Education and Controversial Topics in Post-conflict Societies: The Coexistence and Memory Project in Contemporary Teacher Training in the Basque Country

Effects of a teacher training programme on historical awareness skills, controversial issues and gender in secondary education

“…Historical awareness as an interpretative filter [11] or temporal compass [12] is an interesting strategy in teacher education to address controversial issues, allowing the possibility of avoiding surprises and dealing with them appropriately when they arise spontaneously in the classroom or are deliberately raised on the basis of curriculum development [25,36] . In all of these topics, gender and its diversity, conflicts or symbolic and physical violence are issues inherent to all historical societies, which is why they must be visible and intentionally dealt with in the teaching of social sciences from interdisciplinary integrated models and perspectives [27,[32][33][34] . In this sense, in order to avoid "exclusionary impartiality", "exclusionary neutrality" or "impartial neutrality", we believe it is advisable to adopt the position of "committed impartiality", operationalizing historical thinking and multi-perspective in the teaching-learning process.…”

“…Social and historical problems, present in all societies, can be characterized locally and globally from political, economic, social and cultural dimensions. From this perspective, ignoring conflict and not facing these problems undermines the sense of democracy [32,33] . Another pressing problem is the loss of teachers' autonomy to work on controversial issues [34] .…”