Young trackers

Under the title Young Track Finders, a group of history teachers from various schools in the Netherlands worked on a new approach to teach pupils to investigate (migration) history in their own environment. Inspiration was provided by the Cultural Trackseekers projects (2004-2008) of the Centre for the History of Migrants (CGM). In these projects, young people, in cooperation with CGM, collected many hundreds of photos and documents from the private albums of their parents, grandparents and acquaintances. They
As Cultural Pathfinders, they approached people in their neighbourhood and discovered the unknown history of their parents’ contemporaries. The photos and stories were subsequently included in a growing Historical Picture Archive on Migrants.

The Cultural Pathfinders approach and the Historical Image Archive on Migrants form the basis of the educational project Young Pathfinders that you have before you.
This manual is the result of a Professional Learning Community (PLG) of teachers organised by Leiden University (ICLON) and CGM around the theme of migration. Teachers were inspired by each other and by specialists from the world of historical research, heritage, archives and pedagogy.

During the PLG, they each developed Spoorzoekers projects at their own school; in junior and senior secondary schools (VMBO, HAVO and VWO).