HTCE lecturers’ series, spring 2024

History and its educational relevance for overcoming tensions in current times

Despite numerous studies detailing history’s workings from non-disciplinary perspectives, as seen with research on memory, historical culture, and non-Western approaches to sense creation, modernist views of what history is and how it functions still seem to dominate in the field of education. Because of its application of the historical method as a scientific and rational way of constructing knowledge, history from a disciplinary angle is seen as the form of knowledge creation regarding the past that can best explain “how things actually were”. In educational contexts, such an understanding of history is often perceived as foundational for allowing people to engage and orient themselves in life, giving them the necessary agency to tackle the many social and political problems that they may face. In our contested times, with such life challenges as climate change, increasing frictions between contrasting knowledge systems and ideologies, and the ever-present need of making better room for marginalized peoples in our imperfect societal structures, the question we ask is whether history, understood primarily as a scientific, modernist, and methodological approach to knowledge creation, is still a relevant model for addressing the contemporary needs of our complex world.

In our HTCE lecturers’ series, we provide a space to discuss this question based on theoretical approaches and recent empirical findings presented by internationally renowned experts. We also invite the audience to contribute and interact with our presenters in the conversations that emerge. HTCE lectures are open to the public. They are aimed at experts, scholars, students, teachers and other stakeholders from all regions of the world who are interested in current issues in history education. 

Lecture Series Spring 2024: Program and Abstracts (PDF)


Join us on Zoom: https://fhnw.zoom.us/j/61846989109?pwd=MmNRaUU1ckQzWUFCc01mdXpCbUtBdz09

Short-term announcements will be published on this website.

In case of technical problems contact julia.thyroff@fhnw.ch or martin.nitsche@fhnw.ch

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HTCE lecture series archive

Lecture series fall/autumn 2023/24 (finished)