The project’s main objective is to help consortium members exchange knowledge and experience in establishing relations with the local community and involving local communities in the museums’ voluntary activities, as well as providing adults with non-formal education in storytelling about European cultural, natural and historical heritage. What is more, we expect this project to stimulate social, citizenship, intercultural, personal and professional competence in adult education staff and adult recipients of the museum educational resources offered by the consortium members (and, in the longer term and at the supralocal level, in consortium member states and the whole EU). The consortium is formed by two cultural institutions (Museum of King Jan III’s Palace at Wilanów and Gödöllő Royal Palace) and a non-governmental organisation (Stazione Utopia) which pursues educational and social activity to support local cultural institutions. This project is based on a belief shared by all three consortium members: that their activities for promoting European cultural heritage have both an educational and social dimension, as they support the development of knowledge and key competences in adult recipients of culture. As indicated above, the project is aimed at exchanging knowledge and experience between consortium partners in organising museum volunteer programmes, volunteer recruitment, providing volunteers with orientation in the institutions’ (especially educational) activity and developing heritage programmes and storytelling. Apart from enhancing key competences in adult education staff, the project will result in creating a tool supporting adult education staff (staff of cultural institutions, in particular museums, owing to the activity types pursued by consortium members) in training volunteers to create engaging heritage storytelling. By implementing the project, the consortium partners expect to boost local communities’ involvement in their activity. Furthermore, these newly established contacts will help create a network of highly committed community volunteers cooperating with a given institution, who have already developed a sense of belonging to that institution and are dedicated to promoting active citizenship. Following Freeman Tilden's concept of heritage interpretation (“Through interpretation, understanding; through understanding, appreciation; through appreciation, protection”), educating the society in interpreting its heritage will contribute to greater understanding, appreciation and protection of valuable European historical monuments. In the project we will apply the constructivist approach and assume that the learners (museum visitors) should become actively involved in the learning process (the process of active and independent meaning construction). Issues related to building relationships and creating a community around the museum will be based on the training module on customer service of cultural institutions using the ECHOCAST (European Cultural Heritage Organizations Customer Awerness Staff Training) method. The expert group will consist of eleven people from three countries. The expert group members will be selected from the organisation staff members who cooperate with volunteers, educate adults and perform audience research on a daily basis. The expert group members will pass on their knowledge and skills to their communities. We estimate that several hundred people will use it, and even more will use the intellectual output (story cube), which will be available for download on the Internet. The project will end with a dissemination seminar that will be available on the Internet.
We wanted to see how other European organisations, involved in informal education of adults, approach the subject of education and volunteering. Our main goal was to exchange knowledge and experience in establishing relations with the local community and involving local communities in museum volunteering. Each organisation cooperates in different way with a different social group, thanks to which the exchange of good practices was comprehensive. An equally important objective of the project was to develop an educational tool, which would support volunteers and educators preparing for telling others about the historical and natural heritage. We wanted to exchange good practices in the field of conducting educational classes on European heritage - in terms of teaching methods of interesting and audience-engaging narrative on facilities. The knowledge acquired this way and the jointly developed tools are used by each organisation in their daily educational activities.
The project was based on a reflection on the structure of visitors to large museums (Museum of King Jan III’s Palace at Wilanów, The Royal Palace of Gödöllő) or museum centres (Florence museums, where the educational activity is carried out by Stazione Utopia) – these are institutions visited by many people, counted in millions of people per year. Most often, these are one-time and several-hour visits. The consortium’s organisations care about encouraging local communities (neighbours of institutions) to visit, use and co-create the educational portfolio of the museums, strengthening the links between museums (which care for and educate about the heritage) and the local community. The main objective of the project was to exchange knowledge and experience between the consortium partners in terms of establishing relations and involving the local community in the voluntary activities of museums and providing informal education to adults about building the narrative on the European cultural, natural and historical heritage. Each consortium organisation had other experience in the implementation of educational and voluntary programmes and other challenges. Thanks to the project, organisations gained new knowledge, received methodological support and developed a new educational tool.