EHISTO - European history crossroads as pathways to intercultural and media education (2012-2014)

The EU project aimed at establishing intercultural and media-critical competence within civic and history education in Europe by using multi-perspective and transnational-historical topics ('European History Crossroads'). The subject matter to be analysed was commercial mass media, especially popular history magazines, which often emphasise one-sided national narratives.

Generally, it poses an ever growing challenge to teachers, pupils and citizens to distinguish the information delivered by mass media outlets pertaining to the facts of history from mere judgements or interpretations of the facts, and to come to personal critical conclusions. By using popular history magazines as basic teaching material, the EHISTO project tried to include representations of history in mass media into history teaching in school in order to develop media literacy and to enhance the critical reflection of these products. Furthermore, the EHISTO project used the concept of the 'European History Crossroads' to allow intercultural learning. The concept assumes that the European states and regions have been involved in manifold trans-regional historical processes and have 'shared' them in a way, but thus, however, have made different historical experiences, which until today are manifested in different, at times controversial interpretations. These different perspectives on one topic can be found in popular history magazines of different European countries that often focus on their national view of history. Therefore, the use of history magazines as basic teaching material offered the chance to link media-critical and intercultural learning objectives.

The following pages on the EHISTO project have been extracted from the project webpage, which will not be updated after 2017. Unless specifically mentioned otherwise, the content is courtesy of the project leader's team (Prof. Dr. Susanne Popp, Chair of History Didactics, University of Augsburg). Recommended citation: Author, headline, EHISTO project, URL: https://www.uni-augsburg.de/de/fakultaet/philhist/professuren/geschichte/didaktik-der-geschichte/forschung/projekte/ehisto/, (date of final access)

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