Iberian Peninsula and Latin America Secondary Teachers’ assumptions on Near Heritage to promote historical thinking

Abstract

There are few articles focused on non university teachers’ assumptions about heritage as a tool for history teaching. This fact doesn´t help to indentify likely bias that could block the use of heritage and its great potential in history classrooms. This paper is concerned with teachers’ assumptions about the combination of heritage and school history by using a survey among 290 high school history teachers from the Iberian Peninsula and Latin America. A statistical method (factor analysis) has been used to analyze the survey items measured in a Likert scale in software IBM-SPSS and software R. Firstly, the data was analyzed through an exploratory analysis, with Varimax rotation, to reduce the dimensions and a structural equation modelling was used to confirm the survey design. The factor analysis allows to point out two unobserved variables that are called “historical thinking skills” and “local heritage potential”. Some conclusions have been reached as the widespread assumption that heritage can be a great help for school history teaching as its use can promote historical thinking skills.