Historical empathy in a museum: uniting contextualisation and emotional engagement

Abstract

Museums, memorial centres and other heritage institutions use various strategies to evoke an emotional response that serves to elicit empathy with the historical events and actors that are portrayed in exhibitions. To increase historical understanding, however, both emotional engagement with and contextual understanding of these historical figures are needed. Using the concept of historical empathy, this paper examines the continuous interplay between cognitive and affective dimensions of history learning in museums. We conducted a case study at Museon in The Hague, the Netherlands. We studied a learning session on children living through the Second World War, the museum's strategies employed in the exhibition, the entrance narratives of secondary school students participating in the session and their engagement with the exhibition and with the educational activities. While most of the students did not feel related to WWII prior to their museum visit, the museum managed to engage many of them with personal stories and artefacts and by offering multiple and new perspectives. Our findings underscore the interplay between cognitive and affective dimensions of historical empathy and show that museums can serve as powerful contexts for developing this skill among school students.

Historical experiences: A framework for encountering complex historical sources

“…Another construct that we explored to develop our framework is the concept of historical empathy (De Leur et al, 2017;Endacott andBrooks, 2013, 2018;Huijgen et al, 2017;Savenije and De Bruijn, 2017). Situated in social studies education -in particular, history education in the United States -historical empathy describes the cognitive and emotional aspects of empathy, as distinct from purely human affective empathy, to foster learning about the past (Endacott and Brooks, 2013).…”

“…Specifically, this has meant using historical documents to assess individuals' historical thinking (Wineburg, 1991(Wineburg, , 1998 or historical reasoning (Van Drie and Van Boxtel, 2008). While these and other researchers noted that there are affective elements of historical source work (for example, Sakr et al, 2016;Savenije and De Bruijn, 2017;Zembylas, 2016) that are both inherent in and complicating our understanding of what people learn, extant frameworks do not offer a systematic way to consider these experiences working with historical sources. The work of two of this paper's authors (Baron, 2012;Bertram et al, 2017) has focused on understanding what people learn from complex historical sources -buildings, images and eyewitnesses.…”

Developing Digital Archaeology for Young People: A Model for Fostering Empathy and Dialogue in Formal and Informal Learning Environments

“…The most recent model of historical empathy, created by Endacott and Brooks (2013), consists of a framework with three 'interrelated and interdependent endeavors' (p. 43): historical contextualisation, perspective taking and affective connection. This model was recently applied in a heritage context by Savenije and de Bruijn (2017) and has been more widely employed within the field of history education (de Leur, Van Boxtel & Wilschut 2017;Efstathiou, Kyza & Georgiou 2018;Ellenwood 2017).…”

Understanding what teachers gain from professional development at historic sites

“…An emerging body of research, rooted in that perceptual layer, considers the cognitive, affective, and/or embodied experiences people engage in when encountering different historic materials. This research offers promising pathways for building analytical practices that bridge the textual and interpretive layers and support the pedagogical development necessary for effective transfer into the classroom (e.g., imagery and verbal cues: Glaser & Schwan, 2015; imagery and text: Baron, 2016; readability of the site: Baron, 2012;Gussmann, Merkt, & Schwan, 2017;sound: Lee, Hicks, Henricksen, Mishra, & Cain, 2015; augmented reality/mobile technologies: Johnson et al, 2017;Price, Jewitt, & Sakr, 2016; the interplay of cognitive and affective dimensions: Endacott & Brooks, 2013;Savenije & De Bruijn, 2017).…”