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

“Learning for Peace” is a research project led by Dr Erzsebet Fanni Toth at the Faculty of Psychotherapy Science. The aim of this Erasmus+-funded international cooperation is to understand and utilise discourses on traumatic experiences in education in order to prevent conflicts in the future.

The first workshop with international experts from the fields of psychotherapy science, psychology, social sciences and history took place on 23 March 2023 at the SFU Vienna. The focus of this meeting was on the creation and evaluation of best practices and projects on trauma narrative, processing and education.

In September 2023, a multilingual facilitator platform and training took place in Bratislava, Slovakia, where trauma-informed guidelines were developed with the participation of educators from the formal and civil society sector.

Project team

Project Lead

Assistant Professor Dr Erzsébet Fanni Tóth, M.A.

is the head of the Institute for Transgenerational Trauma Transfer Research, coordinator of the English-language doctoral programme in psychotherapy science, and lecturer in research methods and university didactics at Sigmund Freud University in Vienna. She studied psychology and cultural anthropology at Utrecht University in the Netherlands, sociology and sociocultural anthropology at Central European University, and earned her PhD in psychotherapy science from Sigmund Freud University.
Contact: erzsebet.toth@sfu.ac.at

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Project Team

Ágnes Székely

has an academic background in teaching, language and linguistics. Inspired by her interdisciplinary interest in psychology, sociology and linguistics, she has worked as a researcher for the European Roma Rights Centre and the Hungarian Institute for Educational Research and Development. She has translated several literary novels and non-fiction books on social psychology. As part of an international refugee aid project, she observed political, legal and organisational changes in the field of migration and refugees. She is currently writing her doctoral thesis in Vienna on the experiences of people who “wonder across languages”.

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Nicole Chew-Helbig

is a certified Gestalt psychotherapist from Singapore, practising in Singapore and trained at IGWien / Sigmund Freud Private University Vienna, Austria. She is a published psychotherapy researcher specialising in Therapeutic Autoethnography, a method she developed and published at PhD level. Nicole has been running a private practice in downtown Singapore since 2019. Her research interest is in practice-based, culturally appropriate research.

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Method

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

Question(s) and hypotheses

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.

Project duration

1 Jan. 2023 – 31 Dec. 2023

If you are interested in the project, please contact Ass.-Prof. Dr Erzsébet Fanni Tóth at erzsebet.toth@sfu.ac.at.


 

* This project has been funded with support from the European Commission. This publication reflects the views only of the author, and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein.

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