TLP is collaborating with Turkish and Greek high school teachers, to give young people the skills to come up with their own narratives on Lausanne, challenging narratives that foster nationalism and xenophobia.
Our work with high schools began in 2022, when we prepared a set of four lesson plans intended for Turkish and Greek high schools. These plans were trialled at three schools in late 2022/early 2023. The materials included archival material that had yet to appear in any scholarly publication: rather than being presented with outdated historical scholarship, students were able to use the latest historical findings to reach their own conclusions about what happened a century ago, and why it matters today. The success of this pilot encouraged us to see if we could collaborate with teachers to produce similar resources that could be shared (in Greek as well as Turkish) on both sides of the Aegean.
Phase 2 of the project was a workshop held in Lausanne in July 2023, to which we invited high school history teachers from Greece and Turkey. Follow-on funding from SIAH and Utrecht University’s Public Engagement Fund as well as in-kind support from the Musée Historique de Lausanne (MHL) and Pädagogische Hochschule Luzern created an opportunity for teachers to share their experiences of teaching Lausanne and the population exchange, to establish ties with colleagues across the Aegean and to brainstorm ideas for teaching materials, materials that have since been developed into a second suite of three lesson plans. A second workshop, this time with students, was held in Istanbul in February 2024 and the third again in Lausanne in June 2024.
During these workshops, hosted by the Turkish History Foundaiton and MHL, teachers and pupils were given a selection of sources and invited to discuss how they might use them in their classrooms. These included written testimonies from both sides of the population exchange, as well as material culture (cherished items exchangees had carried with them on their journey, and passed to their children), music, and the built environment (the settlements created to house incoming refugees). Rather than focusing tightly on the traumatic experience itself, something which dominates the teaching of Lausanne in Greek schools, we explored ways of broadening the parameters, so that students explore what came before and after the exchange itself. We also thought of how we could encourage students to historicize concepts such as “nation” and “refugee”, in a way that might allow them to explore the similarities between the refugee crisis of today and that of a century ago – without falling foul of anachronism, of seeing these as identical episodes.
As İsmail Demircioğlu’s research has noted, Turkish history pedagogy has struggled to instill the critical thinking skills necessary to foster active citizenship. Students tend to be presented with a monovocal master narrative, without being encouraged to reflect on the role such narratives play in nation-building and identity politics. One teacher involved in our trial put it simply: “The education system in Turkey is generally based on memorization. The teacher tells, the student listens.” Greek history education is also highly centralized, and shares a tendency to focus on military, political and diplomatic history. These aspects do not feel relevant to today’s generation. The population exchange affords an opportunity to introduce young people to material culture, oral history and local history, mapping the events recounted in their textbooks onto their own family histories, and the histories of their own communities.
While we are well aware of the many constraints, not least a shared tendency to “teach to the test”, workshop participants felt that the population exchange was one historical episode from Greece and Turkey’s shared past that was potentially less encumbered by state-sponsored narratives. As the teachers discovered, the population exchange is barely mentioned in Turkish high school history textbooks, and hence affords a promising sandpit in which to develop the critical source-based skills that students can go on to apply to other historical topics.
TLP’s first Teacher’s Packs are prepared by Dr Elena Stevens, Subject Lead for History at St Philip Howard Catholic High School. Elena completed a PhD in modern British history prior to entering teaching in 2016, and has since established a reputation as a leading innovator in teaching practice. Alongside contributions to the online journal Practical Histories her books include 40 Ways to Diversify the History Curriculum (2022). Rather than simply feeding pupils knowledge, the lesson plans place an emphasis on the skills needed to enable students to sift historical evidence and reach their own conclusions.
If they are to be successful, our initiatives need to foster a culture of co-creation among teachers, pupils, and university researchers. The political scene in both countries presents opportunities, as well as challenges to this work. In addition to creating and distributing innovative teaching materials TLP is exploring the possibility of fostering direct classroom-to-classroom exchange across the Aegean, in which they present their perspectives on the population exchange and other aspects of this shared trauma of World War 1. Thanks to funding from Utrecht University’s Community Engaged Learning programme, UU university students are now helping us with the preparation of new lesson materials under the supervision of pedagogical experts. We are also preparing a teacher’s book, that combines our lesson plans as well as background historical and pedagogical essays in a single volume, to be made available for free in Turkish, Greek and English.
I was teaching the Lausanne conference by rote, not explaining the conditions of the day, and telling it from a single point of view. Now we have taken a multidimensional approach to Lausanne.
A teacher from Eskisehir, Turkey, on TLP’s lesson plans.
If you use these plans in your classroom, we’d appreciate having your feedback. Please send any comments to us at info@thelausanneproject.com
The Lausanne Project 