School

World Heritage Sites as a means for learning – examples from the Ljusdalsbygdens museum

The Ljusdalsbygdens museum works with educational tasks with a basic outlook of “transforming yourself” into something you weren’t before – in a positive sense. This involves the material worked with being tools and equipment on the way, and not a goal in itself.

Finding the ‘little people’ in the fog of history and trying to compare them with yourself and our everyday life can contribute to an ability to enter into the conditions and values of others. Creating historical awareness that things hang together in a chain, and that we actually – even if only a little – influence it, is also an important ingredient in the work. It is also a question of learning to look at history with an eye to source criticism. What do we actually know about what was there? What traces remain? What are the facts, and what is interpretation?

The Ljusdalsbygdens museum has worked a great deal with the Loos school, from the Fågelsjö Bortomåa 1910 World Heritage Farmhouse. Who lived there back then? What did they work on? What was it like to be a child there? What did people think about? What did they dream about? How can we find out?

The work concluded with an on-site ‘day of insight’ at a specific point in time: 1910. 

Interior paintings in a societal context – examples from the Hälsinglands Museum

The Hälsinglands Museum works with interior paintings, often in a broad historical and societal context. The museum’s collection of interior paintings is usually used in religious and historical education to talk about how the world of images of a unified society changed with increasing secularization and modernization. An educational program is being developed with author and artist Anna-Clara Tidholm; this will make educational demonstrations possible in schools throughout the county.

World Heritage Sites – a window on history and the world

The Swedish UNESCO Council has developed material in three parts on how to work with World Heritage Sites in school, or on Swedish World Heritage Sites.

Part I: What is a World Heritage Site?
Part II: World Heritage Sites in school
Part III: World Heritage Sites in Sweden 

World Heritage Site appendices

In the book Det här är vårt arv (This is Our Heritage), Swedish schoolchildren talk to other schoolchildren about World Heritage sites, from the 2001 international student and teacher conference in Karlskrona.