DOCUMENTARY FILM, PUBLIC HISTORY AND EDUCATION IN NORTHERN IRELAND

This 'follow-on' project builds on the success of the original project 'Documentary film and the public communication of historical knowledge in Northern Ireland'. It does so in order to engage with new audiences and forge new pathways to impact. It proceeds from the assumption that to maximise the potential of film to facilitate historical understanding in a post-conflict context we need to forge more effective partnerships between historians, film-makers, broadcasters and educationalists. This entails building on existing partnerships and working with new partners in order to exploit new opportunities for public engagement. The question of how we make sense of our past always looms large in Northern Ireland. One of the major challenges presently facing Northern Ireland is how to remove the barriers to engagement with our shared history that exist within a divided society and a largely segregated second-level education sector. In a contested society - albeit one that has reached certain political accommodations - the interrogation of history can play an important role in the process of reconciliation. Knowledge transfer in this case is intimately linked to a broader social pedagogy of reconciliation. Film and the moving image have an important role to play in promoting knowledge and understanding about the past in a post-conflict society, with documentary film playing a key role in this. Documentaries addressing historical topics have long been a staple of British and Irish public-service broadcasting and have provided a valuable means by which historians bring their scholarly research to the attention of a non-academic audience. Indeed the evidence is that the general public, and in particular young people, increasingly get their historical information from broadcast and film sources (and from the internet). But are the current models of collaboration originated by broadcasters the best ones to maximise this knowledge-exchange process? If historians are to engage with television history on a more effective basis - particularly when this involves understanding history in a divided society - then perhaps we need more effective model of collaboration between historians, media makers and educationalists. The follow-on project has the following key elements: 1. Wider dissemination of the original project outcomes through film-festival screenings, broadcast, DVD/blu-ray publication of the film element and enhanced website provision of interpretative material for educational use. 2. Partnerships with a major EU-funded curriculum project and educational initiative 'Teaching Divided Histories' to utilise the initial project outcomes and additional curriculum material in secondary education in Ireland, north and south. 3. Exploiting the international platform and community nexus provided by the Derry-Londonderry City of Culture 2013 programme for a series of events concerned with public history, popular memory and film. 4. Development of a further 'live project' case study 'Rebel Voices: Easter 1916' linking the historical research of Dr.McGarry (Rebels: Voices from the Easter Rising (Penguin, 2011) and The Rising. Ireland: Easter Rising (Oxford University Press, 2010) with the film-making of Professor Des Bell in a knowledge transfer project designed both to address the issues arising from public commemoration of the centenary of the Easter Rising, and to further elaborate a model of good practice guiding collaborations between historians, film-makers and educationalists.