scholarly journals Silencing the past, retrotopia, and teaching history

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wojciech Józef Burszta

Silencing the past, retrotopia, and teaching historyThe essay analyzes contemporary controversies connected with teaching history in Europe, with particular focus on Poland. It discusses contexts that condition the relation between academic, every day and school narratives about history as it is taught in today’s schools. These contexts are both political and ideological (historical policy), as well as—in a deepersense—are an expression of national mythologies. The main thesis is the following: an analysis of teaching programs in schools tells us much more about the present than the past, and the main mechanism used to build a vision of national history is the notion of silencing the past. In our times, which Zygmunt Bauman has called the retrotopia, history becomes a bastion for nationalism and new tribalism. Uciszanie dziejów, retrotopia i nauczanie historiiArtykuł analizuje współczesne kontrowersje wokół programów nauczania historii w różnych krajach europejskich, ze szczególnym uwzględnieniem Polski. Wskazany został kontekst różnic między historią akademicką, potoczną świadomością historyczną i szkolnymi narracjami o dziejach. Historia nauczania w szkołach ma zarówno charakter polityczno-ideologiczny, jak i – w szerszym i głębszym sensie – jest wyrazem preferowanych wersji narodowych mitologii. Główna teza tekstu brzmi: analiza programów i sposobów nauczania historii więcej mówi o współczesności niż o historii w tym sensie, że metody i techniki akcentowania lub uciszania pewnych aspektów dziejów pełnią ważną rolę dla budowania określonej wizji tożsamości zbiorowych, dla których legitymizacją jest ideologicznie podbudowana „historia narodowa”. Widać to także w kontekście pojęcia retrotopii Zygmunta Baumana. W ramach tej ostatniej historia staje się głównym bastionem dzisiejszych postaci nacjonalizmu i nowego trybalizmu.

2021 ◽  
Vol 34 (03) ◽  
pp. 186-193
Author(s):  
Assad Zahid ◽  
Danilo Miskovic

AbstractTeaching an established surgeon in a novel technique by a colleague who has acquired a level of expertise is often referred to as “proctoring” or “precepting.” Surgical preceptorships can be defined as supervised teaching programs, whereby individual or groups of surgeons (proctors) experienced in a certain technique support a colleague who wants to adopt this technique (sometimes referred to as “delegates” or “preceptees”). Preceptorship programs really focus on a specific technique, technology, or skill which is required to broaden, complement, or transform an established surgeon's practice.Within colorectal surgery, in the past 30 years, there is been an evolution of interventional options including open, laparoscopic, robotic, and endoscopic procedures. With each new emerging technology and technique, safe and effective uptake by established surgeons is best been attained by a period of proctorship by an experienced colleague. Formalizing this has been facilitated largely through industry support. There, however, remains a considerable chasm when it comes to standardization, quality control, and jurisprudence.This article aims to describe the requirements for a contemporary proctorship program, to examine instruments of quality control, and how to improve effectiveness.


Author(s):  
Seema S.Ojha

History is constructed by people who study the past. It is created through working on both primary and secondary sources that historians use to learn about people, events, and everyday life in the past. Just like detectives, historians look at clues, sift through evidence, and make their own interpretations. Historical knowledge is, therefore, the outcome of a process of enquiry. During last century, the teaching of history has changed considerably. The use of sources, viz. textual, visual, and oral, in school classrooms in many parts of the world has already become an essential part of teaching history. However, in India, it is only a recent phenomenon. Introducing students to primary sources and making them a regular part of classroom lessons help students develop critical thinking and deductive reasoning skills. These will be useful throughout their lives. This paper highlights the benefits of using primary source materials in a history classroom and provides the teacher, with practical suggestions and examples of how to do this.


Author(s):  
Louis Bayman

This article investigates the trend represented by the recent TV series This Is England 86 (2010), Deutschland 83 (2015) and 1992 (2015). It analyses retro in the series as enabling an exhilarating experience of the music, fashions and lifestyles of the past while claiming to offer a serious social history. The article thus takes issue with theories of retro that view it as ahistorical (for example Guffey), to demonstrate how retro in these series enables a particular dramatic conception of the dynamics of national history, whether in post-imperial decline (This Is England), a westalgie for the grip of geopolitical conflict (Deutschland 83) or the cyclical progression of trasformismo (1992). The article discusses the series’ common visions of the past as characterised by a pleasing youthful naivety, opposed to an implied present of cynical superior knowledge. I argue that these series embody retro’s distinct ability to combine irony and fetishism in its recreation of the past, as befits an age in which historical consciousness is increasingly referred to the intimate sphere of the individual self and its uncertain relation to posterity.


2021 ◽  
pp. 803-815
Author(s):  
Tatiana A. Ornatskaya ◽  

The article highlights the process of formation of the Korean Department of the Eastern section of the ICCA under the conditions of existence of the buffer state — the Far Eastern Republic. It was to strive for geopolitical compromise in face of the Civil War and the Allied Intervention. The paper discusses conditions for establishment and reasons for further expansion of the Korean section. On the basis of documents from central and regional archives that are being thus introduced into the first scientific use, the contradictions of the national section formation are shown, the positions of the warring parties and the role of Soviet Russia representatives in the settlement of conflicts are highlighted. The conclusion is made about further directions of work with Korean communists. The past provides an opportunity to take a critical look at the events of a century ago, while the opening of the Comintern archives allows the open press to saturate its content with new data. The main body of unpublished documents on the activities of the Communist International is contained in the fond 495 of the Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History, however, information on some aspects may be found in other federal and regional archives. It is no secret that foreign communists played their role in the foreign policy of Soviet Russia, and their help was big. However, the process of bringing them to work in the interests of the RSFSR has not yet been fully studied. Expediency, cost, and consequences of their work may be arguable, but only one conclusion is allowed: this page of national history should not be forgotten, it has to find its researchers. Recently, the study of the activities of departments and sections of the Communist international has not been popular among researchers either. The notions of ideological work have fallen by the wayside, pushed away by the Soviet past of the Comintern departments and sections. However, in our view, some aspects of the activities of divisions and sections of the Comintern remain relevant.


Author(s):  
Boby Ferdianza

History belongs to a compulsory element in the teaching and learning at school. It can help students to know and more appreciate the past events. The number of history materials taught at school sometimes causes difficulty for students to learn. The lack of facilities and learning media which can attract student’s interest becomes the main factors of student’s difficulty in learning Social Science. Learning medium is very vital to determine what materials students can learn. One of solutions to solve difficulty in learning history is by creating new learning medium in the form of educational game as it can arouse student’s ability in thinking. One of the games teaching history particularly the history of Surabaya is Dreamcatcher: War of Surabaya. This game was designed based on historical events in Surabaya composed in an attractive story. It is completed with quiz to improve student’s memory. Game “Dreamcatcher: War of Surabaya” can be played with android platform and it is considered successful in teaching the history of Surabaya as it could improve students’ abilities on Surabaya history by 113.7% based on the results of pre-and post-tests.


2019 ◽  
pp. 124-138
Author(s):  
Derek J. Thiess

This chapter explores connections between two treatments of history in science fictional literature—the apocryphal history and the alternate history—as they deal with material place. Theorists (Jameson, Hughes-Warrington) have explored the role of materialist history in our need to create counterfactuals by examining the cityscapes and structures in literary representations of the past. This essay connects the disparate strands of materialism, place, and religious revisionism via Juan Miguel Aguilera’s La locura de Dios. It reads the novel as both an apocryphal adventure to a “lost world” civilization and an alternate narrative of Spanish national history. La locura comments surprisingly self-consciously on the crystalline fragility of the logic holding material history together, threatened as it is by a revisionist, escapist orthodoxy.


Author(s):  
Inge Melchior

Chapter 3 explores the meaning of an emotional collective story of rupture for those who have been deported to Siberia. The chapter shows that the story’s mobilization positively reframed their identities, it legally and symbolically repaired injustices, and assures a continuation of their personal stories within the community. The ethnographic approach, however, discovered the ‘paradox of the experienced’. Although this settled story of rupture has provided recognition for the deportees, it simultaneously makes them fear the loss of the authentic and real, because the postgeneration can never really understand. Due to this perceived ‘privilege of the experienced’ and ‘impossibility for representation’, the deportees avoid closure in order to keep the emotional connection with the past alive and safeguard the nation.


1994 ◽  
Vol 4 (4) ◽  
pp. 257-275 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stefan Tanaka

Abstract I use the idea of consumption to discuss questions of agency and purpose in history. History, as a consumer of pasts, is itself an agent in the interpretive strategies employed in the construction of a historical narrative. History also consumes people as it attempts to impose its homogenizing narrative. In these senses, there is purpose: to give order and meaning to—thus prioritizing—certain pasts over others and to define commonality—especially of the nation or nation-state—and thus marginality. This view brings out the historicity of history: that there is always contestation in representations of the past, and that there is considerable variability in how individuals make such history meaningful to themselves. The latter brings out another notion of consumption—that individuals consume history. Which parts of history people imbibe, however, depend on connections with their experience, their own pasts and histories. In terms of pedagogy, we must be aware that objectivistic history often meets resistance, invites parody, or fosters disbelief. If one goal of teaching history is to foster belief in the nation-state, then a monological narrative might not be the best way to accomplish that goal. (History; Education; Nation)


2019 ◽  
pp. 135406881986013
Author(s):  
Reut Itzkovitch Malka ◽  
Shaul R. Shenhav ◽  
Gideon Rahat ◽  
Reuven Y. Hazan

When the past is contested by political actors, it can play a notable role both in present and in future politics. This is especially true when it comes to the memory of dominant parties, which are part and parcel of political and national history. Focusing on dominant parties in parliamentary democracies, this article examines the memory dynamics of a dominant party after its demise and highlights the importance of memory modes in understanding these dynamics. Using theories of collective memory, it identifies four possible modes of memory in a post-dominance era, suggesting discursive and power-related indications for each mode. The article then utilizes this framework to examine the memory of Mapai, the once-dominant party in Israel. On the basis of this analysis, the authors propose hypotheses concerning the comparative cases of Sweden, Italy, and Japan.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document