Pamięć litewsko-polskiej przeszłości. Strategie i narracje nauczycieli historii w szkołach wileńskich

ENThe focal point of this dissertation is the history teacher and the narratives about the past taught during history classes. History classes are shown as a multivocal social event. On the one hand, schoolbooks, atlases, collections of historical source texts and educational movies tell stories about past; given that they are either prepared or approved by the state and its institutions, I consider them to be the state’s voice and view them as its official narrative. On the other hand, however, while analysing the situation of history classes we must not forget about teachers. I perceive them as a sort of “conductors” for the students, deciding what voices are present in the class and how they are shown to the youth. It is up to the teacher how schoolbooks are used, and how the texts contained therein are discussed. It is up to them to decide whether to present a historical event as crucial or as merely anecdotal and irrelevant. A teacher is perceived as a person who conveys a narrative concerning the past to the youth in a reflective manner. The subject of my research are narratives about past taught during history classes. I am also interested in discovering how history teachers take their stances on official narratives. The main investigative question answered by the work concerns the strategies adopted by history teachers towards the official narratives. First and foremost, what are they? Finding the answer to the presented question entails analysing the causes that influence the adoption of different strategies by teachers. The analysed issues are presented from the perspective of social memory studies. The narratives about the past taught during history classes were analysed as acts of conveying the cultural memory of a specific group – a nation.Socialising next generations of members of the national community has been acknowledged to be the main purpose of the narratives of memory prevalent in the schooling process. The aim of this thesis was to analyse the narratives and strategies used by teachers of different national identities. The research has been carried out in two secondary schools – one with Polish and one with Lithuanian as the language of instruction – operating in Vilnius. The capital of Lithuania is a place where conflicts of memory pertaining to the shared Polish-Lithuanian past may be observed; it was assumed that the situation of the memory conflict would result in more explicit changes to the strategies regarding the official narratives acquired by the teachers than in communities where such conflict was not present. The work is a result of studies utilising the triangulation of the following methods: in both schools, interviews were conducted with history teachers and their principals. Participant observations were also carried out by taking part in school ceremonies. However, the main method employed in the research was observation of history classes focused on the Polish-Lithuanian past taught by four teachers.