Against this background, the Lebanese Association for History, is an initiative on behalf of a group of history educators and academics to fill in the gap and advance an approach to history as a discipline. This approach stresses that a consensual narrative is contra to the nature of history, or even an oxymoron. A single narrative limits opportunities to nurture historical thinking and prepare individuals to think critically and creatively about issues affecting their current lives. The existing single narrative, used in most Lebanese schools, provides children with no opportunity to do what historians do, like search for evidence, question interpretations and answer big questions. Instead, they learn only to remember information in order to recite for exams. Another approach to learning history exists. It is through this disciplinary approach that children learn the science of thinking and behaving as responsible historians. LAH’s mission is to introduce this approach into Lebanon’s values of advancing education to higher standards and fostering a generation of individuals capable of managing difficult and complex understandings of our history of diversity, conflict and change.
Change happens at many levels. At the policy level, we have gridlock. Therefore, our mission at LAH is to begin the change at the grassroots level, with teachers. We do not aim to change practices of all history teachers in Lebanon. Instead, our theory of change is a much longer yet sustainable process. We believe that change happens when teachers become experts by learning through their practice. We work with teachers who find great interest and value in children historical mysteries that question causes, changes and other historical concepts. We invest in these teachers. Countries around the world, whether developed or affected by armed-conflict, have shown that these high-impact teachers learn to become curriculum writers that governments value and rely on during the curriculum design and production phases. So, our vision is to shift from learning history using only one story to learning history as a discipline by supporting teachers in professional development to become high-impact agents of curricular change. LAH is focusing on two main strategies to ensure that change takes place. On one hand, we are advancing a disciplinary approach to history education; on the other, we are focusing on highly motivated teachers who are willing to make and lead the change.
In Lebanon, we have tried to teach the students history through a single narrative approach. Through this, students have one version of history that has been carefully constructed and that has acquired a kind of «national» consensus at some point in time. This approach presents only one narrative or story of the past, history is factual not problematic, children only learn how to remember events and accounts, and to reproduce them exactly as they appear in textbooks without any personal enquiries, interpretations or reconstructions of the past. Indeed, they do the exact opposite of what historians do. Historians answer genuine questions about the past by examining evidence and different interpretations using historical concepts that require higher levels thinking. So, while a single narrative approach tries to bring communities together by remembering a set of historical events that a group of people find to be free of conflict, children miss out on learning experiences rich in critical thinking and collaborative learning. Instead, they only learn how to reproduce others’ interpretations of the past, which is a practice that contrasts any democratic form of living. A disciplinary approach to learning history requires that children demonstrate their abilities to read information responsibly and use historical concepts to make arguments using evidence. Some fundamental historical concepts include (1) causation (explaining what caused an event); (2) change and continuity (describing changes that took place); (3) significance (examining what was important for whom); and (4) similarities and differences (comparing and contrasting). A classroom model that focuses on history as a discipline involves focused conversations among learners, collaboration in the process of exploration, development of communication and problem solving skills, and expansion of the moral and ethical spectrum of the young learners. This approach is currently adopted in many developed countries. However, countries that have experienced wars like Lebanon have also succeeded in shifting from a single narrative approach to a disciplinary one such as Cyprus and Northern Ireland. This shift took many years, and in many cases highly motivated teachers who struggled to make the change in their classrooms eventually won the confidence of their governments and wrote their national history curriculum. This is why our second strategy is to work with teachers who are highly motivated because they are essentially the curriculum writers.
Since its creation in 2013, LAH has organised a number of professional development activities and programs focusing on historical thinking involving hundreds of teachers. In the first phase, we have focused on a small group of motivated teachers who went through an intensive full-year training program that enabled them to shift their teaching by adopting a disciplinary approach and to produce educational units that focus on the development of historical thinking. This first phase also resulted in the identification of three novice trainers who joined the LAH team in phase II. In this second phase, LAH aimed at spreading regionally. A module consisting of three full-days workshops was offered in Baakline, Tripoli, and Kfarjawz. One hundred twenty history teachers participated in this program that provided an introduction to historical thinking and strategies to apply it in the history classroom. Interest was raised among teachers who realised that there is a path out of the curricular deadlock and a chance to develop history teaching in spite of the conflicts that keep appearing on the national level. The third phase that will be launched during the 2016–2017 academic year will provide once again a more focused and intensive training to a group of forty history teachers, identified as highly motivated and capable. The aim is to enlarge the training team thus to provide a core team that can be eventually at the service of the ministry of education in the process of the making of the history curriculum, and its implementation.
© Artwork by Lebanese illustrator Rodrigue Harb
Successes and challenges
Since LAH started its journey, there have been stories of success and failure which provide much food for thought for any future attempts to develop history education in Lebanon. One of the success stories resembles in the courage of one of the teachers Amira Hariri to address the causes of the Lebanese war by building and applying an enquiry based unit. As Christine Council from the University of Cambridge who led the teacher training programme in 2014, put it «her [Amira’s’] students were able to use disciplinary thinking, in a purposeful way, to find the necessary intellectual distance and rigour with which to discuss a complex and contentious topic of immense important in her own country. I began to see that a disciplinary approach had given her the intellectual tools to assist her moral courage». This teacher was supported by her school administration to try a new approach to teaching history. While some teachers were able to take courageous steps to move away from the one narrative history, others found it more challenging. Some participants were often very taken with the innovative and active pedagogies that were used to model approaches to historical thinking […] sometimes, however, these were mistaken as the core purpose, rather than their curricular object – historical thinking or historical argument. Many were preoccupied with implementing and finishing the textbook on time. Some teachers were reluctant to challenge and revisit their practices. Others were sceptical about students’ abilities to construct their own interpretations of historical events. Having the humility to question one’s practice was a key challenge to trying new ways of teaching history.
While we know that we have a long way to achieve our objective of revising the discipline of history and depoliticising it, we know a bottom up and collaborative approach with policy makers is going to make this journey shorter and more successful. For that we count on courageous history teachers and historians as well as policy makers who are willing to revisit decades of conventional thinking which have been stifling progress in this field.
Dr. Bassel Akar Assistant Professor NDU
Dr. Maha Shuayb Director of Centre for Lebanese Studies
Nayla Hamadeh Educational Consultant
All authors are founding members of the Lebanese Association for History
