Heritage Study-Tours for Polish-American students at Holocaust sites: Transformations of Historical Understanding and Identity

• In Event: As the witnesses fall silent: Holocaust education for the new Millennium (Panel and Book Launch)

Abstract

In this paper, I analyze how the study-tour environment impacts young people’s understanding of history, heritage and identity. Specifically I sought to understand how participants in an education-based heritage tour program connected to modern Poland, understood interconnections between Polishness and Jewishness, and whether or not they experienced a “strengthening” of their connection to Jewishness and/or Polishness. I aim to contribute to research on the effects of experiential and tourism-based education. Study tours are powerful vehicles for particular kinds of learning, and gaining a better understanding of both cognitive and affective dimensions of learning will enhance our understanding of how people's encounters of history and ethnicity combine to create opportunities for learning. In particular, I conducted participant observation, pre and post-study tour surveys, and structured and semi-structured interviews. I observed as 20 Polish-American students travelled to Poland for a study tour in the summer of 2014. In my paper I demonstrate how heritage tourism transformed their historical understanding vis-a-vis place, and their Polish-American, and Polish-Jewish-American identities vis-a-vis encounter.

Author

• Magdalena Gross, Stanford University