Mapping Pupils’ Cultural Consciousness: Design and Evaluation of a Theory-Based Survey

Cultural education, in the broadest sense of the word, teaches children and adolescents to reflect upon culture. It teaches them to reflect, using a variety of cognitive strategies, and in different media. According to Van Heusden (2015) et al. (2013), the semiotic strategies of cultural consciousness are also deployed recursively, to make sense of culture itself. Cultural consciousness is thus ‘culture about culture’. It involves reflective perception, imagination, conceptualization, and analysis, engaging with different media groups: the body, artifacts, language, and graphic signs (cf. van Heusden, 2009).Being able to assess pupils’ reflective abilities (i.e., their cultural consciousness) may facilitate the design, implementation and evaluation of cultural education teachers’ practice and allow for an in-depth analysis of the effects of cultural education programs on the development of children and adolescents. Currently, however, we face a lack of empirically tested instruments that are specifically designed to establish and measure cultural consciousness. In this study we aimed at designing such an instrument which would allow us to map pupils’ preferences for particular reflective strategies. In this chapter we elaborate on how theory informs the design and evaluation of a survey that allows for the mapping of cultural consciousness of pupils aged 8 to 14.