polnische Wissenschaftsstiftung).

Educators and academics from the institutions involved in the project met for the conference in the historic setting of the famous Gdansk shipyard. After the conference’s formal opening, Hanna Grzempa, part of the project team, detailed the findings of her work and drew comparisons between the cultural memory of the socialist past as manifested in German and Polish textbooks and curricula and the individual memories of teachers who experienced the period. Prof. Violetta Julkowska, a historian at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, compared history teaching in Poland and Germany, and Adam Rajewski, a doctoral student at the same university, looked at the use of visual materials in textbooks, highlighting variations in the use of images in textbooks according to their temporal and thematic contexts and proposing that teachers and students reflect together on these contexts and variations, thus helping to achieve a way of teaching history that raises student awareness of its nature as a construct.
Rounding off the conference, Agnieszka Piórkowska introduced the audience to the European Solidarity Centre as a site of learning. The Centre's new residence will be opened with a formal ceremony in August of this year.

The conference was the closing event of the research project "The Interpretation of Socialism within the Politics of History and the Will of Individual Educationalists. A German-Polish Comparison".
Using the exemplary case of two post-socialist societies, Poland and (East) Germany, the comparative project explored the impact of state-issued stipulations on the interpretation of the socialist past, which has inspired polarised debate in the societies studied. The project was funded by the German-Polish Academic Foundation (Deutsch-Polnische Wissenschaftsstiftung) and carried out by the GEI and the Institute of History at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań.