The question of how to teach war history in the field of history education has recently been closely linked to the awareness of peace education that allows students to reflect on the violence of war and internalize the value of peace. This is clearly the direction that war history learning should pursue, but it is also confirmed that such efforts to implement peace education and peace consciousness form a tense relationship with the strategic approach that seeks to understand the purpose, process and impact of war from the perspective of state power. This paper conceptualizes the thinking activity of understanding war in the relationship between goals, conditions, and means from the perspective of state power using the term ‘strategic thinking,’ and seeks a method of teaching war history that can be harmoniously linked with the awareness of the problem of fostering peace consciousness. Thus, paying attention to the criticism that the descriptions of pre-modern war in history textbooks are more interested in victory or defeat than peace compared to modern wars, this study sought a teaching method for war history learning that can evenly cultivate strategic thinking and peace consciousness by using the history of relations between Joseon and Jurchen-Manchu in the 15th·17th centuries as a content element.
For this purpose, this study analyzed the descriptions of Joseon and Jurchen-Manchu relations in the 2015 revised curriculum ‘Korean History’ and ‘East Asian History’ textbooks from the two perspectives of strategic thinking and peace consciousness. As a result of the analysis, it was possible to confirm the existence of descriptions that risk justifying the use of violence in the text, and the existence of descriptions that risk objectifing other groups than the own country’s history in the visual materials such as maps. Accordingly, this paper focused on B. Brecht’s “Verfremdung(Defamiliarization)” technique as a methodological clue to enable students to recognize the narratives in textbooks as “authorial texts” rather than “independent texts,” and furthermore, to critically recognize the intentions of the narratives in textbooks and the contexts surrounding them. Thus, J. T. King’s “bordercrossing” and C. W. Ruitenberg’s “displacement,” which were suggested as educational utilization methods of “Verfremdung(Defamiliarization),” were applied to a war history class that deals with the history of relations between Joseon and the Jurchen-Manchu in the 15th·17th centuries, and the teaching procedure of “readerly reading → provision of thought materials → ‘Verfremdung (Defamiliarization)’ → writerly reading → sharing of reflections” was designed. In particular, in the cases of “provision of thought materials,” “Verfremdung (Defamiliarization),” and “writerly reading,” where content elements and the form of questions are important, this paper attempted to present usable content elements and questions by using the war in which King Sejong the Great attacked the Jurchen forces residing in the Pajeo River (Hunhe River) basin in an attempt to expand its territory.