Non-mainstream Regional Education – Closer to Sources and Local Knowledge. Projects from Lower Silesia

Abstract

Local knowledge has been at the center of ethnologists’ interest since the time of Clifford Geertz. The search for a local interpretation of cultures, however, has not found a reference
in what is essentially local – that is, regional education. In this area, the “classical type” of the local memory of the past (“region – nation”) is the dominant one, i.e. elements of regional education are at the same time important components of national identity. In the multicultural Lower Silesia, post-war regional education was a tool for propaganda
of “the return of the Piast lands to the Motherland” and their “fusion” with the Motherland (i.e. cultural homogenization). Currently education about the region exists in a rudimentary
version. Some teachers try to fill in these deficiencies, within the framework of their competences and capabilities, by carrying out additional projects with their students and by
making use of the cultural and educational offer of cultural institutions. Animators associated with non-governmental organizations are also important initiators of such activities.
The authors, based on the experience and activities of the Ważka Foundation, present examples of non-formal educational activities in which ethnology along with “local
knowledge” and its narratives play a key role. Referring to their own experience, they also propose a bottom-up, participatory regional education, carried out in close contact with the field and with direct intergenerational transmission.