Hosted by OSOS , contributed by Pauline Alberts on 30 April 2019
In our school programs we let primary school kids interview elderly who lived in their neighbourhood during a historical period, and we train the pupils to retell their personal stories.
Through authentic, personal meetings in livingrooms of the elderly we create understanding and break prejudices between people from different generations and backgrounds. The children interview the elderly about difficult historical subjects: my neighbourhood during WW2 / migration to my neighbourhood / colonial traces in my neighbourhood. The personal history takes the polarisation out of the historical context: it is not about who was wrong or who is right. The small life story and life decisions of ‘the other’ that took place in your own neighbourhood, but in such different times, turn out to be recognizable and maybe even the same as yours.
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During hundreds of these personal meetings understanding was born, prejudices broken, ‘What do these foreign kids have to do with our history?’ And the past becomes a shared history from the neighbourhood we all live in: hearing the story from the appartment above the supermarket you go to everyday, or the playground around the corner. Over 2000 primary school pupils held interviews with elderly and followed our masterclasses program. And we train the children to become the new official storytellers at commemorations and in media. They share local stories of Migration, WW2 and Colonial History. 120 official young Heritage Holders of Amsterdam vowed to take the story they heard with them into their lives. |
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