Collective Immersion by Affections: How Children Relate to Heritage Sites

Abstract

This article explores, through group-interviews and in terms of peer-culture, the ways in which pupils negotiate experiences from school-excursions to three heritage sites, Vadstena Castle, a former Royal Castle connected to the royal dynasty of Vasa; Witches’ forest, the place for interrogation by torture and executions of nine women, accused of witchcraft in 1617, and Linköping Cathedral Ages at the visitor programs 'Middle Ages in the Cathedral'. The article, which is part of a larger project on learning processes and historical sites, investigates how pupils collectively load the heritage site with values reflected in immersion by affections, and what significance immersion of affections can have on the pupils’ process of stock of knowledge. The following research questions are asked: What kind of affections are evoked? Which situations and circumstances during the visit at the heritage site, mould impressions and immersion in the collective recalling?

By drawing on affection, peer culture and critical heritage studies’ verb “heritaging”, we have studied how the pupils collectively load the heritage sites with values reflected in immersion by affections, and what significance immersion of affections have on the pupils’ process of historical understanding. To understand how the heritage site in terms of a material and physical place loaded with narratives of the past affects the children, the analysis aimed to explore under what circumstances the immersion took place.

The article localize three situations that led to surprise and thereby friction between the expected (the stock of knowledge) and what was experienced at the site (the immediate experience), namely conflicts caused by expectations and experiences at the site, conflict caused by replicas in relation to originals, and finally conflict between lived experiences and insights at the site.