“Europe – Our History”, a textbook on European history created by a joint project team of Polish and German experts working together, is the continuation of a dialogue conducted over a period of decades by historians, geographers and history educationalists, primarily in the context of the Joint German-Polish Textbook Commission. The creation of a concept for a textbook on European history suitable for use in both German and Polish schools has represented a beneficial and productive new stage in the Commission’s work.
In December 2007, the foreign ministers of Germany and Poland signalled their political support for the development of a joint Polish-German textbook. Accordingly, at the beginning of 2008, the governments of the two countries agreed upon the creation of the requisite organisational basis for the project. On the German side, the Federal Foreign Office and the Standing Conference of the education ministers of the German federal states, with the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sport of the Federal State of Brandenburg acting as lead, assumed responsibility for the project. Their counterparts on the Polish side were the Ministry of National Education, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage. Additionally, the project received substantial support from the Foundation for Polish-German Cooperation. The two heads of the German-Polish Textbook Commission oversaw the project’s academic side, ensuring it benefited from the right expertise. Academic coordination of work on Volume 1 was in the hands of the Leibniz Institute for Educational Media | Georg Eckert Institute in Braunschweig, Germany, and the Centre for Historical Research in Berlin of the Polish Academy of Science. The institutional framework of the project comprises two panels or committees: a ‘steering committee’ and an ‘expert panel’. In 2010, the latter of these issued recommendations which laid the conceptual foundations for the textbook series which has now come into being.The series, planned to encompass four volumes, is a joint Polish-German product in more than one sense. The close cross-border cooperation between the publishers Eduversum and Wydawnictwa Szkolne i Pedagogiczne, the work’s authors, academic coordinators and experts for the various eras covered, while vital, is only part of the story.
Webseite
https://en.europa-unsere-geschichte.org
Runtime
2012-2020
Contact
Project Results
View the textbook Europe - Our History
Learn more about the German-Polish Textbook Commission
[The description of the activity, individual projects and products is based on the content of the Initiative's website.]
