An Interdisciplinary Secondary School Didactic Unit based on Local Natural and Cultural Heritage

ABSTRACT

This article describes an educational path, and subsequent experimentation, for a local cultural and natural heritage didactic unit, focusing on understanding the concepts of heritage, landscape and life in a specific mountain area. The unit, aimed at secondary school children, presents its pedagogical purpose through different methods including worksheets, glossaries, guides, and activity booklets. This study of local heritage focuses on education in relation to the specific field of heritage. Problems currently affecting the region – abandonment, depopulation, and the progressive loss of knowledge and of cultural assets of the past – are central to this didactic unit, which seeks to enhance cultural awareness of local heritage. Several pedagogical techniques incorporating different graphical and textual options are implemented to characterize the setting. The analysis explains the characteristics of the unit and its results in the form of intellectual output. It promotes progressive learning based on the recognition of natural and cultural characteristics of the rural landscape while also developing transversal skills such as innovation, social and cognitive values, and awareness of sensibility and sustainability. This pedagogical tool, which is based on a joint objective and subjective approach exercised both by investigators and the local population, aims above all to encourage the interest of children and of individuals with closer ties to the territory.

KEYWORDS:

• Children
• culture learning
• built environment
• rural landscape
• Penyagolosa
• didactic design
• teaching methods
• placemaking

Acknowledgements

The authors want to thank the collaboration of SEO/Birdlife staff, Mario Giménez, the freelance layout designer Naomí Alonso, and the drawer Miguel Calero from Creaciones Ilustradas.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This didactic unit has received funding and time from the project: Writing historical centers. Dynamics of contemporary place-making in Spanish World Heritage Cities (DoCplaceS), by MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033 [grant number PID2019-105197RA-I00], and the financing support of the Chair on Historical Centres and Cultural Routes in Castellón (2015–2022) and Universitat Jaume I [grant number POSDOC/2020/06]; Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades; Diputación de Castellón.