Abstract
The project HADRIAN – HADRIAN – HERITAGE AWARENESS DRIVING ACTIVE NETWORKS (Erasmus + – KA2: Strategic Partnership | School) has been implemented from 2019 to 2022, with the aim of developing and piloting a ‘teach-the-teacher’ toolkit in order to enable the teachers at secondary schools to convey values and knowledge with their students about cultural heritage, environment and urban development. The current report shows the impact and the implementation benefits of the tools (O2) developed and implemented by the partnership during the project lifetime, providing a case study on how Heritage Awareness can be used as inspiration and motivation for students in order to activate their engagement in the community as well as driving force to raise their awareness on several topics (such as environmental sustainability, urban development and so on). The document is structured in two parts: the first part provides an overview on the European context regarding policies on heritage awareness, analyzing then how in each of the country involved by the project (Greece, The Netherlands and Italy) topics such as environmental sustainability, heritage and urban development are integrated in the school curricula in the schools involved by the project. A preevaluation on the knowledge of the teachers involved in the project has been provided, setting the starting level on which the project would intervene during its lifetime, providing also a “sample” of how schools in a specific country work on that field.
The second part of the output, after introducing the waterlines around which the project activities have been organized – shows the results and the impact of the tools developed by the project (in the framework of O2), highlighting the benefits of the usage of these tools in the educational context.
The data gathered during the lifetime of the HADRIAN project and summarized in the report are pretty interesting: it gives an image of the educational sector which seems more and more interested in the topics of Cultural Heritage and with a big need to deepen the topic of Sustainability and Urban development, in which all the targets involved seem not to have the right experience. Especially for teachers, it has been an important learning path, since it provided them with new tools, approaches and topics to be better integrated in their lesson. For students, it has been a really interesting journey as well: it gave them new tools and way of discover information, understanding their own story and how interact with their own community.
Specifically, the outputs developed within the framework of HADRIAN met the needs and opportunities of the local context: they were developed taking into consideration not only the needs of the teachers and the students, but also the ones of the potential stakeholders. Moreover, their relevance is also potentially transferred to an European level, given the involvement of all the partners in the development of the tools: the similar reaction and impact among the countries confirmed how their transferability is possible as well as their impact similar.
The design of the participatory approach, which has used not only face-to-face but also online activities, was really important: as shown in some of the expectations of the students, the implementation of the tools has been seen as a chance to improve themselves as active citizens and do something, especially in a context in which the environmental issues become more and more important. The sense of belonging, the community itself and the interconnection among each member of the community and its history has been a crucial feature of the learning process of the students during their involvement in the piloting of the tools. Finally, the tools allowed a new discover of the waterlines, in a different way, with a double benefits both for the teachers and the students: it allowed teachers to deepen certain topics and to discover new methodologies and approaches, thus updating their profession and – on the long term – increase their satisfaction towards their own teaching role. For the students, it has been a crucial experience to discover their cultural heritage in a different way, understanding how the heritage of the city is absolutely interlinked with the sustainability, urban development and how much each citizen can intervene at local level within their own community. The tools developed shown their flexibility and adaptability: even if only the time has been seen as a costraint to the activities implementation, teachers can easily implement the activities on more lessons, integrating them with their own learning programme.
HADRIAN project has proved a different and innovative way to reconceptualize cultural heritage and use it in an innovative way as motivation for students, to increase their awareness as citizens and members of a community, and how they are responsible for the history of their city – as heirs – and especially as a drive of change for a more sustainable and integrated development of their community. The increase of the awareness on the past and the understanding of the complexity of the community have been a compass for more responsible citizens of the future.
Download the Intellectual Output I here