Erasmus+ | Learning for Peace (third-party funded project, finished)

Project Lead

Project Team

This is not a traditional research project: a substantial part is dedicated to social impact, stakeholder engagement and dissemination – in other words, a complex research design rather than a specific research method.

Short outline of steps: 

1. Desktop research
2. Engagement of experts at the workshop in Vienna, see report Learning for Peace – 1st Project Report (PDF)
3. Development of expert recommendations guidelines
4. Discussion of guidelines with experts and stakeholders from the formal and non-formal educational sector in the Central and Eastern European region (workshop in Slovakia)
5. Formulation of evidence-based recommendations, methodology and toolkit on the implementation of oral history (accounts of traumatic, conflicting past) in formal and non-formal education (NGOs, museums etc. working with children and youth)
6. Throughout the project: working with experts, who are expected to publish in academic journal

We are working with the following complex problem: despite the fact that interviews with survivors of trauma (e.g. Holocaust, World War II, revolutions, etc.) have been recorded, these interviews are largely archived in the databases of academic institutions. This valuable information is therefore not available to the general public, who could benefit from it. In terms of methodology, we found that most trauma interviews were conducted by historians who are trained in researching the past, but generally do not recognise the potential devastating psychological impact of verbalising long-repressed trauma.

We at the Institute of Transgenerational Trauma Transfer Research are focusing on various sides of the utilisation of oral history narratives:

• that of the interviewer (who might suffer from secondary traumatisation if left unsupervised by a mental health expert),
• that of the interviewed, who might be triggered and retraumatised by the interview situation and the detailed set of questions, and
• that of the receiving end, the educators and their pupils/students, who are afraid of the traumatic accounts and without guidelines, are prone to avoiding first-person accounts of the past, preventing them also from teaching and learning from the past.

The overall aim of the project is to integrate records of past conflicts into educational programmes so that people can engage more critically with history and thus with the current populist, aggressive political trends that have been proven to have plunged societies into wars and economic crises in the past. We want to use discourses of traumatic pasts in education to avoid conflicts in the future. The outcome of the project will therefore be recommendations for educators on how they can make concrete use of records of past conflicts.

1 Jan. 2023 – 31 Dec. 2023

• Learning for Peace – 1st Project Report.pdf
• Final Project Report.pdf

• Arts-based Trauma Research – Video Workshop for Teenagers
• Launch of the Erasmus+ Project “Learning for Peace”
• First Workshop of the Erasmus+ Project “Learning for Peace”
• Second Workshop of the Erasmus+ Project “Learning for Peace”