During a meeting held at the Institute for Development of Pre-University Education of Sarajevo Canton – an advisory, educational and coordination body for starting and steering the growth and development of the educational system – participants stressed the need for teachers to use the Database of Judicially Established Facts, arising from previous evaluations filled out by educators to whom BIRN BiH had presented the materials.
Institute director Senada Salihovic said it was a pleasure to offer to teachers an innovative, yet verified, working material.
“We gladly support and participate in projects which will be based on high pedagogical and scientific standards, as a guarantor of development and progress of society as a whole. Our mission is to motivate teachers for further training, although they are already doing an excellent job,” Salihovic said.
In March 2023, Balkan Investigative Reporting Network of Bosnia and Herzegovina BIRN BiH presented its Database of Judicially Established Facts about the War in BiH.
This contains information from all Hague Tribunal verdicts about crimes committed in the 1992-5 war, video testimonials from survivors and victims tailored to pupils, as well as lesson plans containing activities, to help teachers and professors give lessons about topics from the recent past.
“We are pleased that as many teachers as possible will use our database. Our goal is to start working on its expansion soon, by means of drawing facts also from verdicts passed down before the State Court and other courts in the region, in addition to those from the Hague verdicts,” BIRN BiH director Denis Dzidic said.
The October workshop for teachers in Sarajevo will be run by representatives of the Institute and BIRN BiH who worked on compiling the materials, alongside professor Melisa Foric-Plasto.
For the purposes of this project, she has prepared a 200-page document containing lesson plans with learning activities and concrete examples of events from the past war.