On the 28th of May Eldris Con Aguilar will defend her PhD dissertation entitled Heritage Education — Memories of the Past in the Present Caribbean Social Studies Curriculum: A View from Teacher Practices.

Abstract

Eldris’s study forms part of Nexus 1492 Subproject 4: A Future for Diverse Caribbean Heritages, which seeks to shed light on how local communities interpret and engage with heritage in the present day. When visiting the Caribbean, one is inevitably impressed with its natural and cultural diversity. The increasing effects of climate change, however, threaten the archaeological remains of the Caribbean, a fact that has inspired discussions about heritage preservation at various levels, for example in academia, government, NGOs, the private sector, local communities and school communities.

But cultural and natural heritage are also threated by human activity: when members of a society forget the connection that their contemporary lives have with the past, then heritage becomes vulnerable to acts of vandalism. In addition to this, immaterial expressions of heritage can be forgotten when traditions are lost over time. Such a scenario poses special challenges to teachers, who grapple with various approaches to teaching about the historical past, heritage and culture in the classroom. To this end, the research questions in this study focus on analyzing the relationships that are formed between individuals and the indigenous past in the school context.

This doctoral study, aimed at investigating the use of heritage education and pedagogical content knowledge in the classroom, treats this subject in the form of analyses of three country case studies: the Dominican Republic, Dominica and Saint Kitts and Nevis. Along these lines, it studies how indigenous heritage is represented in the school curriculum for social studies, specifically through an informed analysis of educational policies concerning cultural heritage and an informed account of teacher’s perspectives on subject content and pedagogical practices.

Based on a qualitative approach, this study sought to involve the local participation of educational stakeholders. In this way, school visits and interviews with teachers and education officers revealed how the school community makes use of education resources and materials available for teaching content on the indigenous past within the primary and secondary social studies curricula. As a result of the workshops with teachers, handouts were designed to provide additional resources for tackling the content gaps that the teachers had identified. These resources can be found on the Nexus 1492 website.

This research ultimately seeks to contribute to the fields of heritage education, teacher education and Caribbean studies by understanding the role of teacher knowledge and practices in safeguarding heritage—in this particular investigation, with a focus on the indigenous heritage of the Caribbean.