The University of Barcelona awards a pioneering project in the teaching of history
The University of Barcelona has awarded the Antoni Caparrós Award to Dr. Isidora Valentina Sáez, professor at the Faculty of Education of the UB, for a pioneering educational project with an innovative methodology to teach history and understand its processes. The award is given by the Social Council of the UB and the Bosch i Gimpera Foundation.
The initiative, entitled “Learning about the 19th century by studying the history of a guitar: linking researched history with taught history”, has been carried out in the framework of a collaboration with the Technological Institute and ‘Estudis Superiores de Monterrey (TEC), in Mexico, with the aim of connecting the past with the present in a more meaningful and accessible way for students.
The project follows the history of the guitar in the 19th century as a tool to explore multiple facets of this period. This approach allows students to delve into history from an interdisciplinary perspective that includes political, social, economic and cultural aspects, as well as connecting various geographical areas, such as Mallorca and Cuba. In this way, students learn to link historical knowledge with current issues, such as migration processes, and overcome traditional approaches focused only on political and economic events, often distant from the daily experience of students.
The pedagogical methodology recreates a historiographic research through the study of material and documentary sources, which allows students to analyze and understand events and social processes in their complexity. This innovative approach works on key skills such as researching primary sources of documentation, beyond information available on the internet, and fosters critical, scientific and historical thinking skills. All of this contributes to a more holistic and deeper understanding of historical processes.
Selected as good practice by the Council of Europe
The project has been applied to the subject Contemporary Society of the 19th Century taught at the TEC in Monterrey. During the fifteen sessions of the course, each with extensive support material and using puzzle solving as a guiding thread, students from various TEC campuses have worked with materials specifically created by Dr. Sáez and her team.
On the other hand, it is a teaching model that can be extended to other educational contexts. In fact, it has served as a basis for new didactic proposals, including an advanced training course in historical and critical thinking, aimed at teachers and education professionals, which is in the preparation phase.
The social impact of the initiative has gone beyond the classrooms of the Monterrey TEC, as it has caught the attention of the Council of Europe, which has selected it as a good practice in history education on a European scale. This recognition was made during the Innovation Days that were held in Strasbourg, a sample of the educational and innovative value in history teaching that the award-winning project has.