African-European School Dialogue
Duration: 2023-2025
The project aims to bring together teachers and students within secondary school education from Cameroon and Switzerland to facilitate a reciprocal dialogue on how teaching and textbooks address the respective other context (teaching about Africa in Europe, teaching about Europe in Africa) and to develop new teaching and learning materials that offer new insights and perspectives into lived realities in both contexts. As textbook analysis has shown, geography textbooks for example continue to address “Africa” from a Eurocentric perspective, whilst in some African contexts, the teaching about Europe has been completely suspended or marginalized. This leads on both sides to distorted perspectives, which can turn into socially and politically problematic ways of thinking about the other.
A design thinking approach leads the teachers of two schools in Cameroon and Switzerland through the project. Online and onsite workshops bring teachers of two continents together to empathise with each other and the respective other context, to reciprocally work against biases and to jointly develop new teaching content and methodology. As well as online collaboration, onsite visits in Switzerland and Cameroon allow teachers to acquire experience-based learning about the respective other context.
