With this goal in mind, the Goethe-Institut Cairo together with the Egyptian Ministry of Education are launching the "Discovering History” project. Pupils aged between 10 and 17 will be encouraged to learn history through research and discovery. The project offers children and young people the opportunity to gain a personal connection to the diverse history of their own country. In particular, looking into the past can help to understand today's events and challenges for Egyptian society and to better perceive and classify different interpretations of historical events.
In a first step, workshops and training sessions for Egyptian history teachers, representatives of the Egyptian Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Antiquities will be conducted with various partners, such as the Rheinisch-Westfälische Technische Hochschule Aachen and the Friedrich-Schiller University Jena. They will be trained as tutors for research-discovery teaching methods so that they can best support the pupils in preparing their entries for the history competition. The possible formats as well as the evaluation criteria of the competition will be jointly determined within the framework of a kick-off event. The tutors will simultaneously play the role of multipliers and will disseminate the learned knowledge through regional teams in Delta, Alexandria, Cairo and Upper Egypt.
History competition
Following the model of the German Federal President History Competition (which is run in Germany by the Körber Foundation), Egyptian young people will take a step back from rigid memorisation and learn to independently formulate questions about the past, as well as to question it through their own research - for example by using local sources, conducting eyewitness interviews or visiting historical sites. The selected methods will not come from history books but instead from research-based learning.The nationwide history competition will be launched Mid-March 2022. Egyptian students can participate by preparing and submitting entries alone or in groups.
In autumn 2022 the three best entries at the national level will be honoured as national prize winners in an award ceremony at the Goethe-Institut Cairo. The works of the national award winners will be also presented in three-minute videos. The videos are part of the award and will serve to publicise the history competition on the homepage and through social-media.
Discovering history is a project of the Goethe-Institut and supported by the German Federal Foreign Office.
