Cultural heritage and education: what relationship?

Abstract

This study is based on the experience gained through the research and intervention project on the History of Education - Educational Roots for the Future (EduRF), funded by FCT in partnership with Murça City Council. The project team has created a CITRIME-Murça (Interdisciplinary, Transboundary and Interregional Center for the Memory of Education) located in a rural area in the Portuguese countryside. This Center seeks to expand the notions of educational and cultural activities and study the role of cultural heritage and, specifically, the educational heritage in the school-community relationship.

The goals of this study are to question the relationship between Cultural Heritage and Education; to understand the role of the local community in the development of education and the preservation of educational and cultural heritage; to reflect on CITRIME-Murça, a small cultural structure promoting generational interconnection, the exchange of knowledge, and the fixing of memories, essential for anchoring multiple education and school learning.

To this end, we will briefly present the research and intervention carried out within the EduRF project regarding the cultural activities promoted with the community, schools, and the cross-border region. This will help us understand the role of the local community not as support for school activities, but as a producer of culture, where learning is anchored. In this context, CITRIME-Murça became the center for collecting and preserving the community's patrimonial objects, memory, and a space for dialogue between traditional wisdom and academic knowledge.

The research team implemented the project using mixed methods that allowed the combination of quantitative and qualitative methods, approaches, or research concepts in a single study, improving the validity and reliability of the results and enriching the understanding of the phenomena studied (Cameron & Sankaran, 2015).

The analysis of the results collected allows us to affirm the importance of cultural activities with the involvement of local communities in the recovery and safeguarding of memories, which structure social relations. Among the cultural heritage, the educational memories prove to be a vast field that interconnects the past and the present, generates the interest of different generations, and allows the transmission and the debate on culture and education (Escolano Benito,A., 2000; Felgueiras,M.L.2005; 2015). The CITRIME has a considerable value from an endogenous point of view, encouraging sharing, debate, intergenerational and exogenous encounters through exhibitions, participation in community activities, and interconnection with other communities.

We can conclude that CITRIME-Murça contributes to an enrichment and quality education, both in the school pedagogical aspect and in the widening of the experience of the youngest, in the construction of notions of space and time, establishing links with the cultural heritage. Furthermore, CITRIME-Murça promotes the well-being of the older person, and cultural citizenship is revitalized with the participation of local inhabitants in cultural activities and intergenerational contact, contributing to creating local educational responses adapted to the needs of the communities. This study demonstrated the importance of involving the local population in research studies and developing the projects with the community and for the community.