Building cultural bridges, crossing curricular areas
Building bridges
How can we build bridges among the countries of Europe? How can we widen the mind and the spirit of the European citizens of today and tomorrow? The answer lies in Mahatma Ghandi’s words: “A nation’s culture resides in the hearts and in the soul of its people”. The means to achieve this goal is by enabling the current and future generations to have permanent access to culturally important objects ranging from literature and paintings to architecture and medicine. Collections of cultural heritage are also often used as a medium to promote digital literacy and the production of engaging content while developing key competencies and soft skills.
Europeana in education
The Europeana foundation has created a treasure trove of educational resources and activities featuring Europe’s digital cultural heritage while energizing students, across the curriculum, and unifying teachers into a community of practitioners.
Crowdsourcing activities featured in the Europeana Classroom include the Subtitle-a-thon initiative that brings together young translators who render audiovisual material accessible to multilingual audiences and the Transcribathon which motivates students to learn how to read old handwriting and transcribe documents from the past and type this information into a digital record.
Competitions such as the GIF IT UP urge children to animate cultural heritage, and challenges, for instance, the BuiltwithBits programme that refers to designing virtual spaces through collaborative processes. On the same note, the Reinventing Beethoven encourages creativity via digital learning methods.
Content such as video tutorials per discipline e.g. history, STEAM, Artificial intelligence, a joint project mapping the most relevant collections of manuscripts and objects of medieval reading culture, apps and games, colouring books highlight more topics across the curriculum.
Learning Scenarios
Learning scenarios, in several languages and all educational levels, produced by teachers under the auspices of the Europeana Foundation and the European Schoolnet, are categorized according to the thematic areas of citizenship, environmental education, media literacy, physical and mental well-being, languages, art, and STEAM. The methodological approaches used focus attention on content and language-integrated learning – CLIL, project-based learning, inquiry-based science education, learning by playing, augmented and virtual reality, 3D printing, and mobile learning, to name but a few.
Moreover, learning scenarios for non-formal education merge different disciplines with horizontal life skills, placing emphasis on cultural awareness and expression. Scenarios in online or blended form, with synchronous or asynchronous, self-paced or self-study activities, foster emotional intelligence and language skills, game-based learning and mathematics, and a sense of aesthetics, using virtual environments and cloud-based resources.
Not only are these learning scenarios produced by educators for educators, but also they are put in practice, and the classroom experience is recorded in hundreds of Stories of Implementation, otherwise known as SOIs, in the form of personal testimonies, in thirteen different countries, with diverse educational contexts.
Europeana stories
Last but not least, another asset in our toolbox is the Europeana stories with almost one thousand items, such as the one celebrating the Women’s History Month , blog posts about sports, literature, poetry, public spaces, religion, fashion, history, architecture, that encourage children to research and learn our European cultural heritage.
Being European
“Being European means promoting culture and sport as core elements of our systems and equipping people with the knowledge, education, and skills they need to live and work in dignity.” Margaritis Schinas, Vice-President for protecting our European way of life, stated. “Being European means peace, freedom, equality, democracy, and respect for human dignity” and using Europeana resources can support educators in achieving these ideals and promoting the core values of the European way of life.
CC BY 4.0: the featured image used to illustrate this article has been found on Europeana and has been provided by the Finnish Heritage Agency.