Learning To Live Together In Africa Through History Education

This study sheds light on the current state of history education in Africa and reflects on its potential to prepare this continent’s learners for the challenges of "learning to live together". Drawing on an examination of school curricula and the experiences of educational stakeholders, it identifies trends in the processes and outcomes of recent curricular revisions, and discerns key challenges relating to the teaching and learning of history across Africa. It scrutinises the place afforded to history within African education systems, and surveys related contents and pedagogies. While it identifies African history as a fundamental yet sensitive and controversial subject, it also illustrates examples of present-day curricular strategies to integrating a concern for promoting a "culture of peace".

This study sheds light on the current state of history education in Africa and reflects on its potential to prepare this continent’s learners for the challenges of “learning to live together”. Drawing on an examination of school curricula and the experiences of educational stakeholders, it identifies trends in the processes and outcomes of recent curricular revisions, and discerns key challenges relating to the teaching and learning of history across Africa. It scrutinises the place afforded to history within African education systems, and surveys related contents and pedagogies. While it identifies African history as a fundamental yet sensitive and controversial subject, it also illustrates examples of present-day curricular strategies to integrating a concern for promoting a “culture of peace”.

Emerging from the pioneering work of the African Association for History Education (AHE-Afrika), Teaching African History in Schools offers an original Africa-centred contribution to existing research and debates in the international field of history education.

This book explores how the expectations of historical justice movements and processes are understood within educational contexts, particularly history education. In recent years, movements for historical justice have gained global momentum and prominence as the focus on righting wrongs from the past has become a feature of contemporary politics. This imperative has manifested in globally diverse contexts including societies emerging from recent, violent conflict, but also established democracies which are increasingly compelled to address the legacies of colonialism, slavery, genocides, and war crimes, as well as other forms of protracted discord. This book examines historical justice from an educational perspective, exploring the myriad ways that education is understood as a site of historical injustice, as well as a mechanism for redress. The editors and contributors analyse the role of history education in processes of historical justice broadly, exploring educational sites, policies, media, and materials. This edited collection is a unique and important touchstone volume for scholars, policy-makers, practitioners, and teachers that can guide future research, policy, and practice in the fields of historical justice, human rights and history education.

This volume addresses the role and importance of education for processes of transitional justice. In the aftermath of conflict and mass violence, education has been one of the tools with which societies have sought to achieve positive transformation. While education has the potential to trigger, maintain, and exacerbate conflict, it has also been designed to promote a deeper, more nuanced understanding of the past and to advance reconciliation, peacebuilding, and prevention. The original contributions in the book reflect on lessons learned from education policies of the past in post-conflict societies and seek innovative, sustainable, and context-sensitive grassroots approaches, designed to advocate critical thinking, values of inclusion and tolerance, and ultimately a culture of peace.

Textbook revision and research have historically been two of the central pillars of the work of the Georg Eckert Institute, and remain so today. The history of the Institute demonstrates just how intertwined they are. Against this backdrop, the development of the Institute is presented and critically examined from different perspectives, using a broad range of source materials. The book pays particular attention to the collection of textbooks for the humanities and social sciences, which has been important from the beginning and is now the largest in the world. The history of the Institute illustrates how academic perspectives, as well as political and financial instruments, related to textbook research and revision have changed as part of the shift from bilateral cooperation to global networks. The Institute has always responded to changing social contexts and its foci have provided important stimuli for economists, education practitioners and policy makers.

This volume reflects on the role played by textbooks in the complex relationship between war and education from a historical and multinational perspective, asking how textbook content and production can play a part in these processes. It has long been established that history textbooks play a key role in shaping the next generation’s understanding of both past events and the concept of ‘friend’ and ‘foe’. Considering both current and historical textbooks, often through a bi-national comparative approach, the editors and contributors investigate various important aspects of the relationships between textbooks and war, including the role wars play in the creation of national identities (whether the country is on the winning or losing side), the effacement of international wars to highlight a country’s exceptionalism, or the obscuring of intra-national conflict through the ways in which a civil war is portrayed. This pioneering book will be of interest and value to students and scholars of textbooks, educational media and the relationships between curricula and war.

Originally published in 1967, this book represents the late Professor Brown’s twin skills as historian and as educationalist at their best. It is one of a series of books which he edited, and which was offered to Africa teachers in training. The series was designed to help those who were called upon to teach the many subjects of the primary school curriculum or two or more subjects with the junior forms of secondary schools. It is dedicated to the proposition that giving a good basic education to a country’s children is vital to its development programme. Godfrey Brown’s book starts with a discussion of the place and purpose of history in education – why do we teach it to children? He then describes methods of teaching language skills in history, observation and (at some length) social development through history. He ends with The History of the Future and two practical appendices listing where the African teacher of history could obtain useful teaching material.