Unveiling to Educate: Reconstructing Historical Memories with Locative Digital Media in the Pilar Community

This article examines the relationships and impacts between the sense of belonging and the use of locative media by young students from a public school in the municipal education network of the city of Recife, Pernambuco, Brazil. Within this context, it seeks to foster reflections on the dimension of territorial identity from the perspective of heritage education, guided by the use of georeferencing technology. The objective of this study is to analyze the influence of locative media use on territorial identity. To achieve this aim, the study employed a quantitative methodology, which included the use of digital ethnography techniques to understand the context in which the participants are situated. Participant observation and digital technologies were adopted for data collection. In order to measure the influence of the Gnomon platform on participants' sense of belonging and territorial identity within the context of heritage education, we used a Sense of Belonging Index (SBI) in conjunction with Cronbach’s alpha coefficient (α). This was used as a reliability measure. The findings reveal the impacts of interactions between urban space and digital media, particularly their potential to make visible cultural heritage elements that had previously been forgotten or unnoticed. The analysis of the data collected regarding the sense of belonging showed that responses to the use of locative digital media, when combined with other pedagogical dynamics, are effective as cognitive mediation tools. They are capable of enhancing and giving visibility to forgotten or marginalized histories and memories.