5.18. Learning from Place: Memory, Education, and Public Engagement in Museums and Monuments [ES/EN]

After a society's transition, there is the question: How can we talk about the recent past? How should younger generations remember this past? Although strategies have varied worldwide, one of the main points of discussion has been education and the building of the narrative about the past. In recent years, due to the resurgence of right-wing and extremist governments worldwide, there has been an increase in conflict over what can be included in textbooks and taught in the classroom. At the same time, the irruption of AI and fake news has greatly impacted how younger generations learn about the past. In this context, educators have resorted to different pedagogies and methodologies to approach difficult histories in a moment of a changing political landscape. In this presentation, we aim to identify inspiring practices and draw lessons from our experience in transnational educational projects. For example, the project Changing Democracies uses oral stories to explore unknown aspects of recent democratic transitions in Europe, addressing questions such as what life is like without democracy, what democracy mean to different people, and what our role as citizens is in upholding our democracy. Another project, Monument(al) Challenges, uses public spaces and the physical legacies of the past as a source for learning, empowering educators to explore difficult histories in the classroom. These and other projects share an approach focused on relational pedagogies, placing students at the centre of the learning process. They also engage with contested histories to discuss in the current political context, empowering educators to engage with them in a democratic, responsible, and multiperspective manner. Building on these experiences, we aim to showcase some lessons learned and challenges in dealing with memories and histories in the classroom in today’s Europe.

Since 2009, the Anne Frank Center Argentina for Latin America (CAFA) has been a Museum, but also an educational and training center for Human Rights, inclusion, coexistence, and democratic values. On this occasion, the objective of this work is to highlight the peer education training experience of young people who, inspired by the history and legacy of Anne Frank, reflect and train daily on topics such as memory and the Holocaust, the recent past in Argentina and the region, human rights, and democratic coexistence. The questions guiding the work are: What does it mean to be a young guide at the Anne Frank House? Does such an identity exist? If so, what elements characterize it? What difficulties and resistances exist in formative processes that promote empathy, listening, and "horizontality" through peer education? What resistances and challenges do young people face in the transmission of memory with their peers? What characteristics does the intergenerational transfer of memory between young guides and Museum visitors assume? To answer these questions, the main characteristics of the young guides' training experience will be addressed through in depth interviews conducted at the institution with the protagonists in the training process, including young guides, shift supervisors, staff, and coordinators; then, participant observations will be carried out during guide training sessions and during the guided tours themselves at the Museum, with the aim of understanding the roles and dynamics involved during the training. In conclusion, we expect to show how the training proposal for hundreds of young guides carried out by the Museum since 2009 contributes to fostering in them capacities for the integral promotion of their rights, transforming them into active and empowered subjects in their social responsibility as central actors in the defense of memory, democracy, citizenship, and the construction of coexistence.

Anguished reckonings with the United States' troubled history and the concomitant fraying of democratic norms have called renewed attention to the role of shared narratives in sustaining the pillars of civil society. When critical narrative channels break down, social bonds begin to fray. The collapse of local journalism precipitates a breakdown in political accountability. Gag orders on teachers stymie efforts to forge, in the classroom, a sense of belonging and common destiny. And the continued predominance, in public spaces, of elevated symbols of violent domination preempts inclusive processes of re-storying. Beginning with a recognition of the critical role of narrative infrastructure to memory work and democratic practice, the Detroit River Story Lab, housed in the English Department at the University of Michigan, models scalable approaches to catalyzing capacity-building efforts at the local level, leveraging the sociocultural, economic, and ecological centrality of the Detroit River corridor to reimagine it as a case study in inclusive civic renewal. Over the past five years, the Lab has forged partnerships that recognize and resource the narrative capacities of Southeast Michigan communities through the narrative place-making channels of non-profit journalism, place-based education, and community heritage. This presentation will provide a brief overview of the community-based, river-themed research and education projects, including museum exhibits, long-form journalism stories, and educational tall ship sails, that the Detroit River Story Lab has co-created, in collaboration with community partners, over the past five years. Topics to be covered will include lessons learned about program design, partnership building, and institutional support, reflections on the project's implications for ongoing efforts to rethink the place of humanities education and graduate training, and plans for the next stages of the project's development.

We frame Canada’s public memory in terms of Ottawa’s commemorative public art. We scan Ottawa and find a cluster along Confederation Boulevard—Ottawa’s ceremonial, commemorative route. Then, attention shifts to concepts, theories, and methodologies that make sense of monuments. We characterize Ottawa’s mnemonic terrain in terms of a three-fold categorization by Cento Bull et al. (2022). The point is that monuments rhetorically and spatially bring Nationalist-Antagonistic, Universalist-Cosmopolitan, and Agonistic modes of memory to life. After, we focus on one feature: the centrally located, yet generally unknown, Harper Memorial at Parliament Hill. We concentrate on the unique case of the Harper Memorial; a site where the intergenerational transmission of meaning, historical knowledge, and public memory rarely takes place. The memorial honors Henry Albert Harper, a civil servant and friend of Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King, who was the monument’s sponsor. At the turn of the 20th century, Prime Minister William Lyon Mckenize King built a monument in a powerful space for his friend who died while trying to save a drowning child. The Prime Minister seized the opportunity to remind future generations of his friend’s courage, and in doing so sought to frame the ideal public servant and connected the Canadian self-conception to Britain by remembering Harper through Sir Galahad. This monument communicates multiple strands of Canadian commemoration yet emphasizes Anglo-Canadian views of proximity to Britain, heroism, and civic virtue. However, this monument only speaks to those that know its history—or are curious enough to stop, read its plaque, and look into the events that lead to its creation. In our paper we question how Ottawa’s monuments embody various modes of remembrance/forgetting, and we investigate this specific representation of a Prime Minister’s interjection on public space, collective memory, and a city’s mundanity.