School Inquiry in Secondary Education: The Experience of the Fiesta de la Historia Youth Congress in Seville

Abstract

In secondary education, the focus of history teaching must be on the development of global citizenship. The present research was a study contextualized in the Fiesta de la Historia Youth Congress in Seville (Spain). A documentary analysis with a descriptive and interpretive design was made of 63 projects of inquiry that pupils carried out. The main objectives were to assess the incidence of the proposal in terms of participation, and to determine whether the pupils’ projects followed a logic of inquiry about socially relevant problems which favors the construction of global citizenship. The results point to a low incidence of schools participating in this initiative. The projects of inquiry analyzed present, for the most part, themes related to the historical and social heritage of the locality. The proposals are approached as problems of a specific discipline and are worked on through a method based on a pseudoscientific research process. The findings indicate the need to continue implementing initiatives based on school inquiry that allow the teaching of history to be articulated around relevant social problems, with the objective being to develop citizenship skills.