Study day for teachers: Using Football To Teach Modern History (by Erasmus University Rotterdam)

Making history concrete and close to one’s own experience: this is not always the strongest quality of our schoolbooks. On this special day, we will share experiences from the Football Makes History programme on how teachers can use sport and sports stories to say something about the history of the 19th and 20th centuries and make it tangible and relevant for secondary school students of both lower and upper grades. This keeps the subject ‘close to the learner’ and allows for complexity and multi-perspectivity.

Programme highlights

The role of sport in society
Sport is not an island, but a part of society. Developments in society have a major impact on how people can or want to do sport. Is sport part of a problem or is sport the solution?

Football and collective memory
From its inception, football has played a role in the formation of a collective memory, fuelled by personal memories of and stories about iconic matches, tournaments, incidents and heroes. Moving and thought-provoking stories that, put in a broader perspective, can illustrate Europe’s history in a way different from the traditional ‘canon’.

Iconic football moments as teaching material
Matches such as those during the 1914 ‘Christmas truce’ in the trenches, the myth of the death match in 1942, the 1974 World Cup with the ‘fratricidal struggle’ between the GDR and the GDR during the Cold War, can be the starting point for lessons that make pupils think in an original way and contribute to their empathy and historical awareness.

Objective & result

• Led by subject didactics and subject experts, you work on designing concrete lessons about football as a starting point for lessons about history.
• You learn more about iconic football moments and their broader 20th-century historical contexts.
• Based on this newly acquired knowledge, you design individual lessons and lesson series on the 20th century and on historical thinking and reasoning, using concrete and surprisingly appealing examples.