Internal Workshop Uffizi Galleries School & Youth Dept., 14-16 December 2020
After a long and complex organizational phase, mainly due to the large participation of schools in the "Digital Ambassadors of Art" project, we decided to start with a general information meeting between the organizers and some protagonists of the project: the teachers and museum educators. On this occasion, replicated on two dates, so as to give those who intended to participate a possibility of choice, we were able to explain the purposes and methods of the proposed educational path, to clarify the different steps and fix the dates of the various stages. We got to know the schools participating in our initiatives for the first time and met again those who have been following our school programs for some time.
The online meetings, held on the MEET platform, were planned on these two dates:
Monday 14 December 2020 starting at 2.30pm and Wednesday 16 December 2020 starting at 2.30pm.
The workshops lasted about two hours and were attended by the professors in charge of the PCTO activity of the 66 classes involved from the 24 upper secondary schools, from various regions of the national territory (Tuscany, Lazio, Veneto, Puglia and Sicily), adhering to the project.
Thanks to the Workshops, the School & Youth Dept. of the Uffizi Galleries launched the fruitful mixing between the traditional School-Work Alternation (PCTO) activities done in collaboration with Secondary Schools and the innovative contents proposed by the HEROES project for cultural heritage education. This first sharing of the pedagogical contents developed by the project contributed to lay the foundations of their future sustainability, valorizing the positive combination between heritage education and the peer (education) approach as well as their addition to the traditional curricular activities.
The workshops also fostered the exchange of experiences for educational purposes between School (represented by teachers) and Culture (represented by cultural educators), promoting their mutual contamination and interaction.
Further participants were: the members of the School and Youth Office of the Education Department of the Uffizi Galleries, some trainees from the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence, the 11 museum educators (acting as peer facilitators, too) in charge of carrying out the training activity of the project and some partners involved in the Erasmus + Heroes project, such as the Centro Machiavelli and the Marco Polo Technical Institute for Tourism (which also adheres to the PCTO in question). During the workshops, the project and the educational proposal formulated by the Department to bring the secondary school students closer to cultural heritage through a peer-to-peer approach were explained. The main goal of the "Digital Art Ambassadors", this is the activity's name, is calling young people to reflect on the difficult socio-economic phase faced by the Country and on the potential of cultural heritage as restart engine, not only from economic but also from an ideal and identity point of view. The students will make short videos (max 6 minutes) whose subject will be cultural heritage as a reason of inspiration for the restart of the country system.
