070242 SE Seminar Source studies and critique (2026S)

Course objectives, content, and methodology

The aims of the course are to
- acquire knowledge of different types of sources and learn to assess their significance and scope for the development of historical narratives,
- access written, visual, audio, and film sources, including digital archives, and to contextualize them critically,
- create awareness of the challenges, problems, and opportunities of the current media transformation in history and citizenship education,
- develop theoretical understanding to and reassess the social and cultural dimensions of historical sources in the digital age,
- make a critically justified choice of topic in a selected subject area and be able to relate it to current discourses in historical research
- elaborate a selected topic coherently for G/P teaching from a subject-specific and didactic perspective.
- Identify and reflect on practical possibilities for integrating digitized (primary) sources into G/P teaching.

Content
Participants work on selected historical (primary) sources related to the overarching theme: “Protest cultures from industrial society to the digital age – a historical comparison.” Starting with the phase of rapid industrialization in the late 19th century, relevant protest movements of the 20th and 21st centuries are explored by comparing the organizational and communication structures of these movements. After preliminary clarification at the beginning of the seminar, primary sources on the following topics will be critically analyzed and contextualized according to the latest historical didactic criteria: the labor movement (history of May 1), the women's movement (struggle for equal access to university education), human rights movements of the 1960s, peace movements of the 1960s and 1970s, LGBTQI+ movements; environmental protection movement of the 1980s; climate protection movements after 2000, anti-racism movements in the 21st century.
Historical narratives have a decisive impact on the way people perceive the world. Changes in historical cultures go hand in hand with fundamental social and political transformation processes. A critical and reflective approach to historical narratives and the underlying historical sources is therefore of central importance for the teaching of history and political education.

The course will
- present and discuss both theoretical and practical models of source analysis and critical assessment of evidence in terms of their relevance to contemporary changes in historical studies.
- present current approaches to the contextualization of historical sources from a social and cultural studies perspective, evaluate their theoretical relevance, and apply them in practice.
- present various types of digital historical archives and evaluate them in terms of possibilities and challenges for their application in G/P teaching
- present and critically analyze the “source material” in (digital) textbooks and other digitized learning materials from a historical and political didactic perspective.

Methods
Content inputs/lectures, presentations, group work, team teaching, discussions, various feedback methods, portfolio work, reflections.
The course is accompanied by Moodle and is partly held in a blended learning system: face-to-face blocks, online training, planning for teaching practice.