Gamification and Controversial Heritage: Trainee Teachers’ Conceptions

Heritage education is configured as an ideal framework for the treatment of socio-environmental problems relevant to modern society. To this end, it is essential that teachers can develop proposals in the classroom that promote critical thinking and the eco-social education of their students, based on innovative and experiential methodologies. For this reason, initial teacher training must ensure that future teachers acquire these innovative tools. Thus, the aim of this work is to identify the conceptions of student teachers in initial teacher training regarding gamification as a teaching methodology to address controversial heritage. To achieve this, a questionnaire has been designed with questions about heritage, controversy, and educational gamification, which was given to 235 students (M = 60; F = 175) taking their primary education degrees at different Spanish universities. To guide the design of the research instrument and analyze the results, a system of categories was developed and the SPSS data processing program was used. The first results show that, even though students in initial teacher training think that they do have a predisposition to use gamification to work around controversial heritage in class, they lack the knowledge of methodological strategies and gamified educational activities, which suggests a dearth of training on these issues in the primary education degree courses.