Educational encounters with a local past-historical empathy in the archives

This single-case study focuses on 91 Swedish upper secondary students’ educational encounters with a local historical archive via a place-based educational intervention. Furthermore, it investigates how this event stimulated the students’ historical empathy through their meetings with historical sources at the local archive. Focus group interviews with participating students before and after the visits revealed changes in their expressions of historical empathy. The students’ expressions of historical contextualisation and perspective taking were challenged after the visit. Many students did not view the local past they encountered at the archive as actual history. Most students related the traditional Western, European, and nation-state-centred history they had met through their previous history education to their historical perspective. However, the affective connection to local history primarily increased after the visit, which helped promote a full manifestation of historical empathy among the students. Before the visits, the affective connection had not been visual among the students at all, which shows that local historical archives, as cultural heritage institutions, can help students connect empathically with the past. The results further show that the local past met through the archival visits was a previously unknown historical perspective to the students.