Published 4. 3. 2026

The City as a Historical Lens: First Didactic Workshops Held in Olomouc and Prague

Palacký University in Olomouc organized the first two didactic workshops intended for history teachers and students in teacher training programs. The workshops, held in December 2025 and February 2026, presented the city as a broad socio-historical phenomenon and as a didactic prism.

The first workshop, “City and Monastery,” featuring lectures by Assoc. Prof. Radmila Prchal Pavlíčková and Assoc. Prof. Martin Elbel, demonstrated—using the example of the Franciscan order in Olomouc—the role that religious institutions played in shaping the early modern city after the Thirty Years’ War. Through specific examples from the 17th and 18th centuries, participants explored how historical sources such as a monastic chronicle, alms registers, maps, statutes, and religious literature can be used not only for historical research but also for inquiry-based history teaching.

The second workshop, titled “City, Architecture, and Ideology,” featured a lecture by Dr. Michal Kurz from the Institute of Contemporary History of the Czech Academy of Sciences. It focused on transformations of urban space in connection with the ideological projects of the twentieth century, using the example of socialist construction in Prague in the 1950s. Participants gained inspiration on how to address in teaching the question of the extent to which architecture can express political ideas, and how to work with different types of sources so that students better understand the relationship between space, power, and ideology.

The workshops also included practical methodological suggestions and didactic approaches applicable to inquiry-based history teaching.