At the age of a failing economic system and undeniable evidence of the effects humankind has had over the planet, it is necessary to look for alternatives to the way we live locally. This article explores the use of designing narratives and metanarratives to co-create imaginaries serving as the needed alternatives. This research starts by considering the historical factors to understand how industrialisation and the loss of traditional practices created a culture of disconnection from Nature in the Girona area, but also looks at why people start now reconnecting with it. The analysis is the foundation for speculative design practices to co-create a new local narrative of connection and regeneration. The project adopted the Integrative Worldviews Framework and used paradoxes to create possible future worldviews based on historical factors and literature. Citizens participated in conversational future-visioning workshops to develop and evaluate their local imagery of the previously created worldviews. This conversation-based exercise evidenced the potential of paradoxes in destructive futures to create imaginaries of regeneration. These imaginaries merge and form future stories. From the future narratives, the practice created cultural artefacts embodying a new culture of connection based on storytelling, traditional jobs, and a mythological understanding of Nature. Finally, as observed at the end of the project, these artefacts allow citizens to adopt them as their culture and expand their current worldview.
Many visitor studies make social background variables the central point of departure to explain participation patterns. How the past is 'staged', however, also has an influence on those to whom it appeals. This relational perspective calls for new conceptual tools to grasp empirical reality. Inspired by the historical philosophy of Georg Simmel and the literary theory of Mikhail Bakhtin a number of concepts which enable us to grasp the subtle relationship between museum presentations and visitors are presented. Bakhtin's notion of chronotopy serves as a key concept. By linking museum presentations and visitor perceptions with each other, it is also possible to identify certain tendencies within the contemporary museum landscape.
Using the past to orientate on the present and the future can be seen as one of history’s main contributions to educating future citizens of democratic societies. Because teachers often lack useful methods for pursuing this goal, this study explores three pedagogical approaches that may help them making connections between the past, the present and the future: working with longitudinal lines (LL), with enduring human issues (EHI) and with historical analogies (HA). The efficacy of these approaches was examined in three case studies conducted in two Dutch secondary schools with eighth- to tenth-grade students (N=135) and their teachers (N=4) as participants. Explorations took place within the boundaries of the existing history curriculum and in close collaboration with the teachers who participated because they felt a need to motivate their students by means of a pedagogy to make history more useful. Findings suggest that implementing the LL- and EHI-approaches in a traditional history curriculum with chronologically ordered topics is more complicated than implementing the HA-approach. The HA-approach appears to have more potential to encourage students to use historical knowledge in present-day contexts than the other two approaches. In terms of students’ appraisals of the relevance of history, the application of the EHI-approach showed positive effects.
