Periodic Reporting for period 1 - MAKINGHISTORIES (Integrating innovative theories and practices in historical culture and education)
Reporting period: 2023-01-01 to 2024-12-31
The central aim of this project is setting up a gender balanced, international, interdisciplinary and inter-sectoral network of organisations to produce new knowledge, both theoretical and applied, in the field of historical culture and education studies. This, in order to improve the role of historical representations in present democratic and reflective societies. Enveloping both formal and informal contexts, in which views on the past are disseminated, this field invites a closer collaboration of academics and practitioners working in historical museums, heritage environments, historical reenactments, memorial sites and schools. A total of 18 institutions in Europe, Africa, Australia, Canada, Israel and Latin America are participating in MAKINGHISTORIES. Special attention will be paid to the presence of gender history in formal and informal educational environments and to how they could further develop in this respect. Also, the importance of understanding the challenges of globalisation and global history will be considered. In both cases, introducing these two rather new and innovative historiographical approaches has the purpose of contributing to the renovation of historical culture environments and the present uses of history representations. Furthermore, the project aims to study how innovative dialogical and multi-perspectivist practices might affect historical representations. This project is currently working on research articles, books and digital media (short videos, podcasts, audioguides and multimedia history textbooks chapters) for disseminating and communicating these efforts, expanding a dialogical view of formal and informal contexts of history education. These digital media is being produced in the context of a CPD to improve skills of practitioners and that will continue to be on-line after the project is over, essentially contributing to the project’s self-sustainability.
Various project events have taken place: Kick-off meeting, First General Conference (Madrid, Spain) and Second General Conferences (Nicosia, Cyprus). In addition, almost all secondments have been completed and are or will generating different products. As will be presented in the Technnical Report, one book and various papers published and the initial design of the Course of Professional Development is in the making, including some open access podcast and web page.
Objectives 1 and 2 have been reached mainly through the First and the Second General Conferences (Madrid, March 2023 and Cyprus, Nov, 2024) and the publication of the book based on the work of the First one (immediately after the kick-off meeting). These two conferences included 8 invited speakers (from Israel, Cyprus, Canada, The Netherlands, UK, Austria and USA) very well known in the field of History Education. Details can be seen at the webpage (www.makinghistories.eu) the IG (making.histories) and the first book just published (see below). The first one (UAM, Madrid, March 2023) was devoted to the role of dialogue on history teaching and learning. The second one (Cyprus, Nov 2024) was devoted to the relation of formal and informal contexts for history education. In both cases, these activities also received the additional support of two projects leaded by the PI of www.makinghistories.eu both funded by the AEI (Spanish Research Agency). This additional support (25000 euros) provided more resources to organize fully interdisciplinary conferences and to cover the participation of professionals. In sum, very rich theoretical and applied discussions took place in these two activities which provided enough intellectual inputs to both develop mutual enrichment and to generate a new and integrated model of historical culture (Objective 1). As mentioned, one book has been recently published about the role of dialogue in history education (see below) and another one is in progress about new perspectives on historical thinking. Objective 3, about the design of a Course of Professional Development (CPD) , mostly based on digital productions is being reached by the production the initial prototype www.lahistoriacomoexcusa.com (being translated into English) based on the production of three podcasts about the topics of the project (one is about nationalism and history education, another one about decolonization of museums and a third one about the role Islamic past in present EU societies). In the Second General Conference (Cyprus, November 2024) the general structure of the Course of Professional Development was presented by WP6 and the main ideas of the structure of the course were approved by the Executive Committee of the project. A professional team, headed by this WP6, has started this work and the final version of the Course will be ready by the Third Conference at Germany, GEI, November 2025). By 2026 implementation, evaluation and final design work will be carried out at stated in the Grant Agreement. Also, this objective 3 has received the additional input of the Conference about Videogames and History Education (Cyprus, Nov, 2024), leaded by the PI of this project and funded by the AEI (Spanish Research Agency) (25000 euros). It is important to mention that this additional Conference allowed to include the study of the role of videogames as part of the above-mentioned Course. This development should pay an increasing attention to digital resources and formats and videogames are one very influential and broadly used digital educational tool. Our project will try to offer to both public and private sector related to the communication of historical contents a tool which could be used as a good example of practice to use the reflection about the past to foster democratic and inclusive societies.