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Via HISTOLAB, the Council of Europe and the European Union are developing a toolkit to debunk fake news in history classes in cooperation with the DICSO research group (University of Murcia, Spain). This toolkit will consist of 11 learning-activities that aim to develop competences in the treatment of historical information, in the recognition of fake news and hate speech from history. The research group in charge of designing, implementing, and evaluating this toolkit is composed of secondary school teachers, and researchers on history and history education. Researchers from Europe (Portugal, the Netherlands, Spain, England, Ireland and Sweden) are participating in this design, while researchers from Canada and the US are participating as expert reviewers.
To evaluate the effectiveness of these learning-activities, and the complete toolkit, a teacher training course will be designed so that teachers can implement the activities in their own classrooms.
The finalised subjects and titles of each of the 11 activities are as follows:
- The debate on the role of Spain in the transatlantic slave trade
- War propaganda: the sinking of the Maine, 1898
- Spanish flu or 1918 flu? Information under the influence of the war effort.
- Wartime propaganda: the German Corpse Factories during the First World War (1914-1918)
- Boycott of the 1936 Olympic Games
- Fake news about refugees: the reception of republican exiles in France in February 1939
- Fake news about the suffragette movement
- The role of disinformation in the consolidation of totalitarian states: the Soviet Union under Stalin
- Memory and history of the Holocaust: Evidence and denial
- The Roma Holocaust
- The use of disinformation against migrants during the UK referendum on leaving the EU (Brexit)
Education in democratic values in history lessons, the capacity to evaluate the reliability of sources, and the training of teachers and students to recognise sources or narratives that have been manipulated will be the three axes that will make up the toolkit of activities with the goal of learning how to debunk fake news and hate speech through history.
For more on the purpose of the toolkit, check out this article written by our expert group.
Also, feel free to read our press release.
The toolkit is scheduled for release in the autumn this year.
