Everyday Heritage: Activities and Tools for Active Citizenship

Description

Cultural Heritage Education is often only associated with monuments and famous historic cities.

Yet, cultural heritage also lives in small towns, local neighborhoods, and suburban areas. These environments represent noteworthy cultural realities, with histories, arts, knowledge, traditions, customs, and lifestyles of the communities that inhabit them.

Knowing and appreciating this “everyday cultural landscape” is a valuable tool for teaching observation, reflection, and creative expression, but also for developing a sense of citizenship.

This is especially true for children living in peripheral, unappreciated, and even degraded contexts, which, as research shows, are closely linked to their psychological and social vulnerability.

This course, inspired by Project-Based Learning (PBL) and Place-Based Learning principles, focuses on helping teachers turn the local areas (even when marginalized) into a meaningful learning environment for their students.

Participants will explore strategies to encourage students to look at their neighborhoods with new eyes, discovering the value of both tangible and intangible heritage in their daily lives.

This way, it should be easier for young people to understand that the human environment is a complex system, a place of intergenerational and intercultural dialogue, and above all, a shared cultural heritage.

A key component of the course will be the creative use of digital and creative tools.

The creation of interactive maps, audio guides, and neighborhood stories by the students is a way to stimulate imagination and creativity, but also to give meaning to one’s environment and to one’s personal and shared experience.

These outputs, made by hand and published with free digital tools, will help them see themselves as active narrators of their own cultural landscape, encouraging a sense of belonging, participation, and active and responsible citizenship.

By the end of the course, teachers will be equipped with modular project ideas – ranging from short activities that take a few hours to semester-long initiatives – that can be adapted across subjects and school levels.

They will be prepared to use local heritage as a driver for motivation, inclusion, and active citizenship, transforming the everyday landscape into a shared classroom for growth and participation.

Learning outcomes

The course will help participants to:

• Recognize and valorize everyday cultural landscapes as meaningful learning resources and spaces for intergenerational and intercultural dialogue;
• Foster students’ sense of belonging and civic responsibility, encouraging them to care for their local area and to view it as part of the common good;
• Developing classroom activities that strengthen observation, reflection, and creativity skills in children through the independent production of narratives;
• Promote conscious and creative use of digital tools, enabling students to create their own outputs, such as maps, audio guides, and neighborhood stories, on paper and in free digital formats;
• Apply flexible and modular approaches, adapting heritage-based projects to different timeframes and subjects, down to one small, real act of citizenship in the local area.

Tentative schedule

Day 1 – Introduction to the course and to the cultural landscape

• Introduction to the course and the Academy;
• Introduction to the host city and the week’s cultural activities;
• Icebreaker activities;
• Presentations of the participants’ schools and institutions;
• What is meant by “cultural landscape”?;
• Group discussion: young people’s relationship with their neighborhood/city;
• Maps as an educational tool: the importance of maps as a teaching resource.

Day 2 – Getting to know/mapping the area

• Walkscape (Learning Tour): experiential exploration of the local environment;
• Group tasks: investigating different themes (traces of the past; workplaces; informal art; social life; green areas);
• Documenting the walk with photos, drawings, recordings, and observations (sounds, colors, smells);
• Creating a shared map and exploring how the same map can be built with a class using free digital mapping tools.

Day 3 – Mapping and audio guide

• Designing emotional maps of the neighborhood: comparing participants’ perspectives and discussing the perception and representation of spaces; the personal and collective value of places;
• Creating an audio guide linked to the collective map: information gathering, script writing, narration from a chosen point of view;
• Work process: information gathering, script writing, recording, and collecting images;
• How free audio-guide platforms let a class record and publish its guide as an accessible audio map.

Day 4 – Storytelling the neighborhood

• Digital storytelling: the significance of narration in teaching;
• Workshop: creating narratives about the neighborhood through different formats: story circles, illustrated story panels, and their digital counterparts;
• Free digital formats for publishing and sharing the students’ stories.

Day 5 – The immersive tour: from narration to action

• The immersive guided tour of the neighborhood, designed and performed by the participants: narration, voices, and the senses;
• Workshop: designing a small, real civic action for the local area: something to protect, improve, open up, or celebrate;
• Course evaluation: round-up of acquired competencies, feedback, and discussions;
• Awarding of the course Certificate of Attendance.

Day 6 – Structured cultural activities

• Structured cultural activity(ies) according to the hosting location;
• Learning journal: individual written reflection on the course experience;
• Course reflection: self-reflection and review of course materials and resources.

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