Eckhardt Fuchs

Leibniz Institute for Educational Media | Georg Eckert Institute

Eckhardt Fuchs is Director of the Leibniz Institute for Educational Media | Georg Eckert Institute and Professor for History of Education/Comparative Education at the Technical University Braunschweig. He has worked in a variety of academic institutions and served as a visiting professor in Sydney, Umeå, Tokyo, and Seoul. He has been serving as a textbook expert for many international organizations and has been leading bi- and multilateral textbook commissions in Europe. His research interests include the global history of modern education, international education policies, curriculum studies and textbook development. He has published about ten books and 200 articles and chapters on these issues including The Palgrave Handbook of Textbook Studies (2018). He served as president of ISCHE from 2012 to 2015.

Plenary speech

Title: 

The Representation of the 'Other' in German Textbooks and in a European Perspective

Abstract:

First, the lecture provides an introduction to the current state of textbook research in Germany. It will focus on the portrayal of “the other” in German textbooks, with a particular emphasis on such topics as “diversity,” “religion,” “anti-Semitism,” or “racism.” As these topics are currently the subject of heated debate in German society against the backdrop of Germany's development into a migration society, school textbooks are faced with the question of how to deal with these controversial issues in the classroom.

The second part of the lecture will deal with current developments in Europe in history teaching and focus on two multilateral activities: the Observatory on History Teaching in Europe (OHTE) of the Council of Europe and the European Forum of Reconciliation and Cooperation in History and Social Sciences Education (EFREC). Founded in 2019, the intergovernmental OHTE aims to provide overviews of history teaching in European countries through general and thematic reports in order to deepen cooperation with the goal of a common European understanding of history. EFREC is an initiative of the Georg Eckert Institute together with civil society institutions that since its founding in 2020, complementing the efforts of OHTE, has been seeking to highlight examples of best practice in textbooks in overcoming differences in the culture of remembrance in Europe and to develop proposals for overcoming them.