‘A sustainable feel’: heritage, austerity and the pedagogical predicament

Abstract

The development of a more critical understanding of ‘heritage’ and its value has taken place at a time when the instrumental value of heritage has appeared more relevant to organisational concerns than the intrinsic value. This thesis focuses on the impact of austerity on the contemporary articulation of heritage value and asks: ‘How has the funding crisis in UK heritage affected the perception and provision of intrinsically focused heritage interpretation?’ This question is addressed by using the multi-period site of Basing House as an exemplar within a wider contextual analysis, incorporating a regional assessment of heritage practice.

The research provides an overview of recent changes in heritage practice with an intention to demonstrate a pronounced shift has occurred away from intrinsically motivated practice. The potential issues associated with this instrumentalised focus are addressed and a strategy for balancing the instrumental practice with intrinsic practice is offered, with a model of heritage engagement which uses the ‘5C’s of dynamic heritage interpretation’: Critical history, Community conversations, Convergence, Constructivism, and Collaboration.

This model of heritage engagement draws on the researched observations and conversations held over the course of a years embedded participant observation and semi-structured interviewing at Basing House, but also draws on a regional survey and a review of recent museum professional and academic debate around the value and significance of heritage. Values-aware collaborative practice is highlighted as a strategy for providing deep and personally engaging experiential learning opportunities, in contrast to the shallower and more ‘disciplinary’ and didactically focused interpretation that instrumentalised policies appear to provide. An exploration of the multi-layered identity-making potential available at Basing House, and which by inference and example are also observed at other heritage sites, is used to examine the rich affective resource which heritage provides, as well as providing an opportunity to examine the convergent and entangled nature of heritage sites in general.

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Identifiers

ORCID for Carl Pollard: orcid.org/0000-0002-8429-2009

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