Mary Margaret Kerr, Professor, University of Pittsburgh
Proposal Type: Roundtable
Abstract: This project relates to the United Flight 93 crash on September 11, 2001. Taken over by terrorists, the plane crashed in a rural Shanksville, PA field, never reaching its intended target, the nation’s capital. In the years following this tragedy, thousands of visitors — many of them children—have visited the crash site, now a national memorial. We have been researching text and art artifacts created by children, as a way of understanding how children make meaning of the site and/or the events surrounding it. Our second major effort is a collaborative case study with teachers who have made annual trips to the crash site. Through this project, we hope to learn how children’s encounters with the site have changed from 2003-2014, as those with and without memory of the event experience it.
Seeking: We seek participants for a roundtable conversation that might inform our research, which is in its early stages and our teaching of undergraduates who will participate in an interdisciplinary course on public history. We believe that our work fills a void in the research on how young visitors experience and make meaning of places of public history, when that history involves acts of terrorism.
Background. Bringing together faculty and students from various disciplines including history, history of art and architecture, library science, psychology, psychiatry, and history education (k-12), our team seeks innovative ways to explore and understand the encounters of young visitors with places of public history, focusing on sites of terrorism. We have three goals:
- To inform those who provide interpretation at sites of terrorism.
- To expand the literature on how children encounter such spaces
- To develop engaging experiences for undergraduate and graduate students in the history or art and architect, applied developmental psychology, and K-12 social studies education.
Research Projects. Our research has followed two paths to date. First, we began our research with a series of studies of text and art artifacts created by children, as a way of understanding how children made meaning of the site and/or the events surrounding it. Three sources of evidence gathered between the years 2001 and 2014 comprise the samples under investigation: a) comment cards completed by young visitors, b) children’s messages, poems, letters, or cards sent or left at the site, and c) children’s artwork sent or left at the site. Hundreds of artifacts comprise the evidence we have begun examining through qualitative research approaches that involve detailed analysis and coding of each piece.
Our newest study is collaboration with a rural school district in that has made annual trips to the Memorial since 2003. Two teachers are partnering with our research team to examine several aspects of their experiences: a) how their explanation of the event of 9/11 has evolved over time; b) how students with and without lived memory of 9/11 have experienced the Memorial, and c) how best to provide classroom and field-trip experiences for children visiting such sites.
Teaching and Conference Projects. During the coming academic year, we will collaborate with Dr. Kirk Savage in his new undergraduate course in the History of Art and Architecture (HAA) department. This course focusing on dark tourism sites will bring together students in applied development psychology and HAA to explore how young visitors encounter sites such as the Flight 93 Memorial, the Oklahoma City Bombing Memorial, and the other memorial sites resulting from the events of 9/11. Lastly, with a faculty member, Dr. Anna Woodham at the Ironbridge Institute at the University of Birmingham, UK, we are planning for a conference to exchange research ideas with colleagues at heritage sites.
Related Topics: Museums/Exhibits, Teaching, Place
If you have a direct offer of assistance, sensitive criticism, or wish to share contact information for other people the proposer should reach out to, please get in contact directly: Mary Margaret Kerr, mmkerr[at]pitt.edu
If you have general ideas or feedback to share please feel free to use the comments feature below.
This is one of several topics that relates to “toxic” or “ugly” history: the KKK and the Concentration Camps are others. I wonder if together, you could put together a roundtable on approaches to interpretation.
Thank you for your thoughtful suggestion.
Hi Mary,
Yes, let’s follow up on this idea: a panel/discussion involving the interpretation, memorialization, etc. of toxic sites or ugly pasts.
Reading your proposal reminded me of the following article here: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/marita-sturken/911-memorial-museum-_b_1870554.html
In a way, it connects while contrasting Latin America’s toxic sites and those related to 9/11, which is a good thing. Or, how can we interpret terrorism in the U.S. to broader understandings of global history, etc.?
Let’s continue this conversation….
Thanks so much.
Although I don’t know what they’re doing specifically with children, the Oklahoma City Bombing Memorial seems like an potential participant. Bruce Noble, superintendent of this NPS site (last time I checked), has been active in NCPH, so might be a good starting point.
Thank you so much for your suggestions. We have been in touch with the Oklahoma site for our research, but have not yet visited. I will follow up on the contact you gave.