Teaching The Teachers: A Multi-Perspective Approach to The First World War in The Classroom

The narratives about the First World War to be found in current textbooks continue to feature notably different emphases despite the advance of globalisation.

Proceeding from this observation, this project, which builds on the study "1913 - 2013. A Student's life in Braunschweig", sought to illuminate these differences in emphasis using a synchronically and diachronically comparative approach. The second step in the project exposed teachers to a range of views on the First World War, exhibiting as much contrast as possible, in order to increase their awareness of the various ways in which people have interpreted the twentieth century’s founding trauma in different places and different periods of history. The resulting teacher training modules were assessed with regard to issues raised by theories of memory. One of the central interests in this endeavour was to observe how teachers engage with and handle different patterns of interpretation arising from specific cultures of memory.  This revealed that teachers from different (national) contexts interpreted the same excerpts from textbooks differently.