Image as teaching aide

Following independence and the new openness to foreign expertise, there has been a noticeable increase in attention paid to visual principles and methods of teaching history in Lithuania, despite that they were known, considered and employed to a certain extent already during the Soviet period, in the interwar Lithuanian Republic and throughout earlier periods of Lithuanian history. Taking as its starting point a batch of current didactic history texts, educational regulations, and questions included in the national history proficiency exam, this research attempted to answer the following questions about how the use of images is controlled/supervised: where lies the educational potential of the imagery perceived? What functions are assigned to images in history education? What suggestions are made of how images are to be interpreted and multiple meanings characteristic of them are to be controlled? The problems conditioned the structure of the article: it begins with a fragmentary discussion and survey of the understanding of visual aides in history didactics through interwar and Soviet Lithuania, and later on the focus is shifted to the current situation. The author scrutinizes the declared adoption of an educational model, which mainly relies on history sources, rethinks functions of illustrations in textbooks, and analyses the national history proficiency examination. The article hopefully provides a greater insight into the real rather than declarative nature of the ways images are used in the history education process, and leads to the conclusion that the adoption of the model of history teaching based on visual sources is not yet an accomplished fact, but a continuing process