Teacher training in heritage education: good practices for citizenship education

Abstract

Education of citizens to understand, address and resolve current social and environmental issues calls for a new professional profile that is more reflective, investigative, and critical of the teaching staff and which modifies the predominant, more traditional teaching methodologies. For this reason, we consider it essential that future teachers responsible for all subjects in which heritage is a relevant educational component should have appropriate training in these key concepts, in relation to heritage, emotions, identities, citizenship, and the approach to relevant socio-environmental problems. The study developed here analyses different end-of-degree projects (undergraduate and master’s degrees) carried out by teachers in initial training for Primary and Secondary Education. In their training process, they have addressed different criteria that are considered key to carry out didactic proposals for citizenship education based on heritage, from the perspective of determining good practices in the teaching and learning processes of the social sciences. The approach of this research is characterized by a qualitative methodology, through a documentary study, in which the materials produced by teachers in initial training are examined by analytical categories of this study: Why teach about heritage? What is taught about heritage? How is it taught? What relations are established between emotional intelligence and heritage? What relationships are established between territorial intelligence and heritage? In this study, the importance of the connection between educational research and innovation processes for the training of teachers in the field of heritage education with respect to education for citizenship has been highlighted. The connections of heritage with citizenship education and the potential involved in working on emotional and territorial intelligence have been highlighted too. However, it has been evidenced that it is necessary to go much further into the implementation of the approach to territorial intelligence in which the citizenry should be involved through shared management of heritage.