This Hot Topic from northern Sweden by Henrik Zipsane addresses a new theme within the Pascal HT series, one which has long-term importance for local and regional identity, belonging and empowerment as well as having direct economic significance. For whom is it important, and why?
Many people today are employed and gain economic benefit through exploitation of the cultural heritage and the histories about it. The use of cultural heritage as a tourist attraction is one example of how cultural heritage has grown to be of very powerful importance in industrial, economical and cultural terms.
By using the open air museums as an example, this paper argues that heritage learning is also a contribution to real regional and local development when we use heritage learning to produce and deliver experiences which stimulate both individual and collective imagination for the youngest citizens, for example. It is real development when we stimulate tolerance in young people who are about to produce basic elements in their lifelong understanding of ethics.
It is furthermore regional and local development when heritage learning experiences are so inspiring that they can tempt young people to re-engage in education; and it is developmental for society when elderly people keep up their personal competences and spirits, thereby managing to take care of themselves better and for a longer period of time, and also make a continuing social contribution.
This Hot Topic paper is timely in that it immediately follows one from Australian contributors on ‘harnessing the new demographic: adult and community learning in older populations - an Australian focus with general implications’ (Margaret Steinberg, Peter Kearns, Denise Reghenzani and Nancye Peel). It adds to our understanding both of 3rd age learning and living and of intergenerational learning. It is relevant to policy consideration of the core Pascal theme of social capital and regional governance, and for sustaining a healthy civil society generally. It is relevant for educators concerned with the active learning and participation of young people for whom conventional schooling may be ineffective. (‘People who have learning difficulties in other environments suddenly become more efficient learners in a museum…
This means that the museum can create positive learning experiences for people who under other circumstances actually are seen as losers.’) It is most obviously relevant in the vital arena of (in the broadest sense) intercultural understanding in an era when tolerance and the active valuing of diversity appear to be in short supply, and on the retreat.
Despite the fact that one may argue that this has little if anything to do with “history” in a more traditional meaning, the paper argues that the demand for national identity is declining even though some setbacks by certain governments promoting national canons and so on can be experienced.
In the long run politicians and professionals responsible for the archives, museums, art galleries, cultural, historical and archaeological sites will realize that by engaging heritage learning in practical daily life people and community will gain.
Søren Ehlers, Associate Professor, Dr. Pæd., Department of Curriculum Research,
Danish School of Education, University of Aarhus, 164 Tuborgvej, DK-2400 Copenhagen NV, Denmark
