History educators, historians, History educationalists and political scientists from more than 15 countries met at Freie Universität Berlin last weekend in order to discuss the position of the topic of migration in the History lessons of the respective countries. Starting with lively round table discussions, also with students of the faculty of History Didactics at Freie Universität, participants widely agreed on the importance of the topic. Dr. Peter Lautzas, head of the cooperating partner German Association of History Teachers even stated that “The aspect of migration is essential for modern History lessons in a globalized world”.
The international project team targets at the development of topic-related material for History educators and students (including scaffolding language tasks and activities for non-native speakers) presenting it through a freely accessible homepage and focusing on both, local and trans-national, historical and modern examples of people on the move. Students will be enabled to realize the importance of very personal stories within history and, along with that, the fact that phenomena that seem to have a very narrow perspective at first, tend to have very long-lasting consequences even for their personal lives.
Having completed that project phase, the team is going to deal with more cross-cultural topics, such as human rights, and, in doing so, develop a data base for schools which promotes the aspects of multiperspectivity, empathy, the understanding of cultural differences and historical consciousness and which hopefully enables History educators to go beyond the limits of a purely national approach.
Sylvia Semmet, Germany, project team member
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