Tutzing, September 15 - 18, 2003

The meeting representing professionals from different countries on four continents expresses the belief that history education should have as its goal the formation of a free individual capable of independent democratic and socially responsible judgement, rather than purposes of overt and covert indoctrination. In order to help implement this goal we call upon the community of history educators and all concerned bodies to promote through international professional cooperation the understanding of world history as an integral part of history education in all forms and on all levels, not only through schools and other educational institutions but also through extramural activities including education through mass media.

The new historical awareness is needed today to understand how the world came to the present state, to bridge the past and present cleavages, to articulate understanding and comprehension for cultural differences, to make the world a safer and better place in which to live."

Rabat, September 22. - 25. 2004

"The concept of 'the other' is not easy,"sighed a participant at the annual conference of the International Society for History Didactics at the Mohammed V Souissi University in Rabat, Morocco. From 22 to 25 September 2004 about one hundred participants, including many ISHD members, historians and teachers of history didactics from the university as well as many guests, met in the university's main hall. Decorated with majestic portraits of the late King Hassan II and his son King Mohammed VI, this hall made an impressive setting for discussion of the topic 'To Cope with History - to Cope with the Other: History Teaching as Intercultural Dialogue.' University officials, the president and organizer of the conference, Professor Mostafa Hassani Idrissi, who teaches history didactics in the educational science department of the university, and Professor Dr. Elisabeth Erdmann, chair of the ISHD, welcomed the participants. Some aspects of Morocco's historiography, especially minority history, were presented during the morning of 22 September. That afternoon and the morning of the 23rd were spent discussing ethnocentrism and self-perception, as well as problems of stereotypes and the perception of others.All the members of the conference really enjoyed the afternoon program, a tour of the city of Rabat at the kind invitation of Mr. Abdelouahad Kotaris, a colleague from the educational science department of the university. With enthusiasm, even passion, he revealed to them the cultural and historical treasures of this fascinating city. That evening in a wonderful oriental atmosphere as in One Thousand and One Nights the members of the conference enjoyed dinner at the residence of the President of the Moroccan Human Rights Advisory Committee. The meal consisted of a specialty called 'Mechoudi' (lamb) and several desserts.On 24 September the main topic was members' current experience of learning and teaching foreign history in different countries, among others in Algeria, the Balkan states, France, Germany, Israel, Italy, Morocco, the Netherlands, and Poland. The next day the conference split into three workshops. The first dealt with self-perception and the perception of the other in popular images, the second concentrated on 'us and the other' in the practice of learning, and in the third a CD-Rom on relations between Africa and Europe was shown. In the afternoon all these were discussed at a plenary meeting after lunch at the university's park. Lunch outdoors in the park had become a daily feature of the conference, one which all members enjoyed enthusiastically.The theme of this conference was how to teach history as intercultural dialogue. These were the main questions: first, how to assess and gain contact with new and unfamiliar identities; secondly, how to be open to the unusual or the unexpected in the other; thirdly, how to view one's own culture and others; and finally, how to teach history when confronted by the challenges of globalization, different kinds of fundamentalism, and the various questions raised by migration when concepts such as cultural identity, community and even nation seem to be jeopardized. The debates at the conference were never marked by the naïve positivism or naive relativism that frequently accompanies multiculturalism. Presentations of curricula, of textbooks such as an Israeli-Palestinian joint endeavor, of a multiperspective work on Africa, of the latest examples of historiography, or of the topic of minorities, were indicators of how much the members of the conference were committed to dispassionate analysis. How can one avoid all these problems in history didactics? For most participants in the conference it was absolutely an imperative that in history classes students are expected to learn historical thinking, which protects one against ethnocentrism and, being focused on the history of others, helps one to empathize with the other and to recognize the relativity of one's own cultural values. Such competence, however, does not grow naturally: the only way to teach students how to manage their own cultural identity in a thoughtful way is through consciously planned didactic methods.The single shortcoming of the whole conference was that only two lectures dealt with concrete methods of practical history-teaching in an intercultural dialogue at school: as usual, there was more focus on textbook analysis than on practical history teaching. This imbalance was brought up in the closing discussion of the conference. An experienced historian meets and gets along with others or foreigners in a way that is often difficult for students in their first experience. After all, is not understanding others and foreigners the main demand placed upon a historian? Is it not his intent to try to understand people in the recent or distant past, close at hand or geographically far away? By way of contrast, children and young people have in their everyday life only a narrow perspective upon the whole world: foreigners or others become objects of this naïve and uninformed thinking. For teachers and parents the important question is now how to promote rational and informed thinking while at the same time taking into account spontaneous impressions based on ordinary daily life. It is our duty to create a pedagogical environment which favors reflective thinking. In the course of the workshops some members gave as their answer that teachers should stimulate questions rather than provide answers, and that they should concentrate more on the learning process than on the imparting of bare facts. Teachers should be aware of the part that common concepts like identity, the other, and universality play in the social order. Furthermore, teachers as well as students must make themselves aware that phenomena like racism, xenophobia and ethnocentrism are attitudes alone. This knowledge would set these ideas in their correct context, and help us all to live together. Christiane Kohser-Spohn

Copyright