Outdoor education, the enhancement and sustainability of cultural heritage: Medieval madrid

Abstract

Education has a crucial role to play in helping meet the Sustainable Development Goals, for which the initial training of university teachers, and its evaluation, are all essential. In this context, the authors developed an outdoor work task, consisting of an orientation game in ‘medieval Madrid’. The main objective was to show future teachers how they can enable their own students to value cultural heritage in order to acquire sustainability competencies. The task was evaluated by participants using a questionnaire, in order to make them aware of the acquired competencies. A gamification component was added to the outdoor task to create a healthy competitive environment. In this way, future teachers were able to observe how a teaching activity is evaluated; learn how to organize a didactic activity that can be extrapolated to other territorial and heritage realities; and employ their mobile devices to learn the foundations of sustainability in heritage management. Additionally, they acquired teaching competencies that promoted quality education and contributed towards two of the Sustainable Development Goals, specifically: 4 “Ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all” and 11 “Make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable”.