Research project from UC will provide open educational resources on Portugal and the Holocaust

Projects "The Holocaust in Portuguese" and "MemoMarranos" have just received funding from FCT

LC
Lorena Caliman
19 march, 2021≈ 4 min read

The availability of open educational resources on the Holocaust in Portuguese and the production of knowledge about the "Marranos" in Portugal are at the center of two research projects from the University of Coimbra recently funded by the Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT). The projects "The Holocaust in Portuguese: a dynamic repository of educational resources" and "MemoMarranos" will last for one year and were selected from the National Program around the Memory of the Holocaust, a special support program for R&D projects launched in 2020.

Open access educational resources

The project that focuses on providing educational resources on the Holocaust in Portuguese is coordinated by the retired professor at the UC Faculty of Arts and Humanities (FLUC) and director of the Centre for Social Studies (CES), António Sousa Ribeiro. The repository to be developed within the scope of the project will function "as a dynamic archive directly capable of being used as an educational resource in Portuguese", as described by António Sousa Ribeiro to Notícias UC. The idea is, with the project, to fill a gap with regard to the educational resources available in the field of the Holocaust teaching in Portuguese, taking into account the international recommendations and practices and the "Recommendations for Teaching and Learning the Holocaust" issued by the Ministry of Education of Portugal.

The repository will be structured as a guide, which will provide access to extensive documentation, and offer systematic guidance for the production of content and strategies appropriate to each particular context by teachers and educational agents.

Collaborative research on the Portuguese "Marranos"

The other UC project approved in the special support Program focusing on the memory of the Holocaust in Portugal is the "MemoMarranos", coordinated by the researcher at the Centre of 20th Century Interdisciplinary Studies (CEIS20) and professor at FLUC, João Paulo Avelãs Nunes. The project's area of ​​activity is a "collaborative investigation that promotes the best practices of knowledge exchange", as described on the FCT webpage. In practical terms, it intends to "identify the relevant documentation for the production and dissemination of more scientific knowledge about the evolution, from the beginning of the twentieth century to the present day - with emphasis on the 1930s and the Holocaust period - of Portuguese classifiable as 'Marranos' ",informed Avelãs Nunes. That group of Portuguese people, explains the researcher and professor, would be citizens descended from the "Jews" (until 1496) and the "new Christians" (16th to 18th centuries) who would have lost touch with the essential part of Sephardic culture [Iberian Peninsula Jewish culture] and with other segments of the Jewish Diaspora.

The project will be dedicated to identifying and characterizing "oral (memory and post-memory), written (handwritten and printed), graphic, audiovisual and material documentation that is relevant", as highlighted by the project coordinator.

In total, the two projects will receive around 66,000 euros for their development.