Journal of Educational Memory, Media, and Society

Multimedial and multimodal communication arouse interest in many fields of research today. By contrast, little attention is paid to multimodality in relation to designs for learning, especially in relation to representations of knowledge on an aggregated level. By analyzing three multimodal texts about the Middle Ages, including a textbook, a film series and a museum exhibition, this article provides insight into the role of multimodal designs for learning in a school context.

This article examines public education and the establishment of the nation-state in the first half of the nineteenth century in Switzerland. Textbooks, governmental decisions, and reports are analyzed in order to better understand how citizenship is depicted in school textbooks and whether (federal) political changes affected the image of the “imagined citizen” portrayed in such texts. The “ideal citizen” was, first and foremost, a communal and cantonal member of a twofold society run by the church and the secular government, in which nationality was depicted as a third realm.

This article examines how digital media interact with collective memories and teaching practices by exploring a selection of Wikipedia articles that describe the capture of Lviv by the Germans on 30 June 1941. This event constitutes an important episode in the history of Ukraine and a complex case of violence that produced several controversies concerning the national historiographies of the Second World War in the post-Soviet region. Using a combination of qualitative and quantitative metrics, this article investigates how the event is represented in different language versions of Wikipedia and assesses what kind of memory is produced by each of them.

This article examines the visual construction of the myth of the Albanian national leader in history textbooks. By applying visual social semiotics, it explores the function and usefulness of this myth during the critical years of Albania’s self-isolation from 1978 to 1990. Depicted in recurring episodes that were decisive for the existence of the national community, a capable leader emerges as its savior. His figure is perceived as a symbol of unity and as the only actor able to pave the way toward a bright future. This article argues that this myth served to legitimize power and secure social cohesion.

Dieser Beitrag untersucht die bildliche Repräsentation des Nationalsozialismus in Geschichtsschulbüchern der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik (DDR) von 1960 bis 1988 mit inhaltsanalytischen Verfahren. Dabei kann gezeigt werden, dass die Schulbuchabbildungen die DDR-eigene Deutung des Nationalsozialismus plausibilisieren und legitimieren. Nationalsozialistische Täterschaft wird durch Bilder zumeist mit dem Wirken von “Kapitalisten” in Verbindung gebracht, während bei den Verfolgten eine hierarchische Abstufung zwischen “antifaschistischen” und jüdischen Opfern erfolgt. Lediglich in der letzten Ausgabe vor dem Ende der DDR findet sich eine leichte Verschiebung des Narrativs. Zudem wird unter Bezug auf den geschichtsmethodischen Diskurs in der DDR untersucht, wie die Didaktisierung der Bilder im Schulbuch zur Vermittlung dieses Deutungsmusters beiträgt.

Many scholars working on history education have stressed that, in order to “do history,” a congruent relation between substantive and procedural knowledge is required. In response to this argument, this article emphasizes the need to consider pupils’ relations to substantive knowledge. With reference to history textbooks currently used in Germany, it demonstrates how the introduction of substantive knowledge with the help of the logic of “historical thinking” derived from expert discourses may obstruct the process of historical thinking. Finally, the article presents alternative approaches and their possible consequences for history education.

How do two Swedish secondary school teachers relate to and make sense of history via their experiences and educational media? This article seeks to gain knowledge about history education by analyzing two teachers’ narratives of their personal experiences of the Cold War and classroom observations of the teachers in practice. The article finds that the teachers’ narrations of personal experiences and observed teaching resemble the dominant historical culture of the Cold War in Swedish education. On this basis, the author discusses the importance of the critical awareness of historical culture in order to further a complex understanding of history.