Time Travellers – The European Perspective

The training aims to deconstruct one of the sources of nationalism and racism, which is the concept of national history as provided in the framework of most curricula in European countries nowadays. The training course "Time Travellers - The European Perspective" aims at transferring a methodology to implement and strengthen youth work in the field of remembrance and commemoration. It builds on the principals of living memories by putting young participants into the center of their own and genuine historical perspective and to create a personal and a local context of historical experience. In result national history, which is in many cases also the history of living conflicts, retreats and personal history becomes the defining angle. This training course is aimed to transfer a large number of non-formal methods, which we have developed over the course of time and activities. We will introduce participants and their organisation to the different approved methods, techniques and activities, as well as means of dissemination and exploitations of our results. The ultimate aim is to motivate and equip the participants to apply these tools in their own local and regional environment with their youth and to promote the principles of peaceful remembrance. Thereby they can support dialogue in their own societies and an atmosphere of understanding and last but not least a renewed curiosity for often underestimated topics of history: social development, emancipation, human rights and European common values.

The Training course will take place in Ključ, Bosnia and Herzegovina. Participants should be mainly from youth organisations that want to improve their profile through new approaches in the field of remembrance work and anti-racism trainings and youth work in intercultural contexts.

Participants will have a personal experience of the former war torn Bosnia and Herzegovina. The will learn new skills of research borrowed from social sciences that improve their experiences in needs assessment of future project. They will learn the methodology of "time travelling" into personal and local history. The impact on the local surrounding will be that of recognition and respect. The organisations will profit from new ways of approaching anti-racism and trainings against xenophobia. Participants will be introduced to new applications and methods to improve the visibility of their own rural surrounding.