History(s) for a Global present. Digital Co-Creation in Schools and Museums
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Profile
- Project leadership
- Michael Geiss (PHZH), Sophia Prinz
- Project team
- Alexandra Krebs (KU Eichstätt-Ingolstadt), Jose Luis Caceres Mardones (PHZH, former employee)
- Organisational unit
- F-BW-BDW (Bildung und Digitaler Wandel)
- Project phase
- Completed (1.9.2023 – 30.6.2026)
- Project type
- Research & development project
- Funding
- Digitalization Initiative
- Participating institutions
- Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK); Foundation for Art, Culture and History, Winterthur
Description
Swiss museum and private collections contain countless everyday objects with global biographies: dinner services with sugar tongs and teacups, printed tin cans for chocolate, cotton “Indiennes”, combs made of rubber or letter openers with ivory decorations. They all bear witness to the fact that Switzerland has been connected to the whole world for centuries through trade, colonialism and migration.
For schools and museums, the question arises as to how these global connections can be communicated: How can pupils be introduced to the complex interrelationships? What links these objects with our post-migrant present? And what expertise do the students themselves bring to the table?
This research project develops an app for alternative forms of history education in museums and schools. Using selected objects from the collection of the Foundation for Art, Culture and History in Winterthur, secondary school students will explore the global and (post-)colonial origins of their own lifeworlds.
Instead of dividing history into “modern” and “pre-modern” or the “West” and the “rest of the world”, the complex global interdependencies of modernity and their current effects are made comprehensible.
The students are actively involved as researchers and curators: With the help of the app, they get to the bottom of the global biographies of the objects and supplement them with their own research results. The students then look at how all of this relates to their everyday lives.
New didactic approaches and tools are needed to convey the complex historical origins of our global present. Historical everyday objects from museum collections prove vivid working materials for this. However, they must be prepared in a contemporary way so that their historical and current relevance is also accessible to secondary school students. Digital media can be used in a targeted manner: Virtual exhibitions, 3D models, multimedia presentations and interactive research tools enable learners to examine the objects from different perspectives and deepen their understanding of global historical contexts in a fun way.
Using concrete examples, students learn to question dominant perspectives and adopt different points of view. This creates a multi-layered and polyphonic view of history. It becomes clear how global and local processes intertwine.
The development of such an app, with the help of which lower secondary school students can practice a global historical perspective, brings with it both design and didactic challenges. On the one hand, the app must be designed in a user-friendly and attractive way and invite active participation. On the other hand, the content must be carefully researched and didactically prepared. The app’s mechanisms must also be aligned with the school’s learning objectives.
The research project is jointly managed by the Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK), the PH Zurich and the Foundation for Art, Culture and History in Winterthur. Prof. Dr. Sophia Prinz from the ZHdK is the overall director.