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“Untold Stories | Forgotten Places of Memory” Free educational materials

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The ‘Untold Stories | Forgotten Places of Memory’ project implemented in collaboration with Humanity in Action Germany and Humanity in Action Netherlands in 2022 was intersectional and multidisciplinary.  The format we created made it inclusive and participatory and had a strong networking component. A great group of “changemakers” participated in the project: 12 educators, and teachers from Poland and Germany, teaching Polish, English, German, history, social studies and ethics. Their mentors and experts included Leonie Schoeler, Jason Francisco, Miriam Synger, Dr Małgorzata Kołaczek, Monika Mazur-Rafał, and Dr Magda Szarota. The project was crowned by the conference “UNTOLD HISTORIES Challenges, opportunities and tools in history and human rights education”, which took place in Krakow on 11.12.2022. As part of the project, the participants, with the substantive support of the HIA Poland team, created educational materials that each of you can download for free from our website! 

Our work on the educational materials was motivated by exactly the same idea as the planning and implementation of the entire project: learning about history, confronting the difficult past, and discovering forgotten and silenced stories is one of the best ways to understand and take a critical look at what is happening here and now, and thus to act thoughtfully and actively for human rights. That is why the lesson and workshop scenarios and presentations you can download refer to past events, but are enriched with contemporary elements based on human rights education. In addition to the lesson plans and workshops, ready to be used in the classroom, we have also prepared an educational video (in Polish with English subtitles) “Szlakiem Krakowskich Mezuz” (“On the Trail of the Kraków Mezuzahs”) https://youtu.be/2VMzzpssqX0 and educational materials (in Polish and English) based on it.

Although it deals with a fragment of the history of a particular city, it also shows universal methods of working with local history. In the video, you will find many tips on where and how to look for information about the former (Jewish, but not only) residents of your towns and cities. We hope that the film “On the Trail of the Kraków Mezuzahs” will inspire you to bring back the memory, but also to act for tolerance, diversity and human rights today! 

The results of the work of the participants of the project “Untold Stories | Forgotten Places of Memory” will be available free of charge in the form of an interactive online publication for each and every one of you.

The project coordinator is Larysa Michalska and the project is supervised by Monika Mazur-Rafal.