Notes from Bucharest

Notes on the First Training Session in Lugoj

If Timisoara seemed to be extremely warm, in July, then Lugoj town offered a very cold weather, making us remembering Timisoara with great pleasure. However, except the weather, Lugoj offered a fortunate choice to our Training Session within the project "National Histories in South-Eastern Europe and History of a United Europe". As a very old city, Lugoj represents a realm of memory for various ethnical groups who lived there until the communist regime. The old part of the city reflects the former ethnical and religious diversity of the city, in comparison with the uniform blocks of flats from the new part of the city, built during the communist period. This complex type of atmosphere was a perfect object of study during our informal discussions.

The Training was hosted by the modern Hotel Tirol, a perfect name in connection with the weather we faced. The missing things were the snow and skiing possibilities…

The participants provided to the debates a kind of "critical mass" enough to transform the discussions in a whole debate about the general topic of the Training and the project, as a whole. As usually, within informal conversation, the cultural customs for eating, clothing, using Internet etc. were used, in an amusing way, as the most perfect examples to reflect how the "national heritage" was imposed historically in the South-Eastern European Countries.

The aim of this three-days Training Session was mainly to train the participants in a series of topics like the importance of the European dimension in the education process, the changes of didactics in the process of teaching/learning History, especially in the context of SEEC, and the changes in the curricula in South-Eastern Europe.

In this respect, the Training was divided in a series of lectures which were offered by Mr. Erich Wendl, President of the European Academy from Vienna, Austria; Mr. Antonio Eduardo Mendonca, Director of the Center for Sovietic and Post-Sovietic Studies in Lisbon, Portugal; Expert Daniela Grabe, from the Center for the Study of Balkan Societies and Cultures, within the University of Graz, Austria; Mr. Carol Capita, Professor at the Faculty of History, University of Bucharest and researcher within the Institute of Educational Sciences from Bucharest, Romania; and Mr. Nikola Zezov, Assistant Professor of History at the University of Skopje and researcher at the Institute of National History of Macedonia.

Taking the risk of being subjective, we may say that the lectures of Mrs. Daniela Grabe and Mr. Carol Capita proved to be the most extended and tremendous within all the others. Anyway, saying that we do not refer to any hierarchy.

From a chronological point of view, the first lecturer was given by our Austrain speaker, Mr. Erich Wendl, who started by quoting Jean Monnet: "We do not unite states, we bring people together", thus synthesizing his approach. He provoked the public with the question "why is Europe important", and subsequently stressed the importance of living together in the New Europe. He concentrated on the significance of the European Identity for the peoples from the Western and Eastern parts of the geographical-Europe as the most important common link between them. He used the in-group/out-group definitions, issuing that a first step through the European Identity would be calling ourselves as ‘Europeans’ before any other self identification. The questions of the participants referred to ‘what’ is Europe, ‘who’ is Europe, Balkans as a part of ‘Europe’, the geographical limits of this ‘Europe’, who represent ‘Europe’, the impossibility of writing a common European History Textbook etc.

As a scholar specialized in the study of the museums as sites of memory (a Memory organized for propagandistic aims and the role of these museums in shaping the collective memories, Mr. Antonio Eduardo Mendonca, , described his experiences from the former Soviet Union, within the last decade. He permanently referred to the European Idea as a way of getting peoples together in the future European Union. An important conclusion of his speech was that the more important becoming dialogue between the nowadays members of European Union and the countries from the Eastern Europe simply represents the moving of the European borders towards the far East.

The most extended presentation, in fact a series of three lectures, was offered by Mrs. Daniela Grabe about the didactics of using the primarily sources in the process of teaching/learning History. She hint at her experience as manager of the two years project "History and History Teaching in South-Eastern Europe", developed, within the period 2000 - 2002, by the Center for the Balkan Societies and Cultures at University of Graz jointly with the University of Blagoevgrad, Bulgaria and the Association of Social History, Belgrade, Yugoslavia.

In her lectures, Mrs. Grabe talked about a series of pedagogical techniques like: longitudinal and cross sections, comparisons; connection to present times for explaining the events and attitudes form the past; personal approach in making the pupils to express their opinions; social history as a way to show the complexity of the past, reduced until now to a domination of the political history; interdisciplinary methods; the use of maps, schemes, diagrams, etc. in the process of teaching and learning; the use of pictures, photos, caricatures/cartoons for the same reasons; the text sources and literary texts for reconstruction of the past; tests and learning games for making easier learning History; variety of ‘social forms’ of learning; the ‘inner differentiation’; technical means and illustration techniques; new media as it is used in the above mention process of teaching; etc.

In orde r to explain these techniques, she used the sources grouped in a special material "Variety of Methods in History Teaching", prepared especially for this Training. The discussions about the methodologies of using primarily sources of information in the process of teaching/learning History was very passioned. The participants started to ask the lecturer questions like: where should we find such kind of sources etc.

Finally, as a part of her intentions and also for responding to the above mentioned questions, Mrs. Grabe presented a part of the outcomes of her project, the materials about "Childhood in the Past" and "Men and Women in the Past" and also teaching and information materials of the European Comission.

As an extra-contributor, Mr. Nikola Zezov shortly shared his views to the participants the last trends of the historiography in Macedonia of the last decade, underlying the ideological use of this in sustaining the official point of view of the Former Republic of Yugoslavia Macedonia against the old ‘national’ paradigms of the Bulgarians, Albanians and Greeks.

The last in the chronological order of the deploying of the Training, Mr. Carol Capita lectured the participants about the use of sources in the process of teaching and learning History. He also described the mechanisms of decision in the processes of changing curricula in SEEC. He stressed the heavy difficulties in reforming the educational systems in SEEC, the great debates issued around the topic of using more than one (official) history textbook in Romania of the '90s, the rejection in the late December 2000 of the introduction in the secondary and high schools of an optional course on the European Integration etc. The questions brought into discussion the role of the social group of the history teachers, estimated in Romania at about 12.000 persons, in the process of formation of a civic attitude in SEEC, the big importance of their educational background for the rest of the societies in the future etc.

The lectures had the role to introduce the participants more profoundly in the changes of didactics related to teaching/learning History, and of the National Histories curricula in SEEC, as well as to stress the importance of the European dimension in the education process. These lectures encouraged the participants to discuss about the methodologies of using primarily sources and to question themselves: what could be the European Identity for the peoples from SEEC; the process of reform of the high education in the same geographical area; the changes in the curricula of teaching/learning History in the Balkanic countries.

In conclusion, the training successfully continued the discussions brought up by the Seminar in Timisoara from July 2002, in the spirit of tolerance and mutual understanding, stressing the importance of empathy. It has deepen the contacts established at that time between different groups of students in History from SEEC, refined the discussions about the mutual stereotypes between the different ethnical and religious groups from the Balkan countries, the clichés of the historiographical paradigms, and took into discussion the importance of the already established inventory of problems and solutions. This Training Session proved to be another opportunity for the young participants to debate on their problems as students/teachers in History and to promote their own points of view for solving these problems.

Silviu Hariton

M.A. Candidate in History