The main objective of this chapter is to raise awareness of the pedagogic potential of history of the Spanish Civil War, and its heritage, to develop a citizen education programme to foster critical citizenship. Today, more than ever, our complex and interrelated world is making us learn and live together. Not just because of solidarity, humanitarianism, or to practice the values of pluralism, as described in the civic education educational curricula, but because we must learn to live within the complexity of our world. We will talk about heritage, since each era generates objects, artifacts, and documents of all kinds, and wars are no exception. Thus, we propose pedagogic activities grounded on the use of heritage materials, which will be contributing to the work for a critical citizenry.
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The European Commission in its program Horizon 2020 has widening up the topics related to the Social and Human Sciences, and has provided a research budget equivalent to the Experimental Sciences one, since it considers the Social Sciences as fundamental elements to understand the advancement of knowledge, which currently faces a wide spectrum of social challenges (Campàs, 2014). The League of European Research Universities (LERU) argues that the vital role of Social and Human sciences in today's society is fostering access to knowledge, as the challenges that European society is facing need to be understood as objects of study (LERU, 2012).
Amongst these challenges, we must emphasise citizenship and the management of the historical memory and places, understood as the conscious efforts to understand the past, mostly the tragic one, treating in a respectful manner, as fundamental axes for the understanding of both conflicts and heritage of conflicts. We must not forget that addressing conflicts is fundamental to develop a critical attitude towards violence and to promote its peaceful resolution (Knudson, Cable & Beck, 1995; Claire and Holden, 2007; Cowan and Maitles, 2012; Woolley, 2010).
Conflicts are understood as inherent in any society, although not necessarily as something negative, however, the society must be conscious of it significance to solve these to avoid deepening up the conflicts, turning them into negative actions (Davies, 2005, Goodall, 2007, Maitles, 2012).
In our country, the Spanish Civil War is one of these controversial issues and we consider that it should be taught in educational programmes at school level, as one of the fundamental axes to develop a critical citizenship, and to be able to approach the treatment of conflict as something inherent in human life but with multiple possible ways of resolution (Dagnino, Ott & Pozzi, 2015). It is a topic that fits perfectly between the debates held in the European Commission in regard to the role of the Social Sciences in fostering citizenship skills in education (Simandiraki, 2006).
The main objective of this chapter is to raise awareness of the pedagogical potential of the history of the Spanish Civil War, and its heritage, to develop a citizen education programme to foster critical citizenship. Today more than ever, our complex and interrelated world, is making us to us to learn to live together. Not just because of solidarity, humanitarianism, or to practice the values of pluralism, as described in the curricula for civic education; but because we must learn to live within the complexity of our world, which is increasingly interdependent economically, culturally, environmentally, socially and politically, forcing us to educate, train, work and coexist with people from a wide range of social and cultural groups from various parts of the world (Van Sledright, 1998; Simandiraki, 2006; Feliu- Torruella & Hernàndez, 2013).
Fellow citizens come from all over the world, and we not only share public spaces, cities, schools and workplaces, but also, we establish more complex and personal relationships. Therefore, schools play a key role, as children and the educational community (parents, teachers), must develop the competences and attitudes for democratic coexistence (Feliu-Torruella, 2018).