The Challenges of Doing Multidirectionality. Co-Researching the Own Practice on Holocaust Education in the City Museum of Linz

Abstract

ABSTRACT Models of education that we find in city museums in Austria bear the danger of avoiding discussing the Nazi past. But on the other hand, there is potential in the freedom of being about to skirt it. The lack of pressure to address the topic can lead to a more open approach in discussions, but the ease with which the topic can be avoided is dangerous. Museum spaces between leisure and learning bear the potential to implement open learning models that are, similar to social research, oriented more towards processes and the development of questions than the transmission of already fixed content. Following the approach of research-oriented learning in my own practice at the City Museum of Linz (the city where Hitler and Eichmann grew up), I discuss its challenges, especially in regard to experiences of antisemitism and racism-based forms of exclusions. I use my own learning process as research to suggest methodological developments that allow addressing the issues of antisemitism and the experiences of exclusions in a multidirectional, open, and sensitive way.