Integrating innovative theories and practices in historical culture and education

The central aim of this project is setting up a gender balanced, international, interdisciplinary and inter-sectoral network of organisations to produce new knowledge, both theoretical and applied, in the field of historical culture and education studies. This, in order to improve the role of historical representations in present democratic and reflective societies. Enveloping both formal and informal contexts, in which views on the past are disseminated, this field invites a closer collaboration of academics and practitioners working in historical museums, heritage environments, historical reenactments, memorial sites and schools. A total of 23 institutions in Europe, Africa, Australia, Canada, Israel and Latin America will be participating in MAKINGHISTORIES. Special attention will be paid to the presence of gender history in formal and informal educational environments and to how they could further develop in this respect. Also, the importance of understanding the challenges of globalisation and global history will be considered. In both cases, introducing these two rather new and innovative historiographical approaches has the purpose of contributing to the renovation of historical culture environments and the present uses of history representations. Furthermore, the project aims to study how innovative dialogical and multi-perspectivist practices might affect historical representations. This project will produce research articles, books and digital media (short videos, podcasts, audio-guides and multimedia history textbooks chapters) for disseminating and communicating these efforts, expanding a dialogical view of formal and informal contexts of history education. These digital media will be produced in the context of a CPD to improve skills of practitioners and that will continue to be on-line after the project is over, essentially contributing to the project’s self-sustainability.