Paper short abstract:

Drawing from short-term ethnographic studies I undertook in Finnish secondary schools and museums, this paper asks how the past is mediated in the classroom? and what kind of encounters are possible between school pupils and the past in its most contemporary appearance?

Paper long abstract:

Through a multi-site ethnographic account, I re-examine the elusive meaning that cultural heritage has in school education.

The first site comprise everyday assignments when students search, gather information and give presentations about the past in front of the class. In additon to serving curricular purposes, through them students perform and generate expectations about the past. By bringing their vocabulary, interests and familiar practices, these moments act as informal spaces where the curricular, the vernacular, the past and the present meet. The second site comprise digital libraries, and the mechanisms of meaning-making at work in museum institutions shared with their collections online. These spaces reveal the most partial, open and chaotic facet of the past. The digital and historical merge in a medium that requires from students a re-adjustment of expectations and competences to learn their code, but allows a time travel of sorts, in which students can navigate the past from their own vantage point. The last site of this journey considers the contribution of school classes to museum and archive collections that collected their assignments during lockdown. Rather than their pandemic experience, their assignments capture their teenage experience and voice what they consider important today, which will become the stuff of history.

To conclude, cultural heritage is a practice through which young people may draw on, navigate an co-construct the past (and the fleeting present) in everyday contexts. Using digital libraries, expressing and documenting their own cultures, the class becomes a cultural heritage site in its own right.