ABSTRACT
Out-of-the-classroom learning experiences provide multidimensional, immersive opportunities for students to engage historical content and subject matter in uniquely personal and substantive ways. Historiographical analysis is a technique for engaging students in the examination and analysis of historical sites and commemorations. It also provides a framework for students’ interpretation and deconstruction of difficult heritage. School trips to sites or monuments commemorating difficult heritage hold great potential to elicit an even more profound emotional response from adolescents.
This chapter uses discourse analysis to examine qualitative intersections of history field trips and difficult heritage. The author follows three groups of high school students. Each engages in an out-of-the-classroom visit to, and historiographical analysis of, a site of difficult heritage. This chapter chronicles students’ learning experiences and reflections during and immediately after their visits to these difficult heritage sites. It also draws on relevant social theory (namely positivism and postmodernism) to explore and interpret these examples of difficult heritage, as seen from the students’ perspectives.
