School classrooms across Europe are continuing to become more and more diverse. At the same time, controversies over contested historical legacies in public spaces worldwide have increasingly led to contestations over cultural heritage and conflicts over the interpretation of national histories. Monument(al) Challenges, collaboratively implemented with the Contested Histories Initiative and funded by the European Union, aims to respond to some of the challenges educators across Europe face in teaching history. Specifically, we strive to address teachers’ requirements for resources and training materials that equip them with the skills to discuss sensitive and complex histories, including colonialism and slavery, in their classrooms.

Following the project’s main objective of empowering and equipping educators to teach about contested histories through place-based learning, the educational materials explore and suggest innovative pedagogies that educators can further develop and adapt. This toolkit has been designed to provide educators in formal and non-formal settings with resources and suggested guidelines to help meet their needs when teaching and learning about contested histories.

The toolkit will be soon translated and available in different languages.

  • The use of popular games to develop basic citizenship competences
  • Building Technological Bridges with History: the use of digital learning platforms to promote tailored History Education
  • Feeling the Museum: putting oneself in the shoes of students with special needs to understand how to provide the best didactic experience possible
  • Students as Mediators of Conflicts
  • Find out what New Students Bring to the Classroom

    As a response to an increase in new students in the Swedish educational system, the Swedish Board of Education tasked a group of schools and universities to find a way to assess what newly arrived students know in order to provide the best possible education for each student, as well as focusing on their strengths rather than their weaknesses. This resulted in the formation of materials for conducting discourse around history for the purpose of assessing the historical competencies of newly arrived students. This is done in the form of a 70-minute conversation between a teacher and a student. The assessment is meant to provide valuable insight into what the students are already familiar with, so that teachers can take this into account when creating lesson plans.