Dear colleagues,
Dear students,
Dear friends,
It is a great honour and pleasure for us to
have here today, in our Department of Elementary Education of the Aegean University ,
at the borders of Europe , Professor Doctor
Falk Pingel.
He is one of the distinguished
historians in the field of the Nazism period, concentration camps and the
Holocaust. Moreover, he is one of the most emblematic figures of the Georg
Eckert Institute and, in my opinion, he is the social scientist who has opened
up new prospects and horizons in the research of history textbooks and teaching
methods as well as in historical education as a whole.
I would like to underline his recent
contribution which could possibly turn out to be his major work concerning the
pedagogical approaches to “sensitive” and traumatical historical facts in conflictual and post-conflictual situations.
Personally, I am very concerned about this research field. Working together
with professor Dimitris Mavroskoufis and my colleagues and collaborators in our
Department, Panagiotis Gatsotis and Elli
Lemonidou, we are currently authoring a book (to be published soon) which is
very closely related to the Professor Pingel‘s interests. Therefore, we are in
many ways indebted to Professor Pingel. With his work, Professor Pingel
encourages us to handle the history teaching and learning not as something
which separates, but, on the contrary, as something that connects peoples.
It is very interesting for me that
Professor Pingel is a well-known historian who focuses on History Didactics. His
work connects the epistemology of history and the spirit of New History with
the social memory and the school history. In his approach, the History Didactics
derives from the body of historiography and not vice versa.
In the era of symbolic wars about
history and culture all over the world, Professor Pingel pursues the utopia of
a common European historical culture and education, as a means for the
construction of the European identity, as well as the promotion of the
consequent humanitarian interests.
Here, in our Department, we love
utopias, visionaries, and dedicated hard-working historians and educators. We appreciate
social scientists fighting for the ideals of truth, freedom, peace, justice, solidarity,
and emancipation. Therefore we respect
historians who approach historical knowledge as a common good.
Dear Professor Doctor Pingel,
You are more than welcome in Rhodes .
Thank you so much for having accepted
our invitation.
Your audience today is made up from
colleagues coming from different scientific fields, teachers in service
training, postgraduate and undergraduate students.
We are looking forward to an
interesting exchange of ideas.
I call upon you to take the floor.
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