International Roundtable “Pedagogical Discourses of History and Memory”

Discourses of history and memory are difficult to discriminate and often indistinguishable, despite profound differences in their mechanics and purpose. Both are passed on by systems of education, at all levels from primary school to higher education. While arguments among historians are delimited by the professional scholarly community, narratives of memory are discussed broadly in the media and employed in political practice.

The transmission of narratives of collective memory is both necessary and important; it is actively supported by government institutions insofar as it ensures the unity and solidarity of national communities. But it is no less important to introduce into the school curriculum elements of historical analysis, criticism, and skeptical inquiry.

With the development of global communications it has become inevitable that the narratives of different communities overlap and compete, even contradict each other. National mnemonic communities remember “one and the same” in their own ways; any questioning of an accepted narrative of memory can be interpreted as an insult to or even the profanation of the sacred, and as a result lead to conflict. Such conflicts, and their potential to multiply in the future, cannot be ignored. One of the tasks facing contemporary education is how to teach future citizens to conduct themselves intelligently and productively in communicative situations where such tensions arise.

Where do we look for models? To the experience of successful negotiators (diplomats or scholars, for example) forced to search for and having found a way out of situations fraught with dangerous conflict? Which elements of that experience can be introduced into pedagogical practice, and how? How are these problems discussed and decided in various countries and cultures?

Key presenter: James Wertsch, Professor of Sociocultural Anthropology, Professor of Global Studies, Washington University, St. Louis, USA, author of How Nations Remember. A Narrative Approach (Oxford University Press, 2020).