Sparking creativity and fostering innovation through our cultural heritage
Our common heritage can inspire students’ curiosity, imagination, critical thinking and can open new horizons, as evident in the Teaching with Europeana blog and the work featured here since 2018. Almost 800 Learning Scenarios, nearly 600 Stories of Implementation, and successful campaigns engaging teachers and students showcase the huge impact that culture can have in pedagogy, with a focus on creativity and innovation.
Initiatives to promote creativity and innovation
The Europeana Foundation, concerning the triple transition in Europe: green, digital, and social, has been involved in several inventive projects such as Twin it! 3D for Europe’s culture, which aims to collect emblematic and high-quality samples of Europe’s cultural assets in 3D transitions in Europe, Watching Videos Like a Historian which promotes media literacy and critical thinking skills through audiovisual resources or Creative School advancing self-directed learning, critical and visual thinking skills. These schemes integrate Europe’s rich cultural heritage, with its common values, its wealth of tangible objects, and its creative diversity of intangible heritage, reflecting our past and shaping our present and future.
Learning resources to advance culture-based education
Coordinated by European Schoolnet, the Teaching with Europeana blog has published notable educational materials cultivating creativity and critical thinking while promoting European values while featuring the Europeana collections. Numerous examples can be found, to name but a few, you can get a taste of the learning scenario From Disability to Creativity (LS-DI-545) which places emphasis on promoting students’ emotional literacy: their empathy and social integration, as well as their creative self-confidence, or the one called Rethink Art Creation with Artificial Intelligence which enables students to interact with the concepts of digital cultural preservation, nurturing creativity, technological proficiency, and a deeper understanding of art history.
Stories of Implementation (SoIs) are written to narrate how the learning scenarios published on the blog were actually implemented in the classroom. So you can visit the SoIs produced by educators with relevance to developing the key competences of creativity and innovation. One great example is the Implementation of “Cooperative Story telling” which suggests how to have students visualize short silent movies to design digital stories inspired by them and add their voices so that each story is told by its protagonists. Another instance of innovation and creativity is the Implementation of ‘A Paper Plane Parade’ where the students created and tested their own paper airplanes and took part in a VR experience centered around the topic of aviation, in a STEAM context.
Visit our blog to find inspiration not only on creative and innovative teaching activities, but also related to all key competences, ranging from literacy development and STEM to citizenship, cultural awareness and entrepreneurship enhancement. “Create with the heart; build with the mind.” Criss Jami, an American poet said. We believe that the Teaching with Europeana blog materials both stir the emotion and spur our thinking.
PDM 1.0: the featured image used to illustrate this article has been found on Europeana and has been provided by the National Gallery of Denmark.