Children and Young People in Relation to Documentary Works

Abstract

This paper gives an account of what has been done during the first stage of the programme entitled “Children and Young People in Relation to Documentary Works”, carried out since August 1996, at the Museo Histórico del Norte in Salta, Argentina. The main objective of this programme, aimed at children and young people aged 8-16, is to train them as disseminators of the heritage the museum is in charge of preserving, disseminating, and researching.

The experience takes place at a museum complex made up of three museums, which are National Historical Monuments, namely, Museo Histórico del Norte, Museo Presidente José Evaristo Uriburu, and Museo Posta de Yatasto. These museums differ in heritage, location—one of them being situated in the interior of the province—and interpretive approach. One of them houses a library specialized in historical issues, mainly those related to the region. This library, together with a rich documentary heritage, serves to contextualize the objects and the research carried out by specialists and teachers in this area.

What moved us to start this experience was our concern that the enhancement of the heritage preserved in these museums should be comprehensible to children and young people, given the difficulties implied by handling very specific bibliography and documentation. This concern is closely related to our belief that documentary works—which include museums, libraries, and community life itself—are means by which subjects can build meaningful answers to their questions.

We started by acknowledging the difficulties children and young people find in understanding historical contents, and in analyzing and interpreting different kinds of sources, taking into account that such contents are dynamic and, consequently, grasping their context is essential. There are further difficulties such as constructing spatio-temporal categories; the complexity and variety of historical concepts, which are not closed; the polysemy of texts, due to the shift between their time-space of production and their time-space of recognition; and the language of those texts, which differs greatly from the colloquial language of that age group, or even from the language usually found in books written for them.

The project demands a joint effort in which historical, textual, and didactic knowledge converge, since training disseminators of documentary works implies not only making information accessible and helping in the process of learning meaningful contents but also encouraging and guiding the production of relevant messages and making them accessible to a public quite heterogeneous in interests and cultural background. Overcoming these difficulties will enable us to achieve our goal of involving the whole community with its historical heritage. In this case, children and young people working with documentary works can find new paths of inquiry and new ways of relating to the historical-cultural heritage and to the people who handle, create, and recreate it.