Keeping the history alive : A comparative study of two Swedish exhibitions about The Great Migration in relation to Upper Secondary school's curriculum

This essay analyzes the content and intermediation in two Swedish museums’ exhibitions about The Great Migration by using the didactic questions what, how and why. Using observations and interviews as methods, the results are compared afterwards to the Upper Secondary school’s national curriculum and to the concepts of learning and knowledge, by applying the theories of Arfwedsons and Hein. These theories help the reader to understand to what level the exhibitions give the visitors possibilities to produce their own learning and knowledge or if the exhibitions have a claim to present the truth and want the information to be reproduced by the visitors. In simplified terms, the study investigates how justified a school visit is to one of the exhibitions for the various history courses. The conclusions show that the exhibitions differ among themselves, which will make school visits relevant in different ways, depending on which exhibition and which history course you have in mind. One of the exhibitions focus on showing The Great Migration from a local history perspective and with connections to today’s refugees while the other exhibition instead makes an effort to show the same migration through several perspectives, on all kinds of levels in society. Based on the results and the connections to the school’s curriculum a conclusion can be made: The more advanced a course is, the more relevant it becomes for schools to visit the exhibitions. Having put the concepts of learning and knowledge into the results, the study shows that both exhibitions have a claim to present the truth and in that way sees the visitors as reproducers of that information. Aside from the fact that only one of the exhibitions intermediate through different kinds of channels, both exhibitions lack in source criticism giving the visitors no chance of questioning the material.