Pedagogical uses of the past in Europe

International circulations, tranfers, transnational debates

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The establishment of new regimes of the late 1980’s in Eastern and Central Europe – as well as successive changes of governments – have taken place through new historical narratives, combining the demands and needs for national legitimization, for reconciliation, for symbolic recognition, and the imposition of democratic paradigms. These concerns have been translated into a variety of mechanisms: solemn speeches, commemorations, lustrations, ad hoc commissions, legal mechanisms, monuments, museums. Education holds a singular place in such mechanisms, being assigned with the task of training future generations of citizens.

The scientific field has long neglected the treatment of the past at school and in an extracurricular context. Surely, the analysis of the instruments of public action in the field of history has been invested by research, concentrating however essentially on the analysis of textbooks. It remains, with a few exceptions, carried out by researchers in the educational sciences and, often, by history didactitians. The analysis of international circulations in the management of the past at school has, for its part, focused mainly on historians’ commissions, without, however, linking their action to school and extracurricular teaching practices. Yet, schools are the subject of a large number of transpositions, adaptations and/or (re)appropriations of inherited mechanisms for inter- and/or transnational, or even global exchanges (work of UNESCO, of the Council of Europe, of the EU, of bilateral commissions of

historians, teaching about Shoah as a political-moral norm, use of the figure of the witness or visits to “places of memory” in the framework of pedagogical practices).

The aim of this conference is to re-examine uses of the past at school and in extracurricular activities in the light of these international movements, based on a reflection on the different scales of analysis of this phenomenon: from the international to the microscopic classroom level. It is indeed linked to the issue of thinking of these uses as one of the determining factors for the construction of educational instruments and practices at school and beyond.

Such an analysis presupposes a reflection on the different levels of these dynamics of circulation: around the transmitters and disseminators of ideas and knowledge, the socio-political conditions of their privileged reception, their inclusion in cultural spaces and international or even globalized networks. In this perspective, the weight of the past in transnational memory conflicts in an enlarged Europe will be questioned, as well as the ruptures and continuities in the place  assigned to minorities. This conference intends to be multidisciplinary, drawing on reflections from the fields of education, history, political science and sociology.