Democratic pilgrimage: Swedish students’ understanding of study trips to Holocaust memorial sites
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Abstract
This article focuses on Swedish students’ understanding of study trips to Holocaust memorial sites. 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, this study is the first to examine these study trips from a student perspective. By applying critical discourse analysis, this article analyses 49 students’ reflections, written before, during, and after two study trips. 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, this article 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.
Topics
Educational Tours Holocaust Memorials Holocaust Education Main Topic: Holocaust and Memorial Students Teenagers Schools: Seconday / High Schools Democracy Discourse and Discourse Analysis
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This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way.
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Volume/Issue
75(3)
Page Number
429-446
DOI
Bibliographic Information
Democratic pilgrimage: Swedish students’ understanding of study trips to Holocaust memorial sites. 2023: 429-446. https://archive.jpr.org.uk/10.1080/00131911.2021.1931040
