The Learning Teaching Training Activities Experience (LTTA)

European heroes engaged in the peer-to-peer experience in Malaga and Athens

The Learning Teaching Training Activities (LTTA) represented the key of the whole testing phase of the educational contents provided by the HEROES Model. These activities – indeed - enriched the local experimentation held in each country with an additional experience aimed to create a real setting for the encounter and the mutual exchange on the themes of cultural heritage both among young students and educative professionals coming from different countries.

Through this peculiar action, the Model gained its wider application and provided all the involved participants (students, teachers and cultural educators) different kind of benefits such as: professional enrichment, better awareness of the intercultural dialogue potential - starting exactly from the shared discovery of the local cultural heritage - and the broadening of the personal relations, especially among the youngest ones.

The LTTA consisted in a training week – held in Malaga (October 2021) and in Athens (November 2021) - including specific peer educational activities focused on the local cultural heritage, study visits on cultural and archaeological sites, museums, and to both the historical city centers. The daily training sessions were also complemented by informal moments for socialization and leisure, that made even more effective the peer methodology, fostering interest, curiosity and wellbeing among the young participants, and allowing the full compliance of all the planned educational goals.

Compared with what was initially planned in the proposal, during the project’s approval, the LTTA were subjected to a drastic downsizing due to formal reasons that entailed the cut of the mobility flows of Spanish and Greek students to Florence. This way, the activities abroad regarded only two selected groups of six Italian students each from the “Marco Polo” Institute, who were hosted in Malaga and in Athens together with their accompanying teachers. It cannot be denied that this aspect unfortunately removed the reciprocity of the whole transnational educational action that it was initially intended to be carried out for each country. Nevertheless, the students of the local secondary schools involved both by the Spanish and Greek partners gave their active contribution to the training sessions prepared for the Italian ones, collaborating in a very proactive way to the activities' implementation and showing great interest for the issues pertaining cultural heritage education.

To perform the educational activities on cultural heritage and so test the Model in its widened dimension, the hosting partners - the University of Malaga and EKEDISY – availed themselves of their own professionals to coordinate and animate the peer activities and were supported by the local cultural and educational institutions already involved in the local testing (schools Cardenal Herrera Oria, San José School, Museo Jorge Rando in Malaga and 15th High School in Peristeri and Kantas High School in Athens).