Shaping the past [electronic resource] : collective memory, history education, and student imaginations about World War II in contemporary Poland

In this dissertation I attempt to move beyond traditional approaches to research about the teaching and learning of war and difficult history. My dissertation, Shaping the Past: Collective Memory, History Education, and Student Imaginations about World War II in Contemporary Poland, uses innovative research methods, analyzing seven textbooks, interviewing 60 teachers, and surveying nearly 176 students to examine how public debate and media influence what students know about wartime history. In the first part of this work I examine history textbooks published over the course of four decades. Textbook content has changed significantly over time, reflecting global trends in education, words are replaced with images, military heroes replaced with civilian ones, the books got shorter, and the Holocaust finally appeared as a historical topic after the year 2000. However, the World War II narrative within these books continued to privilege a Polonocentric version of the wartime past. Next, I examine teacher motivations to teach the Holocaust in Poland. I interviewed, sureveyed, and emailed a select group of educators who elected to teach the Holocaust in their K-12 classrooms. Unlike their Western counterparts, Polish teachers were not motivated by a desire to spread ideas about human rights or tolerance (as literature on Holocaust education suggests). What drove them was a desire to understand themselves, their family histories and their students, as well as to fill a gap in their personal history. In the second part of the dissertation I examine the relationship between young people's understanding of the country's troubled history and national presentations of the past. The analysis of 176 Polish student responses to iconic World War II era photographs, their written surveys, and essay narratives illuminate shared cultural narratives about war. Most students glossed over the complexity of the World War II wartime past, seemingly impervious to the influence of media and international attention to Polish-Jewish relations and the Holocaust. At the same time, analysis of student data unearthed dissonant responses from a small but important subset of students who demonstrated a recognition of the Holocaust and the Jewish-Polish experience. This recognition was in the form of budding "counter-narratives, " or interpretations that went against what is commonly believed in Polish society. Thus, in order to overturn previously accepted historical narratives about the difficult past, it may be necessary to introduce dissonance into the classroom that will build new knowledge. By analyzing Polish textbooks, teacher practice, and student understanding I sought to explore the role that collective memory, public debates and history play in education about a difficult and controversial past. My goal has been to use these findings to contribute to research on collective memory, and history education as well as to East European society and politics.

Keywords: Education.
Advisor: Wineburg Samuel S. primary advisor. Thesis advisor
Wotipka Christine primary advisor. Thesis advisor
Ramirez Francisco O. advisor. Thesis advisor
Weiner Amir