ELEMENTARY SCHOOL PUPILS: FROM PASSERS-BY IN LIBRARIES AND OTHER CULTURAL HERITAGE INSTITUTIONS TO THEIR END-USERS

Abstract

In terms of class organization, an important factor for creating the conditions for the teaching process is the venue at which the teaching takes place. School field trips represent a special type of teaching, which involves visits to museums, libraries and other cultural heritage institutions. The aim of this research, conducted in a Croatian elementary school, is to determine how well the pupils remember their visits to these institutions and how motivated they are for such trips. Taking into consideration that the research involved 41 participants who visited a total of 31 museums, libraries and other institutions during the course of 8 years, the total number of possible answers in the survey was 1271 and the participants only provided 239 answers, which means that they remembered only 18.8 percent of institutions visited. The survey also probed the students to see how they prepared for these visits during their school excursions and field trips. Out of 41 participants, 16 reported that their homeroom or class teachers had acquainted them with the institution they would visit; only 4 students obtained the information on their own from online or some alternative sources; and 21 students, more than a half, did not try to obtain any information about the institution they would visit. A way to change this lies in appropriate intellectual and emotional motivation of students, and one of the possible concrete measures is the project “A Backpack Full of Culture”, conducted by the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Croatia.