Educational Platform Presentation and Discussion

We invite you to join the conversation about the educational platform of the Center for Urban History and to discuss the capacity of digital technologies in humanities, especially in the context of the growing role and importance of digital and online education.

Our educational platform is an initiative under development. It targets various academic communities, and more broadly educational environments, both globally, and in Ukraine. Our focus is on a city in the 20th century in terms of spatial, visual, and everyday dimensions. The attention to microhistories of places and people will allow new visions on global historical processes of the century, not excluding big stories, but adding to them a perspective of everyday routines and local aspects. The approach will help modern processes to assume the agency of Ukraine and of a broader region of Eastern Europe though the comprehension and elaboration of the past, both in academic and in public domains.

At the meeting, we will briefly present the logic and structure of the educational platform and discuss its further prospects, possibilities, and applications. One focus, among others, will be on online formats and digital tools that have a capacity and demand for humanities. Moreover, it is an opportunity to remotely benefit from the best practices in the current necessitated quarantine restrictions.

We will show you the selected multimedia stories created on the basis of Lviv Interactive with the help of the StoryMaps tool, and discuss the particulars of their usage in different educational settings. Another focus area is the digitalized visual materials. Under the Ivan Lysiak-Rudnytskyi Programme, we had a chance to make available the materials of Lviv television for 1950-1970. They will contribute to research and teaching of the history of Lviv and Ukraine, and also add new aspects to such disciplines and specializations as media history, visual studies, Soviet history, history of the everyday, and urban history. International audiences will gain better access to the collections of interviews about the everyday life and the turning points in the history of the last century. They give voices to different people and their experiences, thus creating an inclusive area to build a historical narrative. Open access of international audiences to the video stories of the project "City and Art on the Edge" (2019) will help visualize the history of the little known art practices in the 1980s Soviet Ukraine and of a broader period of transformations. In addition, it can help include the stories for the rethinking of the history of culture in the second half of the 20th century.

We expect the educational platform will become an easily accessible, flexible, and useful tool for anyone researching and working with history.

The presentation of the publicized materials and the educational platform will involve the team of the Center for Urban History who worked on the project: Sofia Dyak, Bohdan Shumylovych, Oleksandr Makhanets, Taras Nazaruk, Natalia Otrishchenko, Khrystyna Boyko, Viktoria Panas, and Maryana Mazurak. The talk will also be joined by prof. Mayhill Fowler from Stetson University who has rich experience of teaching to students from the USA and Ukraine, including the courses she developed on the basis of the materials from the Center for Urban History.

The event will take place online via zoom. Please, register to join.

Working language - English.

The event is part of the project "Urban 20th Century: Spatial, Visual, Local, Everyday" implemented under the Lysiak-Rudnytsky Ukrainian Studies Programme at the Ukrainian Institute.

Credits
Cover image: Students in Lviv 1950s. Collection: H.S. Pshenychnyi Central State Cinema, Photo and Phono Archive of Ukraine // Urban Media Archive