The Southeast European Joint History Project

Through creating materials and training teachers, the JHP offers children a chance to explore history from many different points of view, via sources from a variety of countries. In this way, the ethno-centric versions of the past that dominate history textbooks are challenged and children are encouraged to think, question and discuss in order to better understand their common past and shared future.

The project has been running since 1998 and at its core, involves a committed group of historians and educators from across Southeast Europe who have produced four supplementary history workbooks for schools, following a method of rigorous research, assessment, review and cooperative decision making. These workbooks span from the Ottoman Empire through to the end of World War II and are arranged thematically, with ideas for discussion, activities and ways to use the primary sources in the classroom.

Teacher training has taken place across Southeast Europe in order to assist teachers in utilising the interactive and multi-perspective methodologies and in finding ways to fit the materials into their curricula and class time.

A total of 70 JHP workshops have been held for more than 2,000 teachers in Southeast Europe and the workbooks are used in classrooms across the region, with the support of many Ministries of Education.

The CDRSEE has now embarked on the second phase of the JHP, creating workbooks that cover the Cold War and the Transition in Europe, including the wars of the 1990s, which is challenging but deeply meaningful, in process and result.

The goal remains the same -- show students that every story has multiple points of view, and then guide them to think critically and develop an understanding of how history is made. The founding fathers of the JHP believed that the only way to effect true reconciliation and peace in the Western Balkans was to reach the youth. This second phase of the Joint History Project, JHP II, again embraces that belief, and takes it a further, by addressing recent history that the young people of Southeast Europe have themselves lived, and in some cases, suffered.

JHP Books available under the following <link publications seite external-link>link.