Confusing ignorance? The European refugee crisis in Polish textbooks

The European refugee crisis of 2015 had a profound impact not only policies, but also narratives related to migration. The article is aimed to analyse how the European refugee crisis was narrated in Polish textbooks on geography and civics – two subjects that cover contemporary socio-political events within their curricula. It looks at the textbooks not only as a source of information but also as a political and pedagogical mirror that reflects the ongoing discussions in society. The article builds on the vast scholarship on how the refugee crisis was narrated in Poland and investigates whether and to what extent the same patterns are reflected in the textbooks. Mixed methodology is used in the article to identify the main narratives and themes in the samples of Polish textbook. According to the study the narrations are less extreme and explicit than in the public discourse, they are also often incoherent and inconsistent, and hardly human-centred. While they are not explicitly politicized, they often replicate the main narrative frames from the media discourse.

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