Hacia un patrimonio inclusivoanálisis de buenas prácticas de educación patrimonial y emocional para el desarrollo de las personas con capacidades diferentes

Abstract

Today, social and educational inclusion is a priority objective for all societies. Heritage allows us to build individual and collective, social and cultural identity. Heritage education helps us establish links between heritage assets and people, generating processes of patrimonialisation and feelings of belonging. Thus, heritage is constituted as an essential didactic resource for the construction and global development of all people, making it possible to meet the demands of people with disabilities, contributing to the improvement of their quality of life and their development as critical citizens who actively participate in society. To this end, accessibility to heritage is essential, with emotional education as a fundamental tool for its promotion. School-museum relationships prevail as a positive feature in developing good heritage education practices that advocate inclusion. The doctoral thesis is divided into five chapters that make up the final report of the research work carried out over the last five years. Chapter I introduces us to the research that has been carried out, explaining how the doctoral thesis came about, justifying the type of thesis chosen and briefly describing the study approach. The second chapter presents the construction of the theoretical foundation on which the doctoral thesis is based. It develops the theoretical bases of the conceptualisation of heritage and heritage education, inclusive education, emotional education and the links between the three topics, clarifying concepts and taking a theoretical position. The third chapter develops the methodological framework of the research. Using an interpretative approach and a qualitative methodology, the research design is divided into three data gathering sub-phases, ranging from the analysis of didactic proposals of heritage entities, through a multi-case study of four Italian museums, and ending with a case study on the ‘Le radice per volare’ project. The researcher takes an active role in the research process, using tools and techniques such as interviewing, observation and document analysis. Data analysis was carried out using a system of categories developed by the EPITEC research team and adapted to the study by the researcher herself. Chapter four presents the compendium of 8 publications that make up the doctoral thesis. The first two publications refer to the preparatory phase of the research, developing the results of a systematic analysis of the international literature review. The third publication describes the results obtained in analysis of the didactic proposals of 50 heritage institutions, museums or cultural management companies in the city of Bologna. The fourth publication describes the results of the second sub-phase of data collection, which consists of a multi-case study of four museums in the cities of Bologna, Ravenna and Rimini. The fifth and sixth publications develop and explain the results of the third sub-phase of the data gathering phase, the case study of the ‘Le radici per volare’ project. The seventh reference provides an overview of the findings of the full research, indicating ten key ideas for inclusive heritage education. Finally, the eighth publication presents a didactic proposal using the ten key ideas that have emerged from the research. Chapters five and six discuss the results and conclusions, in response to the overall aim of the research, which is to describe good inclusive heritage education practices in museums and early childhood and primary education and their impact on the emotional development of people with disabilities. The results are presented in three sections that are the result of the prominence of each category in our research: heritage education and inclusion: an indissoluble binomial; what, why and how to teach heritage to cater for diversity; and heritage as an element that evokes emotions in people with disabilities. As conclusions of the research, we reached ten key ideas for carrying out an inclusive heritage education, highlighting the aspects that directly influence the inclusion of people with disabilities in heritage activities and didactic proposals.