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 AI and ICT tools.

The creation of interactive maps, audio guides, and storytelling videos 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 digital outputs 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 the conscious and creative use of ICT tools, enabling students to create digital outputs (interactive maps, audio guides, and short videos etc.);
• Apply flexible and modular approaches, adapting heritage-based projects to different timeframes and subjects.

Tentative schedule

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

• Introduction to the course, the school, and the external week activities;
• Icebreaker activities;
• Presentations of the participants’ schools;
• 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 digital map with free tools (Google My Maps, ScribbleMaps).

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 (each group can propose a different route, or the same route can be presented from different points of view);
• Work process: information gathering, script writing, recording, and collecting images;
• Exploring free tools such as iziTravel to build accessible audio guides.

Day 4 – Digital storytelling

• Digital storytelling: the significance of narration in teaching;
• Workshop: creating narratives about the neighborhood through different formats.
• Tools and apps for digital storytelling: Storybird,  Storymaps JS, Canva.

Day 5 – The immersive tour

• The potential of video in heritage education and active citizenship;
• Workshop: create an immersive tour with Scene VR or Thinglink 360°, adding personal photos and voices to describe the places.

Day 6 – Course closure and cultural activities

• Course evaluation: round-up of acquired competencies, feedback, and discussion;
• Awarding of the course Certificate of Attendance;
• Excursion and other external cultural activities.

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