Democratic pilgrimage: Swedish students' understanding of study trips to Holocaust memorial sites

Abstract

Session: Att lära och fostra för demokratiskt medborgarskap

This presentation will be based on a study that focuses Swedish students’ understanding of study trips to Holocaust memorial sites viewed as a specific learning practice. Although about a quarter of all Swedish teenagers visit the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum each year, with the majority visiting as students as part of their school curriculum, the study in focus is the first to examine these study trips from a student perspective. By applying critical discourse analysis as theoretical framework and methodological engine, 49 students’ reflections, written before, during, and after two study trips, were analysed. In order to examine the relation between the discursive and social practices, this study applies the concept of ritual passage based on Turner’s (1969) theory of community participants leaving their original status and, through a liminal phase, receiving a new social status as they perform according to a script. Though the script is regulated, it leaves room for creativity and alternative articulations. The result shows that the students long before going to Poland start anticipating what it will be like, how they will react and more importantly how this experience will make them more mature and provide unique insights. Thus, they are already beforehand developing a script for how they foresee their learning experiences.  Additionally, the results suggest that the study trips’ discursive practice, which constitutes and is constituted by the study trips’ social practice, is regulated by a discursive order termed democratic pilgrimage. In addition, the study reveals two didactic deviations from previous research on study trips: the students’ positive feelings in relation to the Polish environment and the balance between victim and perpetrator perspectives. The latter creates tension within the students and is solved via articulations of democratic values.

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