Changing high school students’ perceptions through peace learning utilizing a digital archive: By constructing a DA of the oral history of Maizuru student storytellers and ‘Shirakaba Nisshi’

Abstract

After 80 years since the end of the war, memories of the war are diminishing with the passing of each generation. The purpose of this project is to create an opportunity for high school students to reaffirm the importance of peace. As a method for this purpose, we propose to create a digital archive (DA) of “Shirakaba Nisshi” and the oral history of student storytellers at the Repatriation Memorial Museum in Maizuru by interviewing them. Using the DA, we conducted a peace study and investigated how the students of the same generation as the authors have changed their perceptions of peace. The results suggest that the students’ attitudes toward peace education changed from passive to active, and that they developed a proactive attitude toward passing on memories of war. We believe that the effectiveness of the proposed method was confirmed and that one example of peace learning using DA could be presented.