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Constructing and Questioning Connections Between History Education and Heritage Education: Sensitive Pasts... Article in Theory and Research in Social Education · November 2017 DOI: 10.1080/00933104.2017.1386960
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Theory & Research in Social Education
ISSN: 0093-3104 (Print) 2163-1654 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/utrs20
Constructing and Questioning Connections Between History Education and Heritage Education Terrie Epstein To cite this article: Terrie Epstein (2017): Constructing and Questioning Connections Between History Education and Heritage Education, Theory & Research in Social Education, DOI: 10.1080/00933104.2017.1386960 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00933104.2017.1386960
Published online: 07 Nov 2017.
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Theory & Research in Social Education, 00: 1–5, 2017 Copyright © College and University Faculty Assembly of National Council for the Social Studies ISSN 0093-3104 print / 2163-1654 online DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/00933104.2017.1386960
MEDIA REVIEW
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Constructing and Questioning Connections Between History Education and Heritage Education
Van Boxtel, Carla, Grever, Maria, & Klein, Stephan (Eds.). (2016). Sensitive Pasts: Questioning Heritage in Education. New York, NY: Berghahn Books. 306 pp., $130.00 hardback, ISBN-13: 978-1-78533-304-0. Reviewed by TERRIE EPSTEIN (
[email protected]), Hunter College, City University of New York, New York, NY 10065
In this edited volume, Carla Van Boxtel, Maria Grever, and Stephan Klein explore the contribution that heritage education may make to a “critical understanding of history and culture” (p. 3). They define heritage as “a continuous process of construction, conservation, management and interpretations in which people refer to the past with a view to the future, aiming to construct a historical identity in the present” (pp. 5–6). Heritage education employs heritage sites and other heritage-related phenomena as resources aimed at enhancing young people’s historical understandings and connections to the present. Heritage sites include “traces” from the past, such as historical objects, monuments, and buildings, as well as more ethereal ones, such as traditions, folk stories, and customs. Among the many interesting questions they ask about educational experiences related to engagements with heritage is the following: “How do historical artifacts and sites, and the narrations in which they are embedded, mediate and remediate the development of students’ historical interest, knowledge, competencies and meaning making?” (p. 2) To answer this and other questions, the editors have organized the book into three sections, with a total of 13 chapters and two epilogues. Along with the introduction, the first section, entitled “Reflections on Heritage and Historical Consciousness,” includes chapters about the possibility of reconciling disciplinary approaches to history education with non-disciplinary approaches to heritage education. The editors and authors conceptualize disciplinary approaches as those that promote historical thinking or the ability to construct interpretations of the past based on evidence from primary and secondary sources. Non-disciplinary approaches to heritage education include
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those that evoke experiential, affective, or sensory responses to heritage objects or sites, responses that disciplinary approaches tend to discount. A second section, “Experiencing Heritage and Authenticity,” contains chapters on the extent to which educational activities related to heritage sites and texts promote historical thinking as well as those that examine less traditional concerns, such as the role of authenticity, manipulation, and emotion in heritage experiences. The third section, “Teaching and Learning about Sensitive Heritage,” examines aims and activities embedded in educational programs at heritage sites as well as those rooted in heritage texts, such as textbooks and other narrative forms. Dutch authors have written about half of the chapters (the three co-editors are Dutch); North American, British, and Israeli researchers author the other chapters. In the introduction, the authors pose a central question: Can we combine the heritage type of playful or emotional ways of learning with a critical examination of historical sources, with contextualized thinking, and with critical historical argumentation that recognizes the possibility of different ways of seeing and knowing the past? (p. 3) As is evident by the quotation, the editors advocate the use of disciplinary approaches when young people interact with heritage sites or objects. They also introduce the concepts of multiperspectivity and historical distance as important frameworks for analyzing heritage-related instruction, texts, and other resources. Multiperspectivity refers to the multiple perspectives on past experiences that historical actors or groups of the period constructed as well as the various perspectives that people in the present employ when interpreting the past. According to Van Boxtel, Grever, and Klein, as well as some chapter authors, organizing heritage activities to reflect multiple perspectives related to the meaning or significance of a historical site or object is one way to shift heritage educational experiences away from simplistic or one-sided views of the past and introduce nuance and complexity into young people’s historical understandings. The term historical distance is conceptualized as a framework for analyzing how instructional resources or activities construct “past–present relations” (p. 183). According to Klein in Chapter Nine, historical distance is used in history to signify When past–present interpretations emphasize discontinuity, meaning that the past is interpreted as being different from the present… To accept historical distance presumes that we master our emotions and examine our own convictions rather than engage in reasoning based on present values and instant feelings… (pp. 183–184)
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Klein contrasts historical distance with the concept of historical proximity (i.e., events or phenomena that are less distant) and argues that the “past tends to become a familiar and continuous thing” (p. 184). The more historically proximate the past becomes, Klein argues, the greater tendency to conflate the past with the present. In addition, the framework consists of five dimensions— time, person, imagination, place, and engagement—and each of these dimensions can be categorized along a continuum based on the degree of continuity/ discontinuity between past and present. For example, the dimension of time can be categorized by the extent to which the historical or heritage event, object, or phenomenon is represented as continuous with or fundamentally different from the present. To demonstrate the utility of the framework, Klein examined an educational walking tour in a Dutch town in which the government detained Jews during World War II before deporting them to Polish concentration camps. Klein interviewed teachers as they and their students took the tour, using the framework of historical distance to analyze the educational materials and teachers’ responses to them. On the dimension of time, for example, Klein found that the teachers approved of the materials’ unstated assumption of continuity between past and present in their representation of anti-Semitism because the teachers’ objectives included teaching about democratic values in the present. He also found the materials wanting in their representations of the dimension of “people” because they did little to add depth or specificity to their representation of Jews, projecting them instead as victims without agency. After analyzing the materials and teachers’ views along the five dimensions, Klein concluded that “heritage institutions can contribute to the need to humanize and emotionalize the past … if they do not present the past uncritically or as static in meaning” (p. 194). In other words, Klein recognized that although historical distance and other disciplinary approaches enhance young people’s historical understandings, heritage experiences needn’t exclude non-disciplinary concepts, such as humanizing historical actors or evoking emotional connections in the present. While many of the book’s authors affirm the importance of promoting historical thinking when engaging students in heritage education, others approach the endeavor from more critical perspectives, taking into account the web of power relations in play when people engage with heritage sites and experiences (Epstein & Peck, 2017). In Chapter Four, for example, entitled “Why do Emotions Matter in Museums and Heritage Sites?” Sheila Watson explores how history museums tend to be “sites of emotional expression and regulation,” or “how they not only stimulate us to think but also to feel and what that tells us about the histories they produce and about ourselves” (p. 76). One of her arguments is that rather than ask young people to distance themselves from emotional responses engendered at museums, educators should consider the positive effects of emotional responses, such as the evocation of empathy for marginalized groups. Paying attention to emotions
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while touring museum exhibits is important, Watson argues, because empathetic responses may stimulate the imagination and support the development of moral judgments. Overall, she claims that almost all history museum exhibits engage the emotions, whether it is museum designers’ intentions or not. As such, emotional responses are phenomena to be examined and, in some contexts, encouraged rather than ignored. Similarly, in Chapter Six, “Tagging Borobudur: Heritage Education and the Colonial Past in Onsite and Online Museum Collections,” Susan Legine broadens traditional approaches to history/heritage education by constructing a critical framing of museum collections, many of which represent a museum’s (and a nation’s) colonial heritage. She demonstrates how a museum display of an object’s “provenance history” (the chronology of ownership) revealed as much about the history and culture of the collectors and colonizing power as it does about colonized people and societies. In another example, she describes how museum curators in Amsterdam and Jakarta created a museum display on Indonesian history and culture by exhibiting the exact same objects. Significantly, if not surprising, the curators in each country constructed different historical and cultural narratives to accompany the exhibits. Through these examples, Legine challenges young people to question the “pre-structured order of things” (p. 109), by which she means the broader historical narratives in which museum objects are embedded in onsite and online museum collections). Perhaps the most outside-the-box contribution is Chapter Three, by Chiel van den Akker, “Antiquarianism and Historical Consciousness in the New Media Age.” The author uses the work of media theorist Wolfgang Ernst, who has argued for “a data-oriented sense of the past, in which artifacts from different times and place exist side by side” (p. 59). Ernst sees the task of the “postmodern museum is to teach the user how to cope with information” (p. 63), rather than to create or appropriate a comprehensive historical narrative. New media in particular enables more participatory and personalized interactions at heritage sites and especially with online digital collections of heritage objects, interactions that can fulfill an individual’s curiosity in searching for, learning about, and/or displaying objects. Van den Akker does not argue against the significance of presenting or constructing historical narratives generated by museum curators or visitors. He does, however, support the legitimacy of engaging with heritage objects/sites, and especially with online collections, in ways that are driven by individual interest and desire to share one’s self-directed learning online with others. As noted earlier, I found the chapters that included concepts and topics that moved beyond those traditionally found in history education to be the most original and refreshing. This is not to say that chapters focused on historical thinking at heritage sites or with historical objects are not substantive. They are. Editors Carla Van Boxtel and Maria Grever are internationally recognized researchers known for their substantive, thorough, and thoughtful
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work. True to form, the introduction to the book as well as several of the chapters provide the same thorough and thoughtful approaches to teaching and learning historical thinking within the context of heritage education. That said, I think the contribution of the volume is found in the chapters that discuss approaches or problems borrowed from the fields of heritage and media studies, like the ones discussed in this review. History educators have a lot to consider and learn from the chapters that look beyond disciplinary approaches as the only or primary worthwhile educational experiences in young people’s engagements with the past. In short, the volume made me consider the limitations of a classroom, curriculum, or school program where young people’s engagement with the past is tightly or exclusively regulated by evidence and argument. Is there not any place or space for the imagination, emotion, personal displays, or what the editors term “the more playful” (p. 3) ways of learning about the past or its connection to the present, alongside or even at times instead of objective or rational approaches to the past (which many critical historians and educators believe is not possible anyway)? I am not arguing that, as a community of researchers, we should turn away from research or instruction related to disciplinary approaches to history. However, after paying close attention to chapters that integrate the imagination, morality, emotions, and curiosity into human interactions at or with heritage sites or objects, I believe that attention to research that moves beyond disciplinary approaches can result in what the purpose of our research is in the first place: for young people to learn about what is significant about their and others’ histories and heritages in ways that enhance everyone’s humanity.
REFERENCE Epstein, T., & Peck, C. (Eds.). (2017). Teaching and learning difficult histories in international contexts: A critical sociocultural approach. New York, NY: Routledge.
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