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Perceptions and Attitudes Towards Cultural Heritage and Its Education Among Preschool Educators: A Convenience Sample from 11 Chinese Provinces

Year: 2025

Type: article

Abstract: Cultural heritage education promotes sustainability by fostering children’s emerging identity with local heritage and internalizing shared cultural values. In early childhood settings, these formative processes are shaped by preschool educators’ perceptions and attitudes toward cultural heritage and its teaching. This study employs a structured questionnaire to investigate preschool teachers’ cultural heritage literacy and their views on cultural heritage education, gathering data from a convenience sample of 64 valid responses from 11 provinces. Results indicate that teachers generally possess a superficial understanding of local cultural heritage and demonstrate limited emotional engagement, which affects their perceptions of the relevance and value of cultural heritage for young children. They often lack awareness in selecting meaningful content, experience contradictory expectations, and hold low expectations for fostering cultural identity. Notably, difficulty interpreting heritage meanings is associated with lower expectations. Over half of the teachers report challenges in “goal setting and evaluation” and in finding “appropriate methods to achieve goals”. Targeted training to enhance cultural heritage literacy and strengthen goal setting is therefore a priority.

Source: Sustainability

DOI: 10.3390/su17198535

Authors: Ran Zheng, Wei Zhang, Liangjing Guo

Institutions: Southwest University, Jinan University, University of Birmingham, Nanjing Normal University

Language: English

Topic: Indigenous and Place-Based Education

Subfield: Education

Field: Social Sciences

Domain: Social Sciences

SDG: Quality education

Open Access status: gold

Estimated APC paid: $2,896