Cultural Heritage Education in Valencia: Active and Place-Based Approaches

Description

Cultural heritage shapes identity, but it rarely finds its place in everyday teaching.

When it is addressed in schools, it is frequently limited to passive visits or factual explanations, which can reduce students’ interest and make it harder for them to connect historical sites and art with their own learning and experiences.

As a result, cultural heritage is often perceived as something separate from daily classroom practice, rather than as a meaningful educational resource.

Using the city of Valencia as a unique learning environment, this course intends to address this challenge by inviting participants to explore cultural heritage through active and place-based learning approaches.

Valencia’s historical, urban, and social heritage will not be treated as something to be observed from a distance. Instead, the course will show how museums, historical sites, and urban spaces can easily become meaningful learning tools that encourage curiosity, active participation, and critical thinking.

Thanks to practical hands-on activities, inquiry-based tasks, collaborative games, and challenges, during the week, participants will be guided in engaging with key cultural and historical locations around Valencia’s city center.

Learning will be built around observation, discussion, problem-solving, and teamwork. This way, participants will be given the opportunity to experience the city in an active way while reflecting on how similar approaches can be transferred to their own educational contexts.

This course aims to be very practice-oriented, with a strong emphasis being put on methodology.

Participants will be encouraged to think about how cultural heritage can be used not only to teach humanities subjects (such as history or art), but also to support broader skills such as interpretation, collaboration, and engagement.

In this sense, this course’s goal is to move beyond the traditional guided visit (where participants usually just passively receive information) and to focus on designing educational experiences in which learners take an active role.

By the end of the course, participants will be inspired to design their own active, place-based learning activities using cultural heritage, adapting games, tasks, and inquiry-based approaches to their own teaching contexts.

They will have developed practical competencies in using museums, urban spaces, and local heritage as learning environments, enabling them to create more engaging, participatory, and meaningful learning experiences for their students.

Concept by Mariya Mihaylova

Learning outcomes

The course will help participants to:

• Understand cultural heritage as a meaningful educational resource connected to identity, memory, and belonging;
• Explore the cultural heritage of Valencia through active, place-based, and interpretive learning approaches;
• Use games, inquiry-based tasks, and collaborative activities to engage learners with cultural heritage;
• Develop practical and realistic strategies to use museums, heritage sites and everyday urban contexts as learning environments;
• Exchange experiences and examples of good practice with colleagues in a collaborative and intercultural learning environment.

Tentative schedule

Day 1 – Introduction to the course and cultural heritage

• Introduction to the course, the school, and the external week activities;
• Icebreaker activities;
• Presentations of the participants’ schools;
• Cultural heritage as an educational resource;
• Why active and place-based approaches matter in heritage education;
• Reflection on participants’ own experiences of using local heritage in teaching.

Day 2 – Understanding heritage in the urban environment

• Cultural heritage: types, importance, and classroom relevance;
• Mercado Central: exploring a functioning heritage market today;
• Place-based heritage “treasure hunt”;
• Reflection on observation, engagement, and inquiry in urban learning spaces.

Day 3 – Designing place-based learning activities

• Designing Place-Based Learning Activities;
• Turia Park: urban change, citizen activism, memory, and place-based inquiry;
• City of Arts and Sciences: contemporary heritage and interpretation;
• Discussion on how to adapt place-based activities to different age groups and contexts.

Day 4 – Museums as active learning environments

• Museums as learning environments (beyond just guided visits);
• Museum of Fine Arts: active museum learning in practice;
• Observation, interpretation, and discussion as learning tools;
• Workshop: designing museum-based activities for school contexts.

Day 5 – From heritage experience to classroom practice

• Contemporary art in a historic building: continuity, change and relevance;
• Keeping historic sites relevant: contemporary use, youth engagement, cultural trends;
• Final projects: creating classroom-ready activities;
• Presentation and peer feedback.

Day 6 – Course closure and cultural activities

• Course evaluation: round-up of acquired competencies, feedback, and discussion;
• Awarding of the course Certificate of Attendance;
• Excursion and other external cultural activities.

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