In the 1980s, curricular management began to give importance to essay learning issues. The set of knowledge that must be mastered by all students in order that everyone can have the skills and tools that enable them to participate in society in a constructive and intelligent way. The essential contents must be constituted by common ideas, experiences and traditions, (Boyer, 1983). For this reason, in many places heritage education began to be defended as an integral part of the essential contents of learning.
In Portugal, Patrimonial Education as learning in a school context has been little cherished, for example, there is no referential for heritage education. This justifies the following 10 questions on Heritage Education.
What is Heritage Education?
It is a learning process that uses the lived life (cultural or natural patrimonial object) as a catalyst. It links with environmental education, citizenship education, global education (education for development, education for art, literacy and algebra).
How do you do heritage education?
Heritage education is done through the participation of students and families through the creation of meaningful experiences mobilized by the patrimony of the communities. It activates the knowledges, the ways of doing and being and the relations with the world and with the others.
How are the heritage education experiences made?
The experiences of patrimonial education activate the perception and the cognition:
- The perception of self, of the other and the context,
- Mobilize memory and awareness;
- Work on the space (of the city) and the times (past, present, future, chronological and symbolic).
What tasks are accomplished by the heritage education experience?
The patrimonial education performs exercises that mobilize the senses (vision, smell, touch, hearing, taste) intuition, and cognition (reading and writing, algebra and geometry, aesthetics and ethics) and concretizes through a communicative action.
How is equity education catalyzed?
Patrimonial education is triggered by the collection of lived objects (experiences, stories, photographs, drawings, things of nature) that have the potential to “lead to a discovery”.
How to motivate the student to heritage education?
It is necessary to start from the diagnostic exercise: to look at the needs of the child and the world of the child. Each child has a sense of self, of others, of their space and of their time.
Children when they are born are centered on themselves and have no time. Confrontation with the world and with others is creating a process of growth, mediated by family and school. When they arrive at school it is necessary to know the starting point of each child to create a common learning process.
How does heritage education contribute to the global educational process?
Working with the notions of space and time contributes to the connection to the world and to the distinction between truth and illusion.
By facilitating the concrete experience it favors the creation of memories and the creation of processes of adhesion through the emotions.
What is the methodology and techniques of work with heritage education?
The methodologies of work in heritage education use the active learning methodologies, generated from group dynamics, combining the self-reflection and the observation of the other in context, in order to create a common action.
The heritage education work technique uses the patrimonial objects as a procedure of acquisition of competences and relevant learning. They can be applied in a specific discipline, or in any disciplinary areas through the use of inheritances, memories, identity, know-how and techniques in local context.
They develop in four stages.
- The revelation of the experience of life (from experience lived as an asset object), where through games of motivation are freely exploited and creative the sensitive world and the different materials and textures, which aims to identify relevance and create motivation ,
- The observation of the patrimonial object, which starts from the recognition of the identified relevancies made through its registration (drawings, writing, photography, recordings, orality), which aims to fix an initial knowledge and create a first level of consciousness;
- The exploration of the patrimonial object that seeks to explore the object of different points of view and create a second level of consciousness about the characteristics of the objects (their material structures) and about their (symbolic) meanings and about the different forms of use by the community (contexts);
- The appropriation of the patrimonial object, which aims to develop a communicative action, through an extroversion action that allows the subject to develop their appropriation of the patrimonial object.
Note: Like any learning process the times described are merely indicative, each time being able to develop autonomously or to merge.
How is the Heritage Education methodology applied?
The heritage education methodology is applied in groups. In each time it is necessary that each one finds its relevance, has the opportunity to express its point of view, in order to develop a group action. Thus the sharing of lived experience must be shared so that from the initial point of view other voices are added. The methodology should allow all members to practice listening and participation.
The heritage education methodology is developed in a laboratory space (school) but involves a connection to the communities that inhabit the space, through the participation of families and local partners in diagnostic and communication actions.
What results are expected from the application of the heritage methodology?
The development of self-awareness, of others (identity and citizenship) in the context of cultural diversity. The application of social and cognitive skills (reading, writing, aesthetics) in solving problems. The development of partnerships with the community.