"Undermining National Narratives with Family Stories..."

Bob Mark taught history and English in the WAS/NS Primary School for 23 years and then went on to research the school for his Ph.D. in education at the Hebrew University. In 2017 WAS/NS sent Bob to the Pädagogische Hochschule in Luzern, Switzerland where he joined an international research group conducting a comparative study of issues that teachers face when teaching their country’s history. The result was the recently published book: The Teaching of the History of One’s Own Country: International Experiences in a Comparative Perspective, edited by Nadine Fink, Markus Furrer and Peter Gautschi.

Link for purchase on the publisher’s website

Contributions to the book came from Switzerland, Belgium, Canada, Cameroon, Japan, Korea, New Zealand, Serbia and Bosnia–Herzegovina. Bob wrote a chapter on Israel. It begins with a discussion of obstacles to critical history teaching in Israel and then goes on to describe an oral history project that he conducted in the WAS/NS School several years ago. The draft for his chapter is attached here.