Pathways to the archives

In an era when digitalisation imprint schools and history teaching is surrounded by the grand narratives: what can visits to an archive bring to pupils and students?

In curricula around the world, history education theory has increasingly begun to find its way into learning outcomes for students and future teachers. Within this theory are concepts of how historical method should be taught as a skill within the history subject. However, there are also demands that different uses of history should be taken into account and that learners should have the opportunity to encounter and reflect on cultural heritage. These formulations place higher demands on teachers: it is difficult to capture all the aspects of what the subject of history should represent today. By allowing pupils and students to encounter historical sources in local archives, this doctoral project studies how pupils' and students' perception of the past is influenced by the encounter with a part of our cultural heritage. Visiting a place, the archive, which for centuries has housed sources of the past in a geographical location has not only been shown to create increased awareness of historical method and an emotional connection to local history in the visitors - the question of what the past is and the encounter with the local past in comparison with the narratives usually presented in history teaching has also been actualized. The doctoral project also examines the possibilities of history teachers to apply place-based pedagogical methods in their work and how the view of historical sources in history teaching has changed over time.