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- Are you a teacher, educator, or activist passionate about history education and human rights? Are you interested in different ways of combining these two fields?
- Are you looking for inspiration on how to teach in an engaging and unconventional manner about grand and complex history distant in time?
- But also how to teach about the often forgotten events and heroes of local history?
People are not numbers, and victims of evil are not statistics, but faces, dreams and personal stories. How can we then use biographies of real-life heroes and heroines to inspire students, social activists or local communities to take concrete actions?
To learn more we invite you to participate in the “History, herstory, our story. How to teach about the difficult past through bios and local history?” webinar!
The webinar will be livestreamed on our Humanity in Action Polska Facebook page.
Let us meet on the eve of the 77th anniversary of the liberation of the former German Nazi Concentration and Extermination Camp Auschwitz-Birkenau in an international group to share experiences and best practices in working with personal and local stories. Panelists will talk about different methods and contexts of using biographies in their educational work. In addition to their historical value, the biographies carry an emotional and cognitive load and can be a pretext for discussing not only the past but also the here and now. We will also talk about how personal, family and local histories can inspire action and how the past can influence contemporary activists.
Our speakers include dr Andrea Despot (Chief Executive Officer of the EVZ Foundation), dr Tomasz Cebulski (founder of Polin Travel), Antje Scheidler (National Director of Humanity in Action Germany, International Director of European Programs in Humanity in Action), Leonie Schöler (historian, journalist, influencer), Maximilian von Schoeler (Projects Coordinator in Centropa), Miško Stanišić (Director of Terraforming).
This webinar is an event accompanying the premiere of the educational-activist mobile app 11 STAGES produced as part of the „Break the Vicious Circle!” project.
In the app we present Dr. Gregory Stanton’s theory of 10 stages leading to genocide. To illustrate the individual steps and draw attention to the danger of history repeating itself, we focus on the biographies of people who during World War II did not remain indifferent, who stood up for human dignity and human rights, who opposed violence and injustice, and who with their courageous actions helped others.
You can download the 10 STAGES app for free in 3 languages: Polish, English and German.
Human rights are not (only) history, therefore in this application, we also refer to the reality that surrounds us and we show how certain thought patterns and specific actions aimed at stigmatization or discrimination manifest themselves today. Awareness of their recurrence and the ability to recognize them in time is the first step that each and every one of us can take in the fight for equality, dignity and justice.
We discussed these aspects, as well as combining history education with human rights education and activism, during the „Human rights are not (only) history!” webinar (in Polish), the recording of which you can find here.
