Teaching history to face the world today

Table Of Contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• About the author
• About the book
• This eBook can be cited
• Table of contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of contributors
• Juan Ramón Moreno-Vera/Cosme J. Gómez-Carrasco/ José Monteagudo-FernándezNo future? History Education in the digital and globalization era
• Part I. Methodological approaches through the use of digital resources in History classroom
• Chapter 1. Active teaching methods in history education: Inquiry strategies
• Chapter 2. Implementation and analysis of a WebQuest-based teaching programme in social studies
• Chapter 3. Emerging technologies: Virtual reality, augmented reality, and robotics
• Chapter 4. Recovering social memory via heritage education. War, repression and exile in the Museum of Pontevedra
• Part II. Proposals, activities, and strategies for teaching history through HistoryLab e-toolkit
• Chapter 5. Historical Interpretation: Deconstructing Represented Pasts
• Chapter 6. Learning about crime, rebellion and punishment: Designing meaningful inquiry tasks to promote historical reasoning
• Chapter 7. Power and powers in the history of Europe Oligarchies, political participation and democracy
• Chapter 8. Historical thinking skills with digital resources: Causes, consequences, change and continuity
• Chapter 9 Peasants and the rural world in history education: Archeologic objects, maps and historical evidences
• Chapter 10. Historical digital literacy – Social media and the multicultural classroom
• Chapter 11. The historical learning for a culture of democracy, coexistence and cooperation
• Conclusions

Acknowledgements

This book was funded by some research projects granted by Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation, Spanish Agency of Research, European Union-Next Generation and European Comission (Erasmus+ KA2), grant numbers: PID2020-113453RB-I00 funded by MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033; PDC2022-133041-I00, funded by MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033, and 2020-1-ES01-KA226-HE-095430.

Disclaimer: The Project “HistoryLab for European Civic Engagement: open e-Toolkit to train History Teachers on Digital Teaching and Learning” (2020-1-ES01-KA226-HE-095430) is co-funded by the program Erasmus+ of the European Union. The contents of this publication are an exclusive reponsibility of the authors. The European Comission and the Spanish Service for Internationalization and Education (SEPIE) are not responsable of the information disseminated and its use.

The European Commission’s support for the production of this publication does not constitute an endorsement of the contents, which reflect the views only of the authors, and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein.

Juan Ramón Moreno-Vera / Cosme J. Gómez-Carrasco / José Monteagudo-Fernández

No future? History Education in the digital and globalization era

Introduction

Don’t be told what you want

Don’t be told what you need

There’s no future

No future

No future for you

In 1977 the Sex Pistols released “Never mind the bollocks (here’s the Sex Pistols)” one of the most iconic albums of the punk movement. According to Albiez (2006) the Sex Pistols opened a new era and represented the “year zero” for Manchester rock scene. Their first performance connected easily with the upset of teenagers, youth and young adults. In the mid-1970s, young people was disperated: lack of work, wide swings of the energy prices, liberalization of the financial markets (Grigoriev, 2009) and the continuous thread of a nuclear attack by the URSS during the infinite cold war.

Not just musicians. Not just the arts. Even scientists and theorists were disappointed. According to McDonough (2002), Guy Debord wrote in his foundational 1957 “Report on the construction of situations” that “Dadaism wished to be the refusal o fall the values of bourgeois society”. In the late 1970s, the situationist authors considered that the values of capitalism had failed: bankruptcy, financial crisis, inflation and highgrow up of energy prices. Inequalities increased among population and the arts and the theories just reflected the moment.

Something similar that we find at the beginning of the 2020s. After a severe financial crisis (2008–2014) where austerity was the answer, new threads appear on the horizon of youth people: post-COVID19 health crisis, unemployment, a great increase of the rental prices, the lack of energy because of the war in Ukraine and, lastly, a rising inflation.

There’s no future again?

Studying history is one of the best weapons that we have to face the world today. The problems that we have to solve already appeared in precedent periods and we can learn a lot from them.

Learning from the past to improve our future. As Phil Connors (Bill Murray) did on Groundhog day (1993). When Phil realized that he was trapped in a time loop listening to Sonny & Cher’s “I got you babe” in the clock radio, he started to learn from the past to seduce Rita (Andie MacDowell) using the loops to know more about her. He learnt how to save people from deadly accidents, how to play the piano, how to sculpt ice or how to speak French. Finally, the good actions convinced Rita to love Phil and, together, they overcome the time loop and continue their lifes.

Following Gómez-Carrasco and González Chicote (2022), in 1949, March Bloch wrote to his friend Lucien Febvre that we need to know the past to understand the present. Even, in 1982, the catalan historian Josep Fontana said that “we need to have a critical vision of the present that explain correctly issues like poverty, hunger or unemployment”. Other historians have reflected about the target of learning history: E.P. Thomson wanted to rescue the “losers” of history. For him, history education must fight the closed narratives imposed by the powers and the states. Pierre Vilar considered that learning history has to be useful to interpret a newspaper.

Basically, the Council of Europe (2017) proposed that history education should integrate the knowledge about past experiences and the challenges of the future. History education nowadays should face: the teaching of the complex history of democracy; the activities of ordinary individuals, recognising that people of different cultural, religious and ethnic backgrounds have often been long establishe in societies; valuing multiple identities, providing historical sources and combatting manipulation, fake news and post-tructh, addressing issues that might be controversial or balancing the ethical dimension of learning history.