Beauty will save the world (LS-IT-551)
If students are able to recognize Beauty, they will do their best to protect and recreate it, inside and around them
This learning scenario, created by Vittoria Volterrani, Italian Europeana User Group DSI4, leads kids in a pathway focused on discovering beauty in art and in themselves.
The scenario is designed and experienced with students aged between 9/10, but is suitable also for students 11/14. It aims to raise awareness about Beauty in the world and it leads kids to discover Beauty by exploring different Europeana Art Collections, to find the masterpiece that fits the best with their concept of beauty. By browsing the collections and admiring different masterpieces students have compared their perceptions and cognitive maps with different artistic movements, metaphors, styles and symbols, widening their perspective, wondering about what was distant from their daily experience, asking questions and appreciating different kinds of Beauty.
After a first icebreaking led in Hypersay(R) about students’ concept of beauty, performed by watching some masterpieces and asking them for impressions and feelings, kids were totally free to browse the collections and find their favourite masterpiece.
Then they were asked to reproduce the masterpiece in an original way and to add in their creation something connected with their concept of beauty. After the creation of these analogue products and the cooperative installation of a real exhibition at school, kids were introduced to Artsteps(R). The exhibition in Virtual Reality was designed by kids, taking turns and it was published on the classroom blog, school social accounts and website.
In Distance learning, kids were led in a metacognitive revision session. Retracing their learning path, with open-ended questions, they easily realised that Beauty is different, it is everywhere and it belongs to people. They also reflected on the working modality, pointing out that, as usual, Europeana provided an extremely interesting and stimulating learning path.
Would you like to know more about this learning scenario? You can download it below:
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CC0 1.0: the featured image used to illustrate this article has been found on Europeana and has been provided by the Thorvaldsens Museum.