ABSTRACT
Welcome to the home of Horrible Histories. Here you can watch episodes and clips, play games, and even sing along to your favourite Horrible Histories songs!
(BBC, 2019)A tendency to intellectualize holidays and a growing desire to offer study and learning opportunities during leisure time is increasing within the current touristic landscape. Consequently, tourism in general – and dark tourism in particular – often provides visitors with experiences that increase their own cultural and educational capital about ‘heritage that hurts’.
Importantly, much of dark tourism utilizes entertainment in addition to educative techniques in order to interpret difficult heritage. Indeed, Herbert Marcuse remarked that ‘entertainment and learning are not opposites; entertainment may be the most effective mode of learning’. Thus, the aim of this chapter is to explore critical intersections between ‘entertainment’ and ‘education’ in dark tourism (re)presentations and children’s experiences thereof. This discussion of the nexus of ‘edutainment’ as an interpretive technique will draw upon current debates, as well as future trends and technologies that use entertainment to teach. The chapter will outline themes, issues, and consequences of edutainment in children’s dark tourism learning experiences. Case examples will illustrate the major concepts.
