Resources
Explore a wide range of valuable resources on GCED to deepen your understanding and enhance your research, advocacy, teaching, and learning.
21 Results found
What Shall We Tell the Children? International Perspectives on School History Textbooks The pages of this book illustrate that as instruments of socialization and sites of ideological discourse textbooks are powerful artefacts for introducing young people to a specific historical, cultural and socioeconomic order. Crucially, exploring the social construction of school textbooks and the messages they impart provides an important context from within which to critically investigate the dynamics underlying the cultural politics of education and the social movements that form it and which are formed by it. The school curriculum is essentially the knowledge system of a society, incorporating its values and its dominant ideology. The curriculum is not "our knowledge" born of a broad hegemonic consensus, rather it is a battleground on which cultural authority and the right to define what is labelled legitimate knowledge are fought over. As each chapter in this book illustrates, curriculum as theory and practice has never been, and can never be, divorced from the ethical, economic, political and cultural conflicts of society, which have such a deep impact upon it. Individuals cannot escape the clear implication that questions about what knowledge is of most worth, and about how it should be organized and taught, are problematic, contentious and very serious. (By the author) 
Rewriting the nation: World War II narratives in Polish history textbooks This chapter examines the processes of rewriting nationhood in educational narratives regarding the Second World War (WWII) in Poland. Using mixed methods, this case study analyzes narrative change in state-approved history textbooks published between 1977 and 2008, thus covering the period of political transition from a communist to a democratic Poland. Although trends in learning theory and international norms suggest that attention to diversity should have increased in textbooks, in Poland these trends have been subsumed by more long-lasting Polish specific cultural tropes. WWII narratives, in particular, emphasize an ethnically homogeneous nation. Throughout the 31-year sample, educating youth about WWII in Poland continues to be focused on reclaiming “Polishness” rather than on espousing global understandings and citizenship. (By the author) The Presentation of the Holocaust in German and English School History Textbooks: A Comparative Study As textbooks are one way of teaching and influencing pupils’ learning, this paper aims to examine critically and compare the presentation of the Holocaust in English and German textbooks. To set the scene, the paper investigates the theoretical and methodological background of textbook analysis. This is followed by a description of the sample and method chosen for this study. The analysis concentrates upon the question of culpability for the Holocaust in German and English textbooks and reasons for this. The paper concludes by exploring the possible effects the presentation of ‘blame’ for the Holocaust has upon the pupils who read textbooks. (by the author) 
Optimising learning, education and publishing in Africa: the language factor; a review and analysis of theory and practice in mother-tongue and bilingual education in sub-Saharan Africa Year of publication: 2011 Author: Adama Ouane | Christine Glanz Corporate author: UNESCO Institute for Lifelong Learning (UIL) | Association for the Development of Education in Africa (ADEA) This analytical review consists of three sections. The first section lays the theoretical foundations and is covered by Ekkehard Wolff and Kathleen Heugh: 1) language politics and planning in the light of development and 2) theories of bi- and multilingual education models and their implementation in the African context. A second section analyses teaching practices and classroom interaction in schools in two chapters by Birgit Brock-Utne and Hassana Alidou. This is followed by a review of the use of African languages in literacy and non-formal education by Hassana Alidou1 . Next, a review study by Kathleen Heugh addresses the critical issue of costs by assessing the costs related to implementing mother tongue and strong bilingual education programmes. Finally, the third section explores the role of locally-based multilingual publishing in supporting and promoting African languages and developing the language industries and the creative sector. Here, Yaya Satina Diallo from Guinea and Peter Reiner2 from Namibia shed light on the promise and pitfalls of publishing in African languages.Each of these sections focuses on theoretical frameworks and specific strategies designed to optimise learning and education in multilingual Africa. The language issue is dealt with at the levels of: policy and development; costing and financing; educational reform and governance; education models; classroom interaction; formal and non-formal education settings; literacy and publishing. 
Unmasking Racism: Guidelines for Educational Materials Year of publication: 2024 Corporate author: UNESCO These Guidelines developed by UNESCO provide recommendations on how to combat racism in textbooks and to develop learning materials that are free of prejudice and bias and do not perpetuate stereotypes or legitimize unequal social structures. Through a comprehensive analysis of recent studies of textbooks and other educational materials, the guide also demonstrates how countries around the world address racism and racialization. It increases awareness and improves our understanding of how racism manifests in educational materials, and aims to support education stakeholders to promote just, peaceful and multicultural societies. Textbooks and the Holocaust in Independent Ukraine: An Uneasy Past The article examines how Ukrainian history textbooks dealt with the Holocaust between independence and 2006. The analysis reveals two major, conflicting narratives about the Holocaust, though both externalize and relativize the Holocaust. As a template for understanding genocide, the Holocaust was applied to the Soviet-imposed 1932-33 famine in Ukraine, the Holodomor. The emphasis placed on the famine in both narratives partially obscures the Holocaust and in propagating the Judeo-Bolshevik myth, turns Jews into leading perpetrators of the Holodomor. In the Ukrainian case, the complex relationship among history, historical culture, and contemporary politics is compounded by the familiar tension between national history and the international reality of the Holocaust. The historical Sovietization of Holocaust victims was attacked by historians in the Ukrainian diaspora who resented the accusations that Ukrainians were collaborators and fascists. They sought to replace the Soviet historical narrative with one that made Ukrainians the central victims, not perpetrators. Ukraine's own nationalization of the Holocaust functioned in much the same way as the Sovietization of the Holocaust. Nationalization, obfuscation, and an implicit competition among victim narratives all contribute to the relatively complicated place of the Holocaust in Ukrainian historical narratives. (By the author) An Unimagined Community? Examining Narratives of the Holocaust in Lithuanian Textbooks 2011 marked 20 years since the collapse of the Soviet Union. This represented a change not just in the content of education or ideologies, but in the relationships between individuals, institutions and systems. During this time, the post-Soviet Republic of Lithuania not only had to reimagine its national identity in a local context, but it also had to reimagine itself as a community within the political, economic, and historical imaginations of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the European Union (EU). Therefore, in Lithuania, as in many other post-Soviet countries, debates over which events should or should not be included as part of the national identity, and thus represented in the school curriculum, are more than just discussions about educational content; they are debates over the moral legitimacy of certain narratives and the ability of sovereign states to define them. (By the publisher) A ‘Curtain of Ignorance’: An Analysis of Holocaust Portrayal in Textbooks from 1943 through 1959 If textbooks are supposed to be an honest and impartial portrayal of historical events, they should remain the same over time. However, when examining one event across different editions of the same textbook, it becomes apparent that this is not the case. This study seeks to examine how the beginnings of the Cold War may have influenced how the Holocaust was discussed during the 1940s and 1950s. Results indicate that as Germany transformed from an enemy to be defeated into an ally needed to stop the advance of Communism, discussion of the Holocaust became more muted. While the beginnings of the Cold War may not be the only factor in this phenomenon, the results of this study indicate a methodological process in which textbooks could be used to create critical and historical thinking in today's classroom. (By the author) Naming and misnaming the nation. Ambivalence and national belonging in German textbook representations of the Holocaust At a time when the power of schools and both state and federal education authorities to guide young people’s sense of belonging is being challenged by multilingualism, by the claims of supra- and subnational regions and minorities, by memories of national catastrophes and crimes, and by out-of-school educational media, this collection of essays provides an apposite exploration of the ways in which shared narratives continue to be transmitted and learned. Its authors, whose work emerged from a series of conferences organized by the French National Institute for Pedagogical Research in Lyon, Barcelona and Paris in 2010, demonstrate not only ways in which multiple disciplines (including history, literature, social and language studies) address young people’s sense of attachment, but also how challenges to educational policy are reflected in school textbooks and curricula in Algeria, Bulgaria, Catalonia, France, Galicia, Germany, Quebec, Senegal and the USA. These studies about the role of education in relation to largely tenacious but shifting national identities should appeal to specialists of education, nationalism studies, history and political science. (By the author) 
Thinkpiece on education and conflict Year of publication: 2009 Author: Lynn Davies Corporate author: UNESCO This paper looks first at the learning sites generally (violent schools, schools as a weapon of war, curriculum and textbooks). It then focuses on specific groups in conflict – gender, language, refugees, child soldiers. Thirdly it discusses education policy and donor intervention; and finally talks of the role of research. All these overlap hugely. This is not a prescription for how the Global Monitoring Report should be structured, but identification of themes and lessons learned that seem the most significant.