Abstract

The short curriculum titled Landscape and Sustainability, a new optional subject implemented in Galicia (Northwest of Spain), allows teachers to design their didactic programs with an important degree of autonomy when they do not have to be subjected to normative prescriptions. This circumstance allows analyzing and seeing the influence of the teachers’ social representations (SR) in the classroom around their teaching practice, the subject, and the type of educational context that favors innovation. This research article aims to answer that, also to identify how three secondary teachers conceive the innovation possibilities offered by this new subject, and to what extent they believe that this develops innovative educational attitudes in the didactic practice. It is a qualitative study whose data was obtained by applying three semi-structured interviews with open questions organized in blocks. These blocks were analyzed using the constant comparison method. The three teachers coincided with (1) an integral and critical view of the educational context; (2) they gave importance to the use of active methods and a critical approach as the key to success in their proposals; (3) the possibility of providing specific knowledge around the landscape supported by an interdisciplinary perspective; (4) they primarily aimed to have the students identify with their surroundings as a way to promote their social responsibility with those places; and (5) in two cases explicitly, and more indirectly in the third, they linked their proposals about the surroundings with heritage elements, pursuing different learning objectives. The analysis of these representations allows advancing the pre-eminence of the teacher’s disciplines over their interdisciplinary intention. Furthermore, it can be observed a tendency to make up students’ identities with places or heritage elements linked to the aesthetic, historical, or traditional factors.

Keywords: Teachers; civics; secondary education; educational innovation; social representations; teaching practice