ABSTRACT
The study focuses on the development of media literacy in teaching history, and such literacy is understood to be an integral part of historical literacy. By the end of their education, students should be capable of addressing different historical issues and problems by means of critical analysis of sources, taking their own position on the past and engaging in historical and commemorative culture. Such engagement with historical culture means that students should know how to approach diverse forms of remembering the past and its various depictions in the present. Media literacy thus represents the students’ ability to systematically and critically analyse (deconstruct) the depiction of the past in the mass media and in so-called unconventional histories or pop-history (comics, films, fiction, PC games, selected social network accounts, etc.) as well as their ability to work with such depictions. Media reports and the products of pop-history are a means of processing and distributing historical information, the primary goal of which is not historical education. A component of the analysis of pop-history is determining the addressee of the work, the intention of the creators, the processes of creation, the nature of the work and its individual elements (historical, creative, authentic, interpretative, significant, supplemental). The connecting link with historical literacy is the way in which a specific depiction can help students create an image of history (construction) and how it can help them talk about history (reconstruction). On this basis, the study analyses the comic book Slovenské dejiny v obrázkoch [Slovak History in Pictures] as an illustrative example of developing media literacy in a school environment. This is the first work of its kind on the Slovak book market, and research and didactic attention has not yet been devoted to it. The study analysis focuses on key events in the 20th century history, which are given special attention in school education. The carried out media-historical analysis within the framework of deconstruction has identified stereotypical, polemical, misinterpretative, and conspiratorial parts of the comic book, which students can rewrite according to their current state of knowledge after prior instruction. The comic book also contains fragmentary or blank spaces that can be filled in during teaching with students’ own creations. As part of this activity, students construct an image of the past and reconstruct it into a media output, thereby forming their media and historical literacy and exploring their intersections and differences.
KEY WORDS
Comics. History. Media Literacy. Pop History. Slovak History. Twentieth Century.
DOI
https://doi.org/10.34135/mlar-25-02-13
Pop-History as a Training Ground for Media Literacy (Comics in History Teaching) © 2025 by Peter Vanek, Michal Veselei, UCM Trnava is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International license.