Journal of Educational Memory, Media, and Society

This article is based on an analysis of the treatment of the European Union in a sample of textbooks from Germany and England. Following contextual remarks about civic education (politische Bildung) in Germany and citizenship education in England and a review of young people's views, we demonstrate that textbooks in Germany and in England largely mirror the prevailing political climate in each country regarding Europe. At the same time, the analysis reveals a disparity between the perspectives presented by the textbooks and young people's views. The textbooks in Germany provide more detail and take a more open approach to Europe than those in England. Finally, we argue that the textbooks may be seen as contributing to a process of socialization rather than one of education when it comes to characterizations of Europe.

The progressive digitization of society is irreversibly changing education. Specialists in teaching methodologies are having to address questions raised by the digital revolution in schools and develop appropriate training for teachers. This article responds to this revolution by proposing that smartphones be used to support digital teaching and learning processes in extracurricular learning settings. Specifically, it presents digital city tours as potential tools designed to help learners to explore the urban space integral to their living environment, recognize its historical dimension, and work on this dimension by developing digital narratives. The smartphone is understood here as a tool that makes it possible for learners to experience history and that encourages them to develop learning skills.

In recent decades, the impact of postmodern approaches to history teaching has triggered an extensive worldwide debate that accommodates diverse and contrasting voices. This article examines how the education system of Religious Zionism, one of the most important ideological movements in Israel, copes with this issue. This inquiry, which is based on Peter Seixas's conceptualization, analyzes the system's history curriculum, its latest textbooks, and an array of lesson plans. The analysis reveals a complex method of coping with postmodernism, including the adoption of clearly postmodern attitudes at the declarative level and the neutralization of their influence in practice.

In the nineteenth century, Anastasios Diomedes Kyriakos, a Greek professor of theology at the newly founded University of Athens, wrote a much heeded scholarly work of Greek ecclesiastical history. Kyriakos had been profoundly influenced by his German Protestant theological predecessors whose ideas, including those about Byzantium, found their way into his work, such that Byzantium was presented as an empire in constant decline. This article addresses the question whether this negative presentation of Byzantium was also adopted in Kyriakos’ school textbooks for ecclesiastical history at a time in which Byzantium was generally perceived proudly as part of Greek national historiography and identity.

Anastasios Diomedes Kyriakos, griechischer Theologieprofessor an der neu gegründeten Universität von Athen, verfasste im 19. Jahrhundert ein bedeutsames akademisches Werk für Kirchengeschichte. Sein Werk war sehr stark von seinen deutschen, evangelischen theologischen Vorbildern geprägt, was sich nicht zuletzt bei seiner Byzanz-Darstellung niederschlägt, denn genau wie seine Vorbilder zeichnet er Byzanz als ein Reich im stetigen Verfall. Der vorliegende Aufsatz befasst sich vor allem mit der Frage, ob diese negative Byzanz-Darstellung auch in Kyriakos’ Schulbüchern für Kirchengeschichte tradiert worden ist, in einer Zeit, in der Byzanz eigentlich mit Stolz als Teil der griechischen Nationalgeschichtsschreibung und Identität betrachtet wurde.

In addition to offering insight into the discipline of sociology, sociology of education textbooks constitute a major source of sociological knowledge. This article examines the scholarly content of Indonesian sociology of education textbooks by focusing on the degree of commonality between their core content and sources, and between their core content and academic scholarship. The results of this examination reveal a low level of commonality among the core contents of the seven selected textbooks—a heterogeneity that reflects not so much the plurality of Indonesian society and educational institutions or the application of sociological theories and approaches required by the Indonesian curriculum, but rather the diversity of the textbooks’ sources and their authors’ scholarly publication records.