Understanding Bosnia or How to Learn and Teach about Bosnia and Herzegovina in the Field – a Report from a Certain Project

The article is an attempt to summarize the observations conducted as part of the didactic student project implemented at the Institute of Slavonic Studies in the 2017/2018 academic year. The outgoing part of the project was implemented in April 2018 in Bosnia and Herzegovina and was aimed at improving and diversifying the didactic process related to teaching about the area of cultural heritage of Bosnia and Herzegovina. The project was directed to advanced Slavic students and assumed the participation of local experts. The initiator and organizer, who is also the author of this article, entrusted the implementation of individual points of the program on the spot to local experts in order to enable a thorough observation of participants’ reactions (and their own) to individual elements of the project. The program was inspired by the anthropological order of work in the field. The activities carried out by the Krakow Slavists on the spot will not contribute significantly to the observed culture, but they certainly changed the participants’ optics and sensitized them to the key issues for comprehending Bosnia. Project participants (including the author of the text herself) abandoned the search for answers to the question in the title of the project about whether Sarajevo is the space of community or division. This question was abandoned for a better understanding of how to learn and teach about Bosnia and Herzegovina, not to deepen its divisions and how to contribute to changes in the perception of Bosnia by Europe. The experience of elements of the project implemented in the field has also raised a number of new questions and doubts that are desirable in the teaching process, as they may increase interest in the explored area and the desire to return to both issues and places

The article is an attempt to summarize the observations conducted as part of the didactic student project implemented at the Institute of Slavonic Studies in the 2017/2018 academic year. The outgoing part of the project was implemented in April 2018 in Bosnia and Herzegovina and was aimed at improving and diversifying the didactic process related to teaching about the area of cultural heritage of Bosnia and Herzegovina. The project was directed to advanced Slavic students and assumed the participation of local experts. The initiator and organizer, who is also the author of this article, entrusted the implementation of individual points of the program on the spot to local experts in order to enable a thorough observation of participants’ reactions (and their own) to individual elements of the project. The program was inspired by the anthropological order of work in the field. The activities carried out by the Krakow Slavists on the spot will not contribute significantly to the observed culture, but they certainly changed the participants’ optics and sensitized them to the key issues for comprehending Bosnia. Project participants (including the author of the text herself) abandoned the search for answers to the question in the title of the project about whether Sarajevo is the space of community or division. This question was abandoned for a better understanding of how to learn and teach about Bosnia and Herzegovina, not to deepen its divisions and how to contribute to changes in the perception of Bosnia by Europe. The experience of elements of the project implemented in the field has also raised a number of new questions and doubts that are desirable in the teaching process, as they may increase interest in the explored area and the desire to return to both issues and places