European Association of History Educators

Bridging Histories has launched in January 2009 thanks to generous support from the Open Society Fund in Bosnia and Herzegovina. The project addresses current practical needs of history educators in the region and following up on the work carried out in previous EUROCLIO projects conducted with local partners.

The project activites will  include four regional workshops on the material developed in the previous project and teaching the latest in history education methodology and didactics. The history education professionals will assess the recent history curricula guidelines and the best steps towards development of the curricula and their implementation into practice. The project also focuses on organizational strengthening of EUROCLIO HIP, the implementing history teachers association in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Four regional teacher training workshops

The local coordinators and trainers will lead four regional workshops for history educators on the use of the materials and lesson plans developed in the previous and current projects, and on the latest skills, techniques, and approaches in the field of history education.  The workshops will be based on the developed modules and teach the methodology that stresses multiperspectivity, mutual inclusiveness, multiple narratives, complexity of history, and development of competencies and skills as critical thinking and work with historical sources and facts. The gained knowledge will help the community of history educators to strengthen tangible network of professionals working across the ethnic and religious divides, having skills that will enable them to work together. Ultimately, these approaches and materials will empower the teaching community to increase the quality and depth of future history education materials and thus contribute to development of an open and diverse democratic society.

These workshops will be led by the mixed training teams and will take place in
Gorazde (for eastern part of the country)
Banja Luka (for area of Krajina);
Bihac (for north-western Bosnia);
Tuzla (for central Bosnia); and

Assessing guidelines for history curricula

The team of authors and experts will make use of the experience of developing the Ordinary People in Extraordinary Country textbook and feedback from the Georg Eckert Institute for textbook research and from educators who have used this resource to date to analyze the current guidelines for development of history curricula and determine which approaches and foci are most effective in reaching out to the students and assessing needs for future materials. Based on this experience and know-how, they will assess the progress of the development of history curricula for the cantons in Bosnia and Herzegovina and further needs for their development and implementation. The analysis will consider the inclusion of second order concepts into the curricula, as well as the extent to which the guidelines include development of competencies and skills, encourage multiperspectivity, variety of approaches and voices, critical and independent thinking, etc.
The conclusions from these working sessions will be worked into a set of Recommendations for history educators that participate on curricula development, policy decision-makers and other stakeholders in history education process.

Capacity development workshop
A three day capacity development workshop led by the Junior Coordinators, focusing on development and strengthening of leadership and management skills will be offered to the groups of 25 EUROCLIO HIP association.  This workshop was requested by the Association members in order to strengthen the core of the organization, gain skills that will empower the key active members to take on initiative to develop independent collaborative projects in the future, and grow the organization into a representative association that will unite history educators from all cantons of Bosnia and Herzegovina.
The workshop is practically oriented around the concrete needs of the local project staff to design and implement projects, evaluate and plan, coordinate and network. It will also cover basic communication, negotiation, and organization skills.

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