International Bureau of Education

The research project entitled Learning to live together through the teaching of history and geography was undertaken jointly by the IBE and the University of Geneva under the leadership of Professor Antoine Bailly, Head of the University's Department of Geography. This project is based on the idea that the society of the future will be one in which, more than ever before, we must live as a community and also on the conviction that the teaching of history and geography can play a key role in learning to live together, in as much as they make a major contribution to forming our image of others.

The final report of the symposium, which was produced in French only, is now out of print on paper. It is made available on this site in portable document format.

A summary of the outcomes of the research project and of the symposium held on 12 June 1998 at the IBE are presented in the IBE's newsletter Educational innovation and information, no. 95, June 1998. A French version is also available.

The subject is also the theme of the Open File of Prospects: quarterly review of comparative education, vol. 28, no. 2, issue number 106, June 1998.
 

As a follow-up, from 30 August to 17 December 1999, the International Bureau of Education organized an Internet forum (listserv) on the following theme: The teaching of history and geography for learning to live together.

More than eighty people were registered. Most of them were history and geography teachers working in Belgium, Cameroon, France, Islamic Republic of Iran, Netherlands, Portugal, Senegal, Spain, Switzerland, the former Yugoslavia, not forgetting Canada (all discussions took place in French).

The discussions were organized on the basis of files, drawn from a textbook prepared by a team led by Professor Bailly. These files, intended for history and geography teachers at the primary and secondary levels, describe themes to be taught that are considered to be essential for our knowledge, understanding and dissemination of values for peaceful co-existence and mutual respect. They have been designed to stimulate the teachers' creativity. It is their task to adapt and enrich the ideas contained in the files, according to their resources, their classes and their historical and geographical scenarios. Twelve files in all were selected, dealing with the following themes: Identity; Places of national significance; Frontiers; Peace; Globalization; Sustainable development; Democracy; Foreigners; Other cultures; Stereotypes; Humanism; and Nationhood. Each file is made up of a first part that presents the objectives, the definitions and the questions posed by the interpretation of the theme, and a second part that suggests theoretical guidelines and some examples.

During the four months of the forum, all participants received one file per week for comments. Leadership of the discussion was undertaken by Professor Bailly's team, particularly Yves André and Bernard Ducret, who were also responsible for making regular summaries of the different subjects taken up and which were distributed among participants.

The second project sought to identify research and information needs with a view to educational decision-making. On the basis of comparative research comprising about fifteen national case studies on links between decision-making, research and information provision and the results of an inquiry on opinions of various actors involved in information production, dissemination and utilization, the project endeavoured to:

• a) provide a diagnosis of the present situation of information utilization in decision-making world-wide;
• b) promote, as a possible solution to problems encountered, a dialogue between those responsible for formulating policies and those who put them into practice; and
• c) organize encounters between the different actors involved and offer courses on current developments in curriculum development issues

This third, completed, project related to multicultural education involved about 13 countries and was mainly devoted to studying the mental conceptions and attitudes of future primary level teachers in multicultural situations and primary level pupils' mental conceptions of the sciences and, in particular, of sustainable development and the improvement of the quality of life. The main objective of the project was the development of teacher training strategies and curricula to handle science education in multicultural societies. The research was based upon a questionnaire that was applied to non-representative samples of teachers and pupils in ten countries from various regions of the world.