Innovative education promotes the integration of cultural heritage into everyday school practice through collaboration sessions with cultural institutions and organisations. Nevertheless, the most recent researches and needs analyses, in the educational area, have shown that there are very few resources available to public and private school bodies for raising awareness of European cultural heritage. For these reasons, the Ischool project partnership is committed to developing an open, accessible, free and widely used online course for primary and secondary school teachers. This tool will improve basic skills and competences related to cultural heritage and increase opportunities for collaboration with cultural and creative institutions.
The i-SCHOOL course for teachers/educators will provide an innovative source of learning available in the form of e-learning content in multimedia form (teaching content, evaluation exercises, OER, etc.). In addition, the course will build both on the resources already available (Europeana’s MOOC “Digital Education with Cultural Heritage”, which focuses and guides users only on how to use Europeana’s digitised collection), but will also focus on methodologies of how teachers can use innovative non-formal education, existing digital and AR tools and technologies to inspire students to love and deepen their cultural heritage. In summary, the online course will enable the integration of heritage and culture into everyday school practices and learning, thus introducing heritage to primary and secondary school students in a naturalised process. It will provide a solid basis for all educators who wish to learn more about this topic in different European countries.
The course is characterised by a practical and theoretical focus on different topics and subjects. The following topics will be explored:
- Introducing the pedagogical value of Cultural Heritage;
- Use of non-formal and digital resources and tools (such as AR) in the classroom;
- Multisensory teaching and approach to cultural heritage in primary and secondary schools;
- Empowering cross-sectoral collaboration with creative and cultural institutions.
Another unique feature of the course is that it is ‘context-free’, which means that it can be applied in any school in Europe, but will also give educators the opportunity to adapt the materials according to the needs of their own school/classroom and local cultural sites and institutions. The result produced can be applicable and useful for all schools in Europe, as it will provide guidance to educators on how to integrate local and European cultural heritage into their teaching practices, regardless of their geographical location. In this way, teachers will be able to adapt the teaching materials provided in this project according to the needs and level of knowledge of their own school/class.
