A Museum as a Centre for Ecological and Heritage Education for Children

The Sagalund museum has had a heavy emphasis on children as museum visitors and hands-on activities for children since the late 1990s. In 2013, the museum received status as a centre of children´s culture, gaining additional state funding for educational activities. This has allowed us to employ a coordinator for children´s acitivites and keep developing them further.

Our goal now is to develop into a forerunner in combining ecological awareness and heritage education. Sagalund’s ecological and environmental education is inspired by the museum founder Nils Oskar Jansson (1862-1927) who was also a teacher. Jansson had his pupils grow vegetables in the school garden. His goal was to teach growing generations to sustain themselves and to learn about the variety of crops available to grow. We continue this today. Each school in the local community has their own vegetable patch in the museum. The programme has been established as a part of the curriculum in the municipality. The purpose is to teach the children about the connection between food and nature, and give them an understanding of how food grows, and how it is linked to the cycles of nature. Each class participating in the program sows and plants their crops in the spring before the holidays, and then harvests their crops in the autumn and cooks a meal using them. The children also learn about recycling and the cycle of nutrients through composting. In addition to the visiting schools, we have our own weekly afternoon club for children, who are able to engage much deeper into the subjects of heritage and sustainability and also take part in planning activities for visiting school groups.

In 2020, Sagalund’s activities for children were awarded the Green Flag certificate, which is part of the international Eco-Schools-programme. We see this as an important milestone in developing our educational activities and fostering the generations of the future to see heritage as a resource for thinking sustainably.