The VIA Culture project
The VIA Culture project was an interdisciplinary endeavour aimed at addressing issues of the modern, diverse and multicultural classroom through heritage. It utilises the wide context that Cultural Heritage in Education offers for the cultivation of equality, inclusion, and acceptance through the medium of Drama in Education, which enhances oracy, also in a second language, through real life and imaginative tasks (see Kalogirou and Trimmis 2020). VIA Culture was created around the research question of "can educational practitioners co-record with pupils from multicultural classrooms a place’s heritage assets, so as to co-interpret the heritage of that place and mobilise it as teaching medium?" In other words, since multicultural education promotes democratic citizenship, social cohesion and intercultural dialogue, can students be better off in the multicultural classroom if they can record the heritage of their present environment and then use it to create educational resources?
To explore these questions VIA Culture set out three aims a) to investigate what can be learned about the importance of the Cultural Heritage Assets of a place if the recording, instead of being a privilege of heritage experts, is undertaken by individuals of different cultural, ethnic, and social backgrounds; b) to understand the potential significance of heritage in education, and especially the education of a multicultural classroom, through a heritage recording methodology that will enable students from deferent backgrounds to connect with the cultural heritage of their environment and c) to use the student-led created assets as backbone to lesson plans for second language acquisition.
In order to achieve these aims three objectives were outlined: a) to facilitate cultural heritage recording by students from multicultural classrooms in four different European cites in four different countries b) to assess the recording and student demographic data in order to investigate the significance of heritage for education and the heritage interpretation aspect of the multicultural recording and c) to build educational resources for second language acquisition based on the heritage recording so as to mobilise the assets in the framework of the real-world teaching schedule, timetable and needs.
To explore these questions VIA Culture set out three aims a) to investigate what can be learned about the importance of the Cultural Heritage Assets of a place if the recording, instead of being a privilege of heritage experts, is undertaken by individuals of different cultural, ethnic, and social backgrounds; b) to understand the potential significance of heritage in education, and especially the education of a multicultural classroom, through a heritage recording methodology that will enable students from deferent backgrounds to connect with the cultural heritage of their environment and c) to use the student-led created assets as backbone to lesson plans for second language acquisition.
In order to achieve these aims three objectives were outlined: a) to facilitate cultural heritage recording by students from multicultural classrooms in four different European cites in four different countries b) to assess the recording and student demographic data in order to investigate the significance of heritage for education and the heritage interpretation aspect of the multicultural recording and c) to build educational resources for second language acquisition based on the heritage recording so as to mobilise the assets in the framework of the real-world teaching schedule, timetable and needs.
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An early VIA Culture presentation at the 2018 TAG conference in Chester UK
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Publications
Kalogirou, K. and Trimmis, K. P. 2020. VIA Culture: Drama based heritage infused teaching resources for language learning and social inclusion Drama 26(2): 19 - 23 https://www.researchgate.net/publication/343649889
