TITLE:
The Educational Influence of Urban Historical and Cultural Resources on College Students: A Case Study of Tiebai Area of Kuancheng District, Changchun City
AUTHORS:
Shuo Dong, Chunkai Yang, Hanqi Wang
KEYWORDS:
Urban Historical Culture, Place-Based Education, College Students’ Development, School-City Integration, Informal Education, Tiebai Area of Changchun
JOURNAL NAME:
Open Journal of Social Sciences,
Vol.14 No.9,
September
8,
2026
ABSTRACT: Urban historical and cultural heritage functions as a core informal educational resource in higher education and may profoundly shape college students’ place attachment, cultural identity, and humanistic literacy. Unlike standardized classroom teaching, localized cultural resources provide implicit, situational, and experiential education that complements institutional curriculum systems. Grounded in place-based education theory and Bourdieu’s cultural capital theory, this study adopts a mixed-methods, cross-sectional design combining field investigation, questionnaire surveys, and semi-structured interviews. It focuses on the Tiebai historic block in Kuancheng District, Changchun, a typical old urban area in Northeast China. Survey data from 308 undergraduates at Jilin Engineering Normal University show that students’ exposure to Tiebai’s diverse historical and cultural resources is positively associated with their self-reported cultural identity, place attachment, humanistic literacy, and social responsibility awareness. Nevertheless, the educational potential of these resources is constrained by insufficient university-city collaboration, low student participation in immersive practice, and structural misalignment between heritage development and teaching requirements. The study proposes targeted strategies for integrating urban cultural heritage into higher education, supplementing empirical research on place-based education in Northeast China. Given the cross-sectional design, the reported associations should be interpreted as correlational rather than causal.