European Cultural Heritage in the politically and culturally changing world as means against radicalization
The Erasmus+ Partnership Key Action 229 project project with the acronym “EU.H.A.R.monic” is also an eTwinning project with 5 partner schools from Greece, Croatia, Cyprus, Poland and Portugal and with the main aim to exchange good practices. Radicalization and extremism are phenomena which have been on the rise during the past few years, due to wars and economic crises all around the world. Europe has faced these problems before and, through the creation of the European Union, has managed to overcome them and establish peace for many years. This is the challenge that the European countries are facing again, due to the recent refugee crisis. Our countries have found themselves in the centre of this crisis and should refer to the European culture and history to fight against xenophobia and exclusion. These are threats that know no borders, highlighting the vulnerability of all modern societies to the challenges of intolerance, hatred and fear. This project aspires to explore the common European Heritage and its innovative educational value, within the framework of the politically and culturally changing world, and how it can be a defence mechanism against radicalization. It addresses the urgent need for new forms of education, for peer learning methods, a new focus on exploitation of the cultural literacy, to defend the European shared cultural heritage. Our motivation stems from the need to move our students from being a “Local citizen”, to being a “European citizen”, and further on to being a “Global citizen”, safeguarding the European cultural heritage, which has managed to be developed all through the previous years, as a vehicle to achieve our common goals towards building a common understanding. To achieve this goal we explored various categories of tangible and intangible cultural heritage, those of historic, natural, industrial, social, political cultural heritage and we aim to conclude with the digital European cultural heritage. We used experiential learning and the Erasmus+ LTTs to discover new ways in carrying out the designed activities, and meet new people, to implement and produce educational material to accomplish our common goals. Every type of activity, new practices, discussions, debates and the final products of the project which are Fanzine issues on cultural heritage both digital and printed and distributed to a big number of recipients and stakeholders, a blog, a handbook for teachers, posters, craftwork, Open days, exhibitions, articles and various dissemination events about these topics have told the story of the shared past and warn about the conditions towards a sustainable future.
