The integration of digital cultural heritage in compulsory education is more important than ever, as the challenges faced for the educational and cultural sectors due to COVID-19, require a strong reliance on digital teaching and learning. While the national curriculum can differ from country to country within the European Union, the focus on our common European history, cultural heritage and the heritage of migrant and marginalised populations in Europe, is as relevant as ever. Digital cultural heritage is envisaged as a powerful online education vehicle to teach in STEAM subjects. CHERISHED, seeks to set forward the path for a sustainable plan toward such integration. In line with the Digital Education Action Plan for 2021-2027 and the 'Education in Cultural Heritage' report requested by the Research for European Parliament's Committee on Culture and Education - CULT Committee (2018), the CHERISHED project aims to: - Provide with a pedagogical framework and concrete recommendations for adoption by educational ministries across Europe - Enhance the capacity of secondary school teachers’ toward integration of digital cultural heritage in their everyday teaching practices across the curriculum. - Support school educators to safeguard the inclusive nature of digital learning opportunities in and through cultural heritage. - Promote innovative quality resources and tools for school educators for integration of cultural heritage towards inclusive digital education. - Provide an impact and evaluation tool for teachers' self-assessment of their readiness to reuse digital cultural heritage in compulsory education. - Promote awareness on the importance of cultural heritage readiness for inclusive digital education in Europe. The intention through the CHERISHED project is to reach over one hundred (100) secondary school students, who will participate in pilot and implementation phases of the designed-based research pursued. Over sixty (60) secondary school teachers and principals will participate in the pilot and implementation phase and the learning activity of the project. At least 200 policy makers and cultural heritage professionals and teachers will be informed about the project’s scope, methodology and products through local events and seminars. Indirectly, it is anticipated that at least one thousand (1000) teachers and students will be informed about the project’s scope, methodology and products through dissemination campaigns and social media outlets and more than 2000 organisations at national and EU level, involved in school education, will be informed about the project’s scope. The project will unfold through design-based research methodology, and involves preliminary context analysis, prototyping of tools and intellectual outputs developed, and implementation and assessment. Design thinking principles and formative evaluation will facilitate the project success. The anticipated results from the project include: - Development of a framework for integration of digital cultural heritage in secondary school compulsory teaching, for inclusive digital education. - Design of a teacher training programme for secondary school teachers and museum educators - Develop an online platform where teachers can find digital modules for their training - Develop a self-assessment tool for assessing teachers' readiness in integration of digital cultural heritage in compulsory education and their cultural competence - Design of a cross-curriculum country analysis with common subjects and specific units taught across compulsory secondary education in the partner countries. It is expected that the CHERISHED project will offer educational authorities like ministries of education, with a Pedagogical Framework for integration of digital cultural heritage in mainstream education. The intention is to improve the capacity of secondary school teachers to use cultural heritage digital resources for mainstream education; in addition, cultural heritage institutions will access a much needed resource for how to digitise their collections, in order to create relevant sources, to ensure that an online collection offers sources that relate to educational curricula. Furthermore, teachers will be able to self-assess their readiness in integration of digital cultural heritage in compulsory education and their cultural competences, undertake a self-paced open access training programme and improve their skills. Secondary school students will benefit from exposure and engagement with digital cultural heritage collections, through the teaching. The project will enable systematic synergies between education and heritage policies to grow and promote digital collections of cultural heritage institutions, which have been largely affected due to the pandemic. Overall, the project will substantially showcase the importance of digital cultural heritage readiness for inclusive digital education in Europe and facilitate its integration.
The CHERISHED project offered educational authorities, with a Pedagogical Framework for integration of digital cultural heritage in mainstream education. The intention was to improve the capacity of secondary school teachers to use cultural heritage digital resources for education; in addition, cultural heritage institutions can access a much-needed resource for how to digitise their collections, to create relevant sources and ensure that an online collection offers sources related to educational curricula. The teachers are now able to self-assess their readiness in integration of digital cultural heritage in compulsory education and their cultural competences, undertake a self-paced open access training programme and improve their skills. Secondary school students can benefit from exposure and engagement with digital cultural heritage collections, through the teaching. The project enabled a synergies between education and heritage policies to grow and promote digital collections of cultural heritage institutions, which have been largely affected. Overall, the project was substantially showcasing the importance of digital cultural heritage readiness for inclusive digital education in Europe and facilitates its integration.
The COVID-19 pandemic has made the integration of digital cultural heritage in compulsory education more important than ever. The CHERISHED project aimed to develop a sustainable plan for the integration of digital cultural heritage in STEAM subjects through a design-based research methodology. In line with the Digital Education Action Plan for 2021-2027 and the 'Education in Cultural Heritage' report, the CHERISHED project addressed the following needs: -Provide a pedagogical framework and concrete recommendations for adoption by educational ministries across Europe -Enhance the capacity of secondary school teachers’ for integration of digital cultural heritage in their everyday teaching practices. -Support school educators to safeguard the inclusive nature of digital learning opportunities. -Promote innovative quality resources and tools for school educators for integration of cultural heritage towards inclusive digital education. -Provide an impact and evaluation tool for teachers' self-assessment of their readiness to reuse digital cultural heritage in compulsory education. -Promote awareness on the importance of cultural heritage readiness for inclusive digital education in Europe. According to the "Education in Cultural Heritage" (Gesche-Koning, 2018) research report for the CULT Committee of the EU Parliament, Integration of heritage matters, but has failed due to: • Lack of structural timing for cultural heritage education within the present school systems (Culture et Démocratie, 2009); • Failure to adequately disseminate good transferable examples past and present (Collard & Witte, 2015); • Too rare long-term programmes linking education and cultural heritage; • Insufficient systematic training in cultural heritage education (Cramer, 2003); and • Too scattered financial support to ensure both training and cultural heritage education activities. In addition for digital cultural heritage in particular, as acknowledged in the DigiCompEdu report (2018), educators need a set of digital competences specific to their profession in order to be able to seize the potential of digital technologies for enhancing and innovating education. The European Commission Directorate General for Communications Networks, Content & Technology has conducted extensive policy, coordination as well as funding actions to supplement Member States’ cultural policy in areas of digitization and online access to cultural material and digital preservation. There exists a growing awareness among many European Member States for integration of cultural heritage in compulsory education. Still, the Fit for Education report for Euroclio (2020), suggested that teachers are lacking the time and confidence to look for digital collections for use in their teaching. CHERISHED seeks to build the capacity of secondary school educators for integration of tangible and intangible cultural heritage in compulsory curriculum teaching, towards inclusive the digital challenges and opportunities of the technological world. According to the findings from the Research for CULT Committee of the EU Parliament "Education in Cultural Heritage" (2018), synergies between education and heritage policies exist; they nevertheless are insufficient and not structured in such a way to be helpful enough to both sectors. Digital cultural heritage can be used not only to educate about Arts, History or Literature, but it also gives an excellent basis for teaching STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics). Digital cultural heritage helps to enhance students’ soft skills and supports them throughout their learning process.