Textbook Development in the Baltic States

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania emerged as independent states. Like other new sovereign states in Central Eastern Europe, they were faced with the task of building their own educational systems and developing new curricula and textbooks. Moscow's influence in the old textbooks was most strikingly obvious in the teaching of history and geography. History teaching, moreover, now required new, post-Marxist-Leninist interpretations of the past.

In the process of building new schools and writing new textbooks, state authorities and textbook authors turned to the Georg Eckert Institute in order to benefit from West European experience in textbook writing. This has resulted in conferences and seminars aimed at discussing the concept and structure of new textbooks.

Moreover, in order to support these countries in their development of new teaching materials, it was decided to establish a textbook center in Vilnius (www.pedagogika.lt/puslapis/vtic/e-vtic.htm). The Georg Eckert Institute and the Robert Bosch Foundation supported and funded this project. The Center is a place for scholars and textbook writers from the Baltic States who want to exchange ideas. Thus, the Center facilitates the transfer of know-how.

In the meantime, curricula and textbooks have been developed further. A current project, which will run until 2009, aims to analyse this process of development in the subject area of geography in these three countries, and to evaluate the results. The experiences of the various groups involved (ministries, teacher associations, publishing houses, textbook authors, etc.) will also be depicted and assessed. Current geography textbooks will further be evaluated, based on criteria set by the Georg Eckert Institute. These books demonstrate a certain know-how in textbook design, which has been partly influenced by seminars and research visits in Braunschweig as well as by informal exchange taking place within the forum of the Georg Eckert Institute.

Cooperation Partners:
Ülle Liiber (Institute of Geography, University of Tartu)
Natālija Buile and Ināra Švarca (Izglītībaz satura un eksaminācijas centrs, Riga) 

Contact: