DVV International Ukraine and the All-Ukrainian Association of History and Civic Education Teachers "Nova Doba" are completing a joint online course for secondary school teachers, "Propaganda (in/of) History." This course is a part of the international project "A Toolkit for Critical History Teaching" financed by the Federal Foreign Office of Germany.
The course explored the challenges associated with using history in political propaganda. Over several months of classes, the participants got acquainted with the various dimensions of propaganda and discussed the tools to combat it. During the course, special attention was paid to the search for working methods that allow debunking historical myths within the framework of school history classes. In particular, the participants talked about the peculiarities of Soviet propaganda: its visual images and markers, propaganda in the media, and dangers of "public history."
The course lecturers were well-known Ukrainian historians and teachers: Anton Liahusha, Olha Koliastruk, Ella Sytnyk, Liudmyla Makhun, Liudmyla Panchenko, and others. The format of the classes was built in such a way that the participants interacted with each other as much as possible, not just listening to the lecture material but also taking part in discussions.
The most active participants were invited to one of two offline reflection seminars held in April-May 2024 in Lviv.
More than 170 persons from different regions of Ukraine have participated in the course. Currently, the participants are preparing their own mini research based on the knowledge and skills acquired during the course.
DVV International Ukraine and "Nova Doba" have already released a manual, "Totalitarian Propaganda. Lessons of Ukrainian history of the 20th-21st centuries", the materials of which formed the basis of the online course. Another textbook from the project team and course authors will soon be available to explore the phenomenon of "historical propaganda" from a more academic perspective.
The main partners of the project are DVV International, Koerber Foundation, and EUSTORY. The project is implemented jointly by DVV International representative offices and local NGOs: Teachers Association “Nova Doba” (Ukraine), The National Association of Young Historians of Moldova – ANTIM (Moldova), Soviet Past Research Laboratory (SovLab) and GAHE - Georgian Association of History Educators (Geogia), and "Hazarashen" Armenian Center for Ethnological Studies (Armenia). In the framework of the project, the Ukrainian project team holds history competitions for youngsters.