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Iakttagelser och insikter vid elevers besök i Gestapos högkvarter

Abstract

Schooling plays a fundamental role for reproducing knowledge and social values of significance for citizenship. In recent decades, there has been an increasing interest in using institutions such as museums, science centres etc. as complementary contexts for learning. The article reports a study of how students respond to visiting a peace and human rights centre in Norway. The centre—Arkivet—is housed in a building which served as the Gestapo headquarters during Nazi occupation. Data were generated through questionnaires and focus group interviews with visitors (aged 14-15). Data have been analysed through Thematic Analysis. The results show that it is obvious that the visit represents a multisensory and emotionally charged experience in Dewey’s sense, where the authenticity of the building, its materiality and history, give students personal access to the concrete nature of terror in ways that go beyond what classrooms offer, while the role of ideology in producing such terror and oppression is not prominent in the comments made by students. Thus, embedding socio-material experiences in a conceptual and democratic framework remains an important task for didactics.