Abstract (300 words)
The relevance of education for sustainable development (ESD) and global citizenship education (GCE) has gained recognition in English Language Education (ELE) discourses, as well as in history didactics discourses. As the historical dimension should play a significant role in any cultural-learning program, it is of great interest to investigate how history-related pedagogical concepts could be integrated in language education for sustainable development, which is a research area that has remained unexplored so far. Aiming to address this research gap, our paper suggests ways in which the concept of “Geschichtsbewusstsein” can be conceptually incorporated in ELE to inspire content, material and task design that reflects on past, present and future to “empower individuals to reflect critically on the legacies and processes of their cultures, to imagine different futures and to take responsibility for decisions and actions” (Andreotti 2014: 29). More specifically, by drawing on theories from the realm of ESD and GCE (Andreotti et al. 2019) and ELE (Kramsch 2009; Marxl and Römhild 2023) and combining them with the theoretical framework of history didactics (Rüsen 1997), our paper will focus on the contribution and guidance that history didactics can provide when discussing eurocentrism and manipulation through language in the ELE classroom. Our initial research shows that the core philosophy of history-related pedagogical concepts overlaps significantly with ESD and GCE and promotes competences such as critical analysis of sources and of one’s own position that would provide teachers with meaningful guidance in going beyond mere “Informationsaustausch” (Kramsch 2009) in the ELE classroom.
Biographical Note
Mag. phil. Tamara Urach is a Pre-Doc researcher in didactics at the University of Klagenfurt focussing on video games, contemporary media as well as literary and cultural studies in a didactic context. Her current research focus in her PhD project is how ecocriticism can be taught via simulation games.
Iris van der Horst, BEd MEd, is a Pre-Doc researcher in didactics at the University of Klagenfurt. Her main research interests include global citizenship education and foreign language textbooks. Her PhD focusses on the depiction of global issues in ELT textbooks widely used in Austrian schools.
References
Andreotti, Vanessa de Oliveira. 2014. “Soft versus Critical Global Citizenship Education.” In Development Education in Policy and Practice, edited by S. McCloskey, 21-31. Palgrave Macmillan.
Andreotti, Vanessa de Oliveira, et al. 2019. “Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures. Global Citizenship Otherwise Study Program”.
Kramsch, Claire J. 2009. The multilingual subject. What Foreign Language Learners Say about their Experience and Why it Matters. OUP.
Marxl, Anika, and Ricardo Römhild. 2023. “Kritische Diskursfähigkeit im Fremdsprachenunterricht.” Fremdsprachen Lehren und Lernen 52 (1): 102-118. DOI: 10.24053/FLuL-2023-0008.
Rüsen, Jörn. 1997. „Historisches Erzählen.“ In Handbuch der Geschichtsdidaktik, edited by Klaus Bergmann et al.: 57-63.
| Keywords | Geschichtsbewusstsein, critical thinking, eurocentrism, history, English |
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