Playfully Learning About History Through Objects?

The text presents the results regarding the play- or game-based historical learning processes of primary school children in the binational Italian-German research project \u0022Education and Objects. Historical learning processes of primary school children in museum collections.\u0022 In the project, funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG), groups of Italian and German school children between the ages of eight to eleven years had performative and playful experiences with selected collection objects or their respective replicas in \u0022contact zones\u0022 (Clifford, 1997; Wagner, 2010). These interactions with collection objects can be considered anthropologically as \u0022play\u0022 - as an individual form of playing - or as a \u0022game\u0022 - a social form of playing (see Schiller, 1795/1946; Mead, 1967; Huizinga, 1938/2006; Gebauer & Wulf, 1998). On the basis of ethnographic participant observation (Breidenstein et al., 2013) and ethnographic videography (Friebertshäuser, 2012) children's

approaches to and interactions with collection objects are reconstructed from a didactic as well as cultural studies perspective on performativity and material culture. The extensive video footage from Italy and Germany was coded and interpreted according to Corbin and Strauss' Grounded Theory Methodology (1996). The video data shows that children establish various connections from the present to the past, but also to the future through playful interactions. These can be seen as a preconditions for learning about history and indicate didactic potentials for child-centred, playful historical learning processes in primary schools. [Publisher's Text]

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