Category: About the Project

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Learning Principles

The project identified several principles, conveyed in the lessons. When you customize the lesson, try to apply the same principles.

Primary sources, multiple formats

Lessons place less emphasis on “authoritative” textbook-like content. Instead, they try to bring together multiple sources. Whenever possible, they incorporate primary materials, including non-textual sources such as images, sound recordings, art and architecture

Multiple perspectives

Especially when dealing with contentious issues, lessons refrain from a winner-loser narrative. Instead, they emphasize instead competing claims, interests, and contexts. Relatedly, students do not need to agree with all viewpoints or interpretations, but teachers should cultivate students’ ability to empathize—even when not in agreement with—different positions. Along the same vein, students should be able to understand where each historical actor was coming from, and to grasp the chains of events that had led to such positions.

Regional / multi-national scope

All units bring a sub-regional or intercultural perspective. As much as possible, the units and lessons use examples from diverse geographic or cultural areas. They aim to highlight commonalities, such as common experiences, without glossing over differences.

The lessons emphasize the value of unity in diversity, or cultural diversity. They expose students to multi-dimensional relationships beyond antagonisms between states or peoples, as has often been the case in the teaching of war histories. Instead, materials show other aspects of relationships, such as co-operations, trade, negotiations, and co-existence, between peoples, states, and different cultures.

When appropriate, they highlight relationships that reached beyond modern state borders and do not impose current geopolitical borders onto past geopolitics.

Balance ground-up and top-down perspectives

Whenever possible, units’ content go beyond state-to-state or elites-to-elites framework, but instead pay equal, if not more, attention to everyday life, to “people’s history,” or “history from below.” This includes materials that might not be “historical” in the strictest sense (that is, with textual record), but knowledge and “histories” passed down through, or embedded in rituals, oral histories, myths, stories, traditions, etc. However, when used, these sources need to be used with care and contextualized properly.

Involvement of parents and community

Some lessons suggest activities that involve students’ community as well as parents, either as in-class activity or more often as part of extension work. Everyday interactions with people in the community is a great way to enhance students’ experience and creativity, as well as broaden parents’ perspectives on history.

Engaging topics, content, and learning experiences

As much as possible, the historical materials should be vivid and relatable to students, not just a list of facts and dates. The lessons suggest a variety of active learning pedagogies that encourage students to analyze and express their opinion rather than memorize dates.

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Skills for Peace

 

Through the lessons, the students are expected to develop the following important skills:

1. Foster a historical mindset and cultivate historical inquiry skills

These include the ability to evaluate evidence, to see, assess, and understand multiple viewpoints, interpretations, and arguments. Students should feel comfortable engaging with historical materials, including non-textual sources such as images and material culture. Ultimately, students should see history not as a series of dates and narratives told by authority figures, but as a discipline of active inquiry that opens up to everyday life. That is to say, to see that everything around them, be it everyday objects, religious beliefs, news stories, has a history; these histories can become points of departure for further inquiry, linking History with everyday life.

How to cultivate this skill?

  • Organize group discussions
  • Provide as much as possible diverse sources in different formats (textual, non textual)
  • Encourage students to approach materials with a critical mind, rather than accepting and memorizing texts.
  • Challenge students with research projects, whenever possible involving interviews of local resource persons
  • In upper levels, introduce historiographical inquiry through questions such as: “How do biases and prejudice influence how we interpret the past? How does our understanding of the past influence our choices in the present?”

2. Nurture a sense of tolerance and an appreciation for cultural diversity

Historical empathy is the ability to put oneself in a historical figure’s shoes, to have understanding of the historical relativity of values, conditions of possibility, and the choices available to historical actors.

How to cultivate this skill?

  • Organize role plays
  • Ask students about what they would’ve done in a particular situation encountered in history.

3. Cultivate “historical empathy”

These include the ability to understand and accept other peoples’ perspectives and values. The lessons should go beyond antagonisms between states or peoples, as has often been the case in the teaching of war histories.

How to cultivate this skill?

  • Highlight commonalities, such as common experiences, without glossing over differences
  • Encourage students to identify positive aspects of relationships, such as co-operations, trade, negotiations, and co-existence, between peoples, states, and different cultures.
  • Value materials that tell the stories of everyday life, rather that that of the government and elites. These may include oral histories, myths and traditions, which need to be contextualized.

4. Initiate a love for history

The suggested lessons propose activities which aim as much as possible to enhance active learning to go beyond the mere memorization of facts. Active learning techniques is a form of learning that engage students through doing things and thinking about what they are doing. Activities become more exciting and engaging and usually foster a deeper understanding of and interest in the historical topics from students.

How to cultivate this skill?

Many active learning activities are proposed in the units, and many more can be developed and contextualized by the teachers. The list below is non exhaustive but proposed a range of activities that can be set up.