Blinken OSA’s Accredited Education Program for Teachers

Research Room

This Saturday, Blinken OSA starts its accredited education program for teachers in its original format for the last time. A new course is being prepared, we will report about it soon.

About the course:
Titled “Scopes and Constraints in 20th-Century Hungarian History,” the 30-hour long, free-of-charge, accredited teacher education program for history teachers will start this Saturday. The two lecturers of the course are historians András Mink and Krisztián Ungváry, the course will run between October 17, 2020 and February 20, 2021.

The Hungarian political community is divided along apparently irreconcilable narratives and interpretations of its 20th-century history. One of the main goals of this training is to offer helpful tools to explore the reasons behind this divide, as well as to ensure the development of an open, tolerant but at the same time critical thinking.

The classes take place at Central European University. Exploring the collections of the Archives offers a unique opportunity to present and analyze the historical questions at hand. After getting acquainted with the source material, teachers will be able to introduce these sources into their own curriculum. The training ensures the professional exchange of ideas through lectures, panel discussions, source analysis, and the presentation of best practices—and will thus rely significantly on active participation.

The course focuses on 20th-century traumas that generated radically different interpretations in Hungarian historical memory, triggering heated debates throughout the last century, and up to this day, such as the revolutions of the 20th century, the political system and the society of the Horty era, the Kadar era, the Rákosi dictatorship, and the process and dilemmas of the 1989 democratic transition.