The project ‘Identity and Innovation’ (I²) is a cooperation between 2 secondary schools, 2 educational heritage service providers and 2 networking organisations in the field of cultural heritage from Belgium the UK and Italy. It is aimed at developing a participative trajectory to create an integrated vision and creative solutions for a future-oriented innovation in European education enforcing at the same time its roots and making visible its identity. The involved partners share the desire to seek a balance between the historic value of educational heritage and the need to create innovative surroundings for schools. These days, they often result in rather sterile environments that diminish the identity and atmosphere of the historic buildings. This is a project to counter this evolution and look for best practice solutions to solve the problems related to this topic. In this project, the participants will especially learn from each other: educational experts will develop new ways of learning and to adapt their learning environment, heritage experts will make the rich variety of school heritage more visible and used in schools. They will learn to use it in a more creative, often digitalized, way in classrooms and want it to be more appreciated because of its instrumental and intrinsic value. This will include making buildings and surrounding landscapes more sustainable and adapting them to ameliorate the well-being and the quality of living at schools. To achieve these goals, the partners will organise three round table networking events, in Italy, the UK and Belgium. At these events, they will develop new insights through this cross-sectoral and cross-national exchange of views. They will exchange good practices and use these as a basis to develop some principles and guidelines to put the integrated approach into practice. In two learning activities, also small groups of pupils will get into contact with school heritage from their own and from other schools. They attend workshops by experts on innovation of education, educational heritage, creative and digital tools to work on oral and visual identity. They will develop their own examples and present these to a panel of experts. The methodology that will be used at the round tables with the experts and the learners is based on three different elements. Firstly, Design Thinking will be used, more specifically the Double Diamond Design model. Next to that also Evidence based learning (EBL) will help us to use facts and reality as a basis to depart from. And finally, we will work with small scale professional learning communities (PLC’s) to discuss reality and compare it to other practices or theories. The results of this project are two-fold. On the one hand we aim especially at an increase of skills and competences or the involved participants and organisations: they will learn how to deal with educational heritage in innovative ways, yet at the same time, preserving their historic value. The multidisciplinary and international angles of this project will also enable them to work on their networking capacities, cooperation skills and it will help them to see the broader picture. Next to these intangible results, we also aim at some small scale tangible results: - An innovative, culturally rooted and sustainable vision on the integration and strengthening of heritage learning in schools and vice versa - An inspiration guide containing principles, guidelines and good practice examples - A number of educational packages/guides for teachers to implement projects of intercultural nature, combining historical knowledge and methodology with arts and new technologies. - An action plan for cultural organizations and schools who want to set up a similar co-creative trajectory. In the long term, we want to improve the interaction between the different stakeholders and create environments that are not only historically valuable, but also excellent examples of innovative teaching. Because, as Theodore Roosevelt already said it “The more you know about the past, the better prepared you are for the future.”
We aimed at a number of non-tangible results that would increase the knowledge and skills of participants taking part in the round-table discussions, so that they could transfer new knowledge to colleagues and peers. We wanted to give them an insight into the important aspects of the project, being innovative education, historic value of educational heritage, creative and digital use of heritage in teaching. In the meetings we wanted to show each other the problem areas and opportunities from each angle, get acquainted with some good practice examples and discuss how we could make the most out of opportunities. Nevertheless, we also wanted to work towards a number of tangible results: 1. A vision text on heritage learning in schools. 2. An inspiration guide with good practices examples. 3. A number of educational packages for teachers to implement projects of intercultural nature. 4. An action plan for heritage organizations and schools who want to set up a similar co-creative trajectory. We especially aimed at bringing together passionate heritage professionals and teachers to show how they work with heritage from their point of view and see how we can create activities together.
We applied for this project because there was a thorough need in schools, heritage services and heritage network providers to share their expertise and look at different ways that we could learn from each other. In this context, there were some important needs of our consortium: in the heritage sector there was a fundamental need to broaden and deepen their focus, reinforced by Covid, so they could bring cultural heritage closer to people and their lives. And in schools, the demand for more digital, experience-based, cooperative and differentiated learning has become louder and it is translated into other ways of teaching. Unfortunately, these newly created environments tends to become a rather cold, unpersonal setting, lacking any connection to the history or emphasis of its education. So, in this project, we wanted to bring together the different parties and help them to develop an integrated approach in which cultural heritage is taken into account to create new learning environments that is connected to the local educational traditions and the school’s identities.