How to use oral history for democracy education? | Seminar for teachers and educators

We invite teachers and educators to the workshop “Changing Democracies: how to use oral history for democracy education?”, where we will present a toolkit designed specifically for teachers to engage students in meaningful discussions about democracy and historical change in Europe.
You are invited to register here: https://docs.google.com/…/1FAIpQLSeJHjYquKl4wK…/viewform
The international project “Changing Democracies” has collected 31 personal stories and narratives about the transition from totalitarianism to democracy. These stories and narratives have been used as the basis for the development of a range of teaching tools for teachers and pupils.
During the seminar we will present a unique archive of stories. The website publishes the stories of people who have lived through political, social and cultural transformations in different countries. These are not “nice” or smooth stories – some are provocative, some challenge conventional narratives – but they are the ones that reveal the real experiences of change.
Teachers have been given plans and activities to help students not only learn about the story through the personal experiences of the witnesses, but also to understand how the story relates to their own lives today.
How to talk to students about sensitive historical periods?
We will discuss how oral history can be used in the classroom to engage your pupils, understand different points of view and learn to think critically.
More about the project: www.changingdemocracies.eu
Organisers.
Workshop partners: the Association of History Teachers and Educators (IMES)
The Changing Democracies project aims to reflect people’s narratives and memories of communism, dictatorships, resistance and transition from a European perspective in order to create a shared space of memory. The project explores how the living, oral history of Europe can help us understand the crisis of democracy, and in addressing the challenges of the contemporary world, it seeks to reveal that our experiences and expectations of democracy can be very different. The project invites us to rethink what democracy means to us personally and what experiences we might share. It was implemented by a team of civil society and education organisations from Belgium, Croatia, Lithuania, the Netherlands, Czech Republic, Poland, Greece, Romania, Spain and Portugal. In Lithuania, the consortium was represented by our team at the Open Lithuania Foundation.

Translated with DeepL.com (free version)