The social discourse of "true/false/real/fake has come to dominate different aspects of life. This is the backdrop against which the participants of the project will construct, de-construct and re-construct the topics "knowledge" and "transfering knowledge" and create their own "Knowledge Lab". The three areas which the international participants will use to work with knowledge and its transfer are as follows: -music and the arts (copy/original/forgery, historical, social...) -natural sciences (learning from/with/in nature, copy and original in nature...) -society (fake news, journalism, truth and lie/copy/forgery within the realm of social media) The international groups will be fomed according to the respective interests of the participants and they will start working with "their " aspect. What makes this project special is the close cooperation between the three schools and two museums (one from Germany and one from Poland) as institutions where knowledge is transferred, exhibited, collected and created. This cooperation allows us to reach our three main objectives. The first of these is concerned with the participants´ cultural and museum-specific competence: They will take part in workshops where professional curators, designers and educators will teach them their professional outlook on an exhibition thus providin them with the ability to professionally plan and construct an exhibition. This exhibition will be opened in Dortmund (Zeche Zollern) in 2019 as integral part of an exhibition by the Industriemuseum LWL in Germany. Using these special skills the participants have acquired, the groups will also plan and construct apps, interactive elements and parts of museum catalogues to go with their exhibition. Thereby visitors of the exhibiton and its creators can engage in discource and the creators have the chance to get feedback quite directly. The second objective is to enable participants to "read" museums as institution where knowledge is stored, questioned, exhibited and discussed. The international an European aspect allows the participants to comparatively analyse museums and discuss differences and similarities. The third objective deals with a cooperation between the German school and the German museum. Modelled on this cooperation which will also be developed further in the course of the project, the Polish school and museum will hopefully establish a similar model to open the perspective of the museum for their pupils. The international participants will experience how this cooperation works first-hand. During poject the participants will travel to Poland, Germany and Ireland in small groups (they will analyse musems, discuss ideas and further develop their respective skills (designer/curator/educator). The travelling groups will be small, only the e.g curators will go, take part in a curator-workshop and thus be able to add their expert-knowledge to the whole group´s project. The exhibition - an integral and interactive part of the Dortmund exhibition, will be visited by a lot of people so that the participants experience themselves as active. The become part of the social discourse and their voices will be heard.
The project "Knowledge Lab - Creating, Sharing, Protecting, Knowledge" was run by three European schools and three European museums: The LWL-Industrial Museum in Germany, the Hittorf Gymnasium (Germany), the Muzeum Inżynierii Miejskiej (Poland), VI Liceum Ogólnokształcące im. Adama Mickiewicza w Krakowie, the Scoil Mhuire (Ireland), the National Museum of Ireland (associated partner). Around 40 students, 10 teachers and 4 museum curators worked together as a group. During the 28-month long project, the students from Germany, Ireland and Poland dealt with the relevance of knowledge, the transfer of knowledge and the knowledge culture of a modern and globalized Europe. In doing so, the 14 to 17-year-old students worked transnationally as a team and with a variety of perspectives to investigate the following key questions: How does knowledge develop? How can it be shared and protected? Why is it so important? The main goals were of the project were: - The intermediation of cultural-, media-, history- and social competence via an extensive examination of the topics through the medium of an exhibition - Strengthening the cooperation between the educational partners - Analysis by the participants of the museum as an institution of social knowledge and knowledge transfer The working language was English. Based on the curricula of the participating schools, the project focused on three main topics: 1. STEM focus: Learning and transfer of knowledge in and from Nature 2. Artistic focus: Originality - Inspiration - Copy in the field of Arts 3. Social focus: Real or fake: Mass- and brand products, journalism, social- and mass media As part of the project activities, the participants travelled to Poland, Germany and Ireland. They took part in workshops and got to know different museums, exhibitions and other cultural institutions. There the participants also continued the work at the schools between the workshops (the results were regularly communicated via social media). In the workshops curators, museum educators and designers taught the students how to make an exhibition in their respective fields of work (researching the thematic complex of knowledge, evaluation and analysis of exhibitions, creation of exhibition concepts, design, etc.) from start to finish. By visiting exhibitions, the participants put their newly acquired knowledge of evaluation and analysis into practice. In doing so, they got to know the museum as a place and institution of social knowledge and knowledge transfer. In a European comparison, the participants analyzed how knowledge, especially in cultural institutions, is created and presented. The project activities resulted in the interactive exhibition "Knowledge Lab" designed by the project participants. The “Knowledge Lab” was shown in the LWL Industrial Museum Zeche Zollern in Dortmund for a duration of six months and was visited by around 45,000 people. The participants also developed an accompanying program (interactive elements, website) for the exhibition. In this way, both creators and visitors became part of a social discourse through the exhibition and found themselves to be capable of acting as a part of European society. The participants also experienced how European educational partnerships and cooperation work. They not only reflected on the cultural peculiarities of their own countries, but also came to the understanding through the joint project work that transnational cooperation opened up additional perspectives: The “Knowledge Lab” and its topics got more European diversity and depth. On the other hand the audience dealt with the different aspects and perspectives of the participants on the subject of knowledge and knowledge transfer and gave feedback on the results. Both the participants and the visitors thus became part of a social European discourse and were able to express and exchange their opinions in this way. Another conclusion that (was/could be) drawn from the positive course of the project and its results is that the partnerships should be maintained and developed beyond the scope of the original project: e.g. in the joint development of the accessibility of the museum as an extra-curricular learning location and in other cooperation projects. Last but not least, personal bonds - friendships - were built among the participants in the course of the project. Through this exchange and cooperation, young people from different nations and cultures in Europe experienced, understood and expressed their unity through diversity - culminating in a sustainable contribution to a peaceful, democratic and diverse European society.