Raising awareness of cultural heritage through crafts Erasmus Project

Project Title

Raising awareness of cultural heritage through crafts

Project Key Action

This project related with these key action: Cooperation for innovation and the exchange of good practices

Project Action Type

This project related with this action type : Strategic Partnerships for adult education

Project Call Year

This project’s Call Year is 2018

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: Cultural heritage/European Year of Cultural Heritage; New innovative curricula/educational methods/development of training courses; Intercultural/intergenerational education and (lifelong)learning

Project Summary

We started this project believing the craft sector is important both for the preservation of local culture and heritage, contributing to the uniqueness of the regions, regional appeal to its visitors, inhabitants and to the regional economy as a source of local employment, and social and economic stability and European countries have long traditions and culture of crafts.
Today, the crafts sector in general in the EU faces several important problems, such as the strong global competition of cheaper products; loss of old skills and traditions; difficulties of getting into the markets; losing the customer appeal of traditional crafts’ products; (lack of financial resources and economic capacity, and the most dangerous of all, the new generations don’t recognize it as something valuable.
Therefore, our partnership at the beginning of the project set the two overall objectives: raising awareness of the cultural heritage of each partner country and emphasizing the importance of the craft industry in the European Union, raising the question of its importance in the economy and development of each project partner region. Moreover, the specific objectives of the project were:
1) To learn from each other about the ways of promoting traditional crafts among adults via crafts workshops
2) To exchange the possible ways for improving and extending the supply of high-quality learning opportunities in the art craft, tailored to the specific needs of individual adults
3) To raise educators’ competences in teaching students traditional crafts by exchanging practice from 4 different countries
4) To disseminate the project results and raise awareness among all target groups – adult students, policy, and decision-makers at regional, national, and EU-levels, craftsmen and craft sector stakeholders, and general public thus raising awareness about each partner’s cultural identity.
All these objectives set at the beginning of the projects were met until the end of the project.
The participants that took part in the project were 60 employees of four participating organizations,30 teachers/ trainers from four countries, and 233 students who attended art craft courses from four partner organizations.
Apart from the Transnational project meetings which we used for good practice exchange, the other activities we undertook were desk research about all topics relevant to the project, conducted surveys among teachers and students, collected testimonies among students, and a list of recommendations on all relevant topics. The list of recommendations will be available on web pages of all partner institutions and useful to all stakeholders interested in cultural heritage, its promotion, craft sector, and its importance.

The results of the project are good practice exchange about the ways of promoting cultural heritage through art crafts, learning from the experience of four partner organizations about marketing strategies that we use in order to make art crafts visible, raised competences of our teachers/trainers about teaching about cultural heritage through art crafts, and the good practice exchange about tailor-made programs for specific groups of students.

– The impact we succeeded in is the most visible in the:
– higher awareness of participants, participating organizations, target groups and relevant stakeholders of the importance of preserving the cultural heritage, in the European context
– getting knowledge of the ways and techniques of promoting cultural heritage through art workshops
– practitioners now aware of the possibilities in teaching about cultural heritage
– practitioners acknowledged themselves as valuable contributors to the general culture.
The special impact the project has made on participants who have some educational or geographic difficulties, or some kind of physical impairment or unemployed people. They will be given the possibility to attend these craft workshops designed to suit their needs and requirements. It can bring both higher competitiveness on the labor market and a sense of self-confidence in acquiring new skills and learning about the cultural heritage in the same way.

Longer/term benefits for all four partner organizations are better educational offers, more skillful teachers/trainers, quality programs, and above all better awareness of different ways of promoting cultural heritage as a way of keeping each country’s identity and as a reminder to the future generations of their own past.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 36300 Eur

Project Coordinator

Pucko otvoreno uciliste Zagreb & Country: HR

Project Partners

• LJUDSKA UNIVERZA NOVA GORICA
• JYVASKYLAN KAUPUNKI
• Samogitian museum “Alka”