The course asks students to learn the history of humanitarian aid by simultaneously reading (seeing, listening, or watching), evaluating, explaining, writing, researching, making, revising, and reflecting thoughtfully. The course will help students become proficient in:
- Basic and recent knowledge about the history of humanitarian aid. This includes key concepts, events, people, points, argument, and generalizations
- Keys to make sense of today’s humanitarian aid and development, their mutations as a pluricultural society, their position in the world. That is to say, keys to uncovering the history behind the headlines, some distortions in the media version of history, and the roots of everyday customs and objects.
- Special attention to lost and retrieved memories.
- Main tools for historical research and the skills use them well.
- Skills to solve historical problems including the analysis and interpretation of historical documents, and the ability to make distinctions in the face of complex questions.
- “How do we know” the past: to question myths in the history of humanitarian aid and development effectively; to be mindful of the history of history; to make links with history learned otherwise, especially family and community memories.
- The main tools to organise historical findings.
- The main tools to present history in writing, orally, visually
- The links between history and other disciplines.
- The ethical issues of historical research
- The collaborative nature of knowledge and good ways to work collaboratively.