The school-community link: an experience of heritage education from non-formal education

Abstract

This study is based on the implementation of the “Culturados” project in the Ethnological Museum of the Huerta de Murcia, located in the municipality of Alcantarilla. Its objective is to find out the opinion of the students and teachers of pre-school and primary education, from seven schools in this town that make up the sample, about the link between the school and the community. Also of the complementarity of non-formal education for the study of cultural heritage, in the formation of an intercultural and inclusive citizenship. The main instrument used in the research was the questionnaire, one for teachers and another for students. The information collected in them has been complemented with annotations of what was observed in the course of the workshops in a field diary. In this study, descriptive and inferential analysis of the data collected in the questionnaires has been carried out, as well as content analysis of comments from the field diary, open questions from the questionnaire and other audiovisual materials. eThe results show that both students and teachers consider it important to link the school with their immediate environment. The participants believe that the teaching of cultural heritage contributes to the acquisition of knowledge, and consider that this type of proposal, from non-formal education, favors and complements intercultural and inclusive education, which is necessary to form more critical and democratic citizens. However, in order to obtain successful results, it is important to establish collaboration between the school and the socio-cultural agents in its environment, establishing strategies to achieve a common goal.