engleski

Methods for breaking the nationalist master- narrative in post-traumatic society - The case of teaching Modern history in Contemporary Croatia

The multiperspectivity in history teaching has been contemporary claimed to be a very successful method in fostering civic values in pupil and student population. However, in my paper I would argue that the multiperspectivity can hardly achieve the stated outcomes in the society burdened with the legacy of the quite recent war from the 1990s. Since the history in contemporaneous Croatia represents an everlasting political battlefield, I noticed that students attend my class in Modern Croatian History with initial partisanship in respect to history regardless of their political orientations. I also noticed that mentioned partisanship stems not only from the omnipresence of the non-civic nationalist master-narrative in school curricula, but also from the obsolete teaching methods pupils are exposed to in primary and secondary schools. On the case of selected examples from my teaching I would present how I achieve the outcome of “melting” the initial understanding of history as a kind of fairytale Manichean struggle of heroes and villains where the nation represents a "thousand-year-long" victim of others. I will show how the mentioned outcome has been reached by teaching students initially in complexity and contingency of particular historical events rather than exposing them to deal with various, usually antagonistic perspectives and interpretations. Finally, my experience shows that my students eventually took into account another’s perspective rather if the perspectives were only eventually taught to historical complexity, and not if I make them to deal compulsory with multi-perspectivity.

history teaching ; multiperspectivity ; Croatia

nije evidentirano