Abstract
Heritage education enables us to question past societies to help us understand the present and think about the future to develop historical awareness. Heritage should be interpreted based on the implicit power relations, the stories that created it and those that now interpret it from different vantage points. Education for critical citizenship should examine the role of women or minorities when studying the heritage and call for an intercultural perspective. Heritage education is an extraordinary tool to help us understand the change and continuity in both objects and ideas, traditions and everyday life. Through heritage education, we have to develop youth critical awareness so that they reinterpret their culture based on their reality and interests.
TopIntroduction
Critical education starts from the foundation that any educational process should be interpreted as a power relationship and any discourse or story has an ideology which must be identified, including those related to studying the heritage. In the opinion of Dewey (1995, 2002), education is not a neutral process but a form a social control. In a similar vein, Freire (1970, 1974) believes that education is an instrument that can be used in two totally different ways: first, to educate a person in the logic of the social system, and two, to educate them in “the practice of freedom” in order to deal with reality critically and creatively for social participation and transformation. Ross (2019) states that there is no “scientifically objective” response to the question on the purposes of education in the social sciences because these purposes are determined by the kind of society we want to build. The purposes of studying heritage cannot be approached from objectivity or neutrality, since heritage exists within a society and a context, and education upholds certain social values.
Heritage education should teach students to appreciate the historical and cultural legacy we have been bequeathed and that we should leave as a legacy for future generations; it should teach us to value things with both a social origin and a natural heritage, both tangible and intangible. But heritage education cannot be limited to a catalogue of the assets and achievements of a given culture and its knowledge; instead, it should also spark questions and inquiry into the problems related to their creation, evolution, conservation and future. Critical education sets out to educate youths to understand their reality and participate in society in order to bring about changes and improve it. Learning how to interpret the past is an essential part of this process in order to understand the present through the legacy and sources which have reached us and are part of our cultural inheritance, and to contextualise the heritage from the historical standpoint and understand what society was like and how it has changed.
Heritage education can be a tool for training students in critical thinking skills if we analyse the conflicts associated with the creation and conservation of the heritage, as well as the different viewpoints regarding the meaning and use of the heritage in society today. The heritage is born with a certain intentionality associated with a way of thinking, living and seeing the world. Analysing the heritage means analysing the information associated with its origin and the society that created it, which enables us to work from the perspective of critical literacy. We have to educate students in asking questions based on sources and in training critical thinking for social action.
This chapter presents the fundamental ideas on critical heritage studies which interpret power relations, analyse hegemonic stories and suggest alternative counter-narratives on the purpose and future of the heritage (Daly & Chan, 2015). From this perspective, we suggest challenging the study of the heritage and posing controversial topics which reveal the most conflictive elements of the heritage in terms of its origin, meaning, conservation or disappearance, current use, etc. (Winter, 2013; Ho, McAvoy, Hess, & Gibbs, 2017). Knowledge of the heritage enables us to introduce topics related to democratic values, social problems related to people’s lives, change and continuity over time, debate and development of a critical awareness (Bickmore & Parker, 2014).
Key Terms in this Chapter
Controversial Issues and Heritage: the heritage has a vast educational potential for interpretation, debate and critique. For this, heritage studies should extend to the most problematic issues that affect the social world, beyond the cultural legacy. The heritage has a political, social and cultural component, and for this reason, it should be studied via controversial topics. Furthermore, the heritage does not have the same meaning or the same purpose in different places around the world, so it becomes a very living concept that is difficult to define and enables to suggest class debates, inquiry processes and issues where citizens can intervene.
Heritage Education: It should allow the historical roots of the present to be interpreted via all the elements from the past that still survive, which to examine in terms of what kind of society they represent, who constructed and used them, what they were used for, what values they represent, what they tell us, etc.
Hegemonic Discourse and Heritage: It tends to highlight the great artists, sculptors or architects, most of them men from a given dominant culture. Yet rarely do the women, the workers or the children who often contributed. For these reasons, the alternative and divergent discourse incorporates or includes everyone who participated in all cultural creations.
Heritage and Symbol: It often becomes a symbol of social transformations, of social or cultural revolutions, of ruptures with the past or the claims of other eras yearned for in the present. The heritage is claimed or denied every time power has changed throughout history. It becomes a symbol of an era as well as evidence of how power was envisioned in each epoch.
Critical Literacy and Heritage: Critical literacy applied to studying the heritage is geared towards reviewing its meaning, purpose and political and social use, that is, towards the disruption of its common or traditional use.
Critical Heritage Studies: They focus on the present, because it is in the present when we accept the responsibility for conserving the heritage; the present is the vantage point from which we interpret its meaning and relate it to certain identities. The heritage is a cultural asset as well as a social and political instrument for redefining our cultures, which should not simply be assimilated; instead, the new generations should evaluate it, critically interpret it and confer new meanings on it.
Interpretation of the heritage: It can lead the past to change by reusing or modifying it. The heritage transforms because people’s perception of it changes because of the very human condition, which leads our perception of the remains of the past to change, because the values, beliefs, preferences or priorities have changed.
Historical Memory and Historical Awareness: Historical memory is a vindication of the past. Historical awareness uses procedures to construct temporality and change-continuity in a process that goes from the past to the future. Memory looks toward the past and historical awareness revisits the past to analyse how to think about the future. Memory is related to imagination and historical empathy. Historical awareness is more related to the capacities of interpretation and historical narration. Memory is the example or the moral lesson, while historical awareness is the analysis of possibilities and the evaluation of social changes, ruptures and continuities