Bi-lateral History Textbooks - Achievements, Lessons Learned, Perspectives, Challenges

The proposed panel will discuss the history of bilateral textbook commissions and their products - bilateral school history textbooks, from both didactical perspective (as innovative teaching/learning tools), but also seen as political endeavors, as steps on the path of mutual dialogue and understanding left by the older generations for the younger ones. Experiences from existing commissions will be shared with the aim to initiate discussion on the emerging or desired ones that can benefit not only from the material results of the work done, but also from know-how, strategies adopted and rejected, difficulties and the ways to handle them, taking into consideration the variety of educational traditions, school practices, cultural phenomena and political circumstances. Our particular hope is to initiate the dialogue of the bilateral textbooks to be developed in Asia, with the use (and adaptation) of the European experiences. The CISH conference, with the mediation of the International Society for History Didactics and institutional support of the Georg Eckert Institute in Braunschweig (world leading center of textbook research), will create fruitful working atmosphere for a smooth start of such an exchange. Each of the European panelists will present the historical background of the bilateral commission they participated in, with a special emphasis on the lessons learnt from the process of textbook development and implementation. The Asian participants will refer these presentations to their national and regional contexts, assessing the potential and challenges of undertaking similar projects in relation to Korean-Japanese, Korean-Chinese, or Chinese-Japanese history textbooks.