Heritage Education as a Tool for Creating Critical Citizens

During the last decades, citizenship education has become a key priority, as it is one of the main concerns for governments and international organizations. Since 2004, the European Commission has been developing several programmes and projects with the aim of disseminating democratic values and raising awareness of the power of education and its role in the creation of democratic and participative citizenship. In light of this, heritage education, as one of the main dimensions of citizenship education, plays a key role in building a local identity to confront the challenges of global citizenship. The main aim of this study is exploring the conceptions that future secondary education teachers have regarding citizenship, democracy and heritage as well as identifying the relationships between education and the training they have received as future teachers.