Helena Meyer-Knapp

The research question  —- What do college and high school students retain and comment on when asked about school field trips?

The impetus behind the work has been to understand how public memories of war and other instances of national suffering, for example colonization, are passed from the generation that experienced the actual suffering to successor generations.

History textbooks, in particular in NE Asia are often contentious for what they convey about “wrongs” in the past. In the USA struggles arise over whether particular State Boards of Education have too much influence over content. In Korea and in China Japan’s Education Ministry is routinely accused of allowing textbooks to present too positive a view of Japan’s actions in the Pacific War and as Colonizer.

Rather than studying textbooks, which seem easily forgotten, this research starts from the assumption that field-based and active learning is known to have an enduring impact on student learning.

The project began as a study of Japanese school study trips (shugaku ryoko) which are ubiquitous across the country every spring and fall. Japanese school groups crowd Kyoto and Hiroshima, the ski hills of Nagano and Tokyo Disneyland. Bullet trains are full and huge buses throng the parking lots. The project became comparative on a trip to Washington DC when it became clear that Americans too send their young people on school field trips.

The study design is multi-modal — observation, field records and survey — and the data has been collected in numerical, video, photographic, brochure and field note format.

Four descriptive foci guided the project.

1) To characterize the public purposes inherent in school sponsored visits to war memorials, battle sites and military/historical museums.

2) To learn which specific displays, narratives and group activities consume student time in the field.

3) To discover how students describe the learning after the event.

4) To seek out differences in student learning and behavior at similar sites in different nations.

The pages surveys and survey results give numerical results. The pages listed under sites, behavior and images symbolizing political relations give examples of findings from field observation of student activities and the study of websites, plaques and guide books.

The complete data files are available for anyone who has a genuine use for them. Running “cross-tabs” operations on the numerical findings offers little in the way of direct connections between a specific activity and a specific response. One of the strongest findings, the powerful impact of visits to Okinawa on Japanese student feelings about the cruelty of war, results from student comments. The numerical work that is most revealing shows where one or another country is an outlier in frequencies. Frequency tables are scattered throughout these pages.

Methods 
All phases of this research, in Japan, the U.S. and Korea used the same methods:
(a) Examination of websites, texts, images and site-specific layout at museums and memorials, to illuminate the stance adopted by the official agencies responsible for their management.

(b) Surveys of high school and college students covering their experiences on school sponsored group field trips to war memorials, museums and other historically significant sites that have war or peace associations to illuminate how students describe their learning at these sites.

(c) Video and photos collected at memorials and museums and also on journeys to and from the site, to illuminate the behavioral circumstances surrounding the learning which occurred.

A description of the data sources and analytical tools applied in this study is available in the attached file: Interdisciplinary Research Methods

SITE CREATION PROCESS. In order for the different components to display logically, I have be forced to create an artificial array of dates for the publishing of each segment. In reality, I began publishing parts of the History to Heritage project in 2010 after the last phase of Korean field work. Some data were only put up on the website in 2014.

A paper I gave at the Association for Asian Studies Conference in Toronto 2012 offers a summary of the findings:History becomes Heritage and includes History becomes heritage presentation slides.