Authors

Tadeusz Wojtych¹;  ¹ Newcastle University, UK

Discussion

Coexistence with former enemies is at the centre of political debates in both Central Europe and Canada. Implementing reconciliation in curricula and textbooks is an urgent challenge for educators. Historians of education explored how textbooks from individual countries portray other nations. Transitional justice scholars analysed how post-conflict societies work towards reconciliation through Truth and Reconciliation Commissions (TRCs). However, scholars in these fields have not yet adequately addressed how reconciliation-oriented commissions affect the actual content and form of textbooks. The understanding of reconciliation is therefore based on the declarative statements of actors involved in it, rather than on an analysis of its specific results. My research makes a step towards filling this gap. I explore how reconciliation commissions affect the portrayal of former adversaries in history curricula and textbooks in Germany, Poland, and Canada – the few countries that over the past decade introduced reconciliation-driven changes to their educational materials.<

This paper argues that the structure of each education system determines its reconciliatory potential. As a step towards reconciliation, both Canadian and Central European textbooks increasingly more often incorporate information on the history of “the Other” and juxtapose different perspectives on the past (for example, artworks by Polish and German painters differently depicting the same battle, or different assessments of one event by settler and Indigenous historians). This fits well with the curricula in Poland and Germany, where students are supposed to memorise a body of information about the past and, in some cases, learn the skills of academic historians. Even though Poles and Germans may have different perspectives on the past, both nations share a similar understanding of history as a discipline. In contrast, white settlers and the Indigenous peoples often operate within different epistemological frameworks. Canadian history/social studies curricula are skills-based: they try to prepare students for successfully navigating modern Canadian society, shaped by centuries of colonialism. Merely by incorporating more Indigenous content, the colonial framework is not dismantled. Canada is therefore still far from weaving ‘Indigenous ways of knowing’ into its education system, despite calls by Indigenous educators to do so.

By analysing educational reforms in Central Europe and in Canada alongside one another, I reflect on the different meanings of reconciliation and on the lessons that one region may learn from the successes and failures of the other.