I joined one of the parallel discussions. It's following up on one of the questions from the previous panel by asking: "how to engage new generations via innovation in education and digital memory"?
Marlene: A lot of adolescents, adults and elderly come to visit the former campsite (Mauthausen). A recurring question they ask is: "what does this have to do with me?" The memorial site educators work with this question, and besides building on what preexisting knowledge visitors bring, they developed new methods to flow with the times, such as using short-form videos (like #Loops) with accompanying teachers' guides. These videos work by answering that very same question, even though this format is very challenging for the use of building remembrance. The positive side is that this way education can reach outside of the classroom. However, this approach requires significant resources. It is ineffective against people who have been radicalised by destabilising disinformative campaigns.
Joanna: Teachers and museums (and, more broadly tourist attractions) should always work closely together. Museums have the specific subject matter knowledge, while the teachers are equipped with the adequate pedagogical knowledge. Ultimately, both groups should work with students - to teach human history to human beings. The pupils should not be taken as naive young people.
Sandra: Constructing historical knowledge requires fragmentation, dissonant sources and contextualisation. Usual educational narratives miss this tension-filled process in the name of streamlining learning. Digital tools, like serious games, can help introduce nuanced learning in pre-tertiary learning.
Victoria: Research shows that there is an immense amount of innovative creativity in #EduTech but most of it gets muffled due to lack of funding and/or adequate research. There is a strong tendency by solution providers to jump on the #VR or AI bandwagon, striving for interactivity and immersion, while users don't always want interactivity. Instead, they are looking for innovative data representation approaches (e.g. five digital collections of testimony videos versus a 3 hours long tape of one testimony). Museum visitors often don't want to use QR codes and their phones - they want to be immersed in the analogue space.
Marlene: As a professional, begin with using methods and tools you already know to work well. They do work for a good reason. You can build from that and explore innovation.
Victoria: Nowadays, there is also a switch through media exposure to how memorialisation is done: immediately and without historicalisation (collecting testimonies for teaching from victims while the conflict is still ongoing). That significantly changes how historical pedagogy needs to approach these sources.
Sandra: Correcting the "proper" application of new formats and tools (like #AI) is not the point, but understanding how they are different and how that difference can serve as an asset to expand the established frameworks is.
Question from the audience: How can the depth of historical learning be effectively translated into short attention span grabbing media?
Marlene: History simply cannot be translated into a 90 second video. The format doesn't allow for the real, implicit depth. There are ways to work with this, but this approach is not complete.
Sandra: The point of these approaches is different. The goal is getting the foot in the door of interest through captivating storytelling.
Question from the audience: How has the fact that many of popular social media platforms are owned by corporations and within countries that are unaligned with teaching inclusive and multiperspective history affected your work?
Marlene: The algorithms in fact don't react well to something like female victims of sexual abuse. When platforms become too saturated with destructive agendas and become useless in terms of teaching, we need to leave them behind. We abandoned X, for example. However, we still feel the need to reach young people, and many of them are on these platforms.
Victoria: To be frank, it is unavoidable to talk about some owners of these platforms being openly fascist and chauvinistic. But abandoning these platforms currently means withdrawing from the discourse and disappearing from the view of our target audiences.
I was happy to see young members of the audience ask the questions the more experienced speakers should have elaborated on. I favour adaptive pragmatism when looking for solutions (in education especially), so this balanced and self-reflective conversation played well into my biases.
4/5
mozzribo
