The Art Nouveau Path: Curriculum-Aligned Heritage Learning for Urban Resilience and Sustainability Competences

Source abstract

Cultural heritage can strengthen urban resilience when mobilized as educational infrastructure that builds stewardship, place attachment, and civic agency. This study examines whether the Art Nouveau Path, an outdoor mobile augmented reality heritage game in Aveiro, Portugal, can function as a curriculum-aligned pathway for sustainability competences and resilience-relevant meaning-making in formal education. A curriculum translation matrix mapped eight points of interest and 36 tasks to Portuguese curriculum anchors, Education for Sustainability themes, GreenComp sustainability competences, and the Sustainable Development Goals, framing the matrix as an adoption-oriented design artefact. Empirical evidence comprised accompanying teachers’ in-field observations (T2-OBS; N = 24 across 18 sessions) and students’ post-activity survey data (S2-POST; N = 439), with open-ended reflections coded through a directed resilience-mechanism codebook (Krippendorff’s alpha = 0.91). Teachers reported high perceived value and feasibility and frequently noted enacted stewardship and placed responsibility during sessions. Students’ reflections most often linked resilience to sustainable conservation under pressure and to nature-city interconnections, whereas hazard-memory mechanisms appeared less often. Adoption-related evidence is limited to teacher feasibility reports and institutional legibility from curriculum translation, rather than confirmed institutional uptake indicators. Scaling is likely to require explicit supports for differentiation, assessment scaffolds, and routine delivery in public spaces.