INTERNATIONAL SCIENTIFIC CONFERENCE: DO WE LEARN FROM THE PAST FOR THE FUTURE? WHAT HISTORY TEXTBOOK DOES 21ST CENTURY EUROPE NEED?”

On September 15-16, 2022, an international conference on the topic “Do we learn from the past for the future?” was held in Paris at the Paris Science Center of the Polish Academy of Sciences. What history textbook does Europe need in the 21st century?”.

The conference was planned as a regular meeting of historians-scientists and history teachers within the project of the Georg Eckert Institute for International Textbook Research in the city of Braunschweig (Germany), launched in April 2022. The Paris conference summed up the implementation of Franco-German and Polish-German projects, as well as other projects aimed at creating transnational materials (textbooks) for teaching history. During the conference, the methods of storytelling about the history of Europe in transnational textbooks, their application in the didactics of history at the level of school education in different countries of the European Union were analyzed.

During the work of the conference

 The participants of the conference were scientists from Germany, France, Poland, Ukraine, Moldova, Serbia, Israel historians, political scientists, public intellectuals, people connected with the world of politics and cultural diplomacy, who were or are involved in various transnational history teaching projects. Teachers from higher education institutions of Germany, Poland and France joined the work of the conference.

Employees of the Department of Theory and History of Political Science of our Institute participated in the work of the conference and gave speeches Doctor of Historical Sciences, Professor Yuriy Shapoval and Candidate of Political Sciences Oksana Zorych.

Yuriy Shapoval, Oksana Zorych together with one of the organizers of the conference, Professor Marcyn Vyatra

The organizers of the conference sought to identify possible areas of cooperation and initiatives that go beyond the territory of the EU countries. The current war in Ukraine and the negotiations on Ukraine’s membership in the EU prompted them to think about creating a project that will develop materials for teaching the history of Ukraine in the broader context of European history, which could be used both in Ukraine and in EU countries.