10 February 2022 Multiplier Event of the HEROES Project – Final Conference in Malaga
The University of Malaga held on 10 February 2022, the multiplier event of the European Project Erasmus+Education KA2: Heritage, Cultural Roots and Innovative Peer Education Strategies (HEROES).
The Assembly Hall of the Faculty of Sciences Education welcomed more than sixty people from different institutions and with a wide diversity of interests. University teachers and researchers, teachers from all educational stages, museum educators who, in their debates, created a space for the exchange of ideas with the aim of publicising the model and strengthening, through its principles, the relationship between University-School-Museum. The programme of the activity was organised in two distinct moments and over the course of a three-hour session.
Firstly, the team of teachers and researchers from the University of Malaga gave a detailed presentation of the process followed locally and by the other partners in Italy and Greece that has generated the model, achieved at an experimental and theoretical level. The audience was able to learn more about the conceptual principles that shape it and the experimentation of Peer Education in Malaga, with the direct participation of Virginia Illana de la Torre, educator of the Jorge Rando Museum, as well as Mª Victoria Márquez Casero and Mª Dolores Sánchez Arjona, teachers of the schools Cardenal Herrera Oria, Santa Rosa de Lima and Colegio San José. Between them they offered a detailed vision of the collaboration between School-Museum and the possibilities of strengthening relations by creating synergies around collaborative educational projects between the two institutions. The most relevant moment was the participation of students from the Cardenal Herrera Oria who, with a brilliant intervention, talked about the meaning for them of learning about the cultural heritage of their city, a content that is not part of their education, as well as the experience of becoming cicerones of their Italian peers.
The second part of the session was a round table discussion on the Museum-School collaboration, open to the participation not only of its members, but also of the audience. The political administration was represented with the participation of the head of the Fine Arts Office of the Education Delegation in Malaga of the Regional Government of Andalusia; educators from the Picasso Museum in Malaga, the Russian Museum Collection St. Petersburg, Picasso's Birthplace and the Pompidou Centre; as well as secondary and high school teachers from IES Puerto de la Torre in Malaga and Santa Victoria School in Cordoba. The aim of the round table was to get to know the point of view of the educational administration, cultural educators and teachers, based on experiences in which they have collaborated: what interests have guided them, their advantages or difficulties, the obstacles or institutional conditioning factors that interfere in this relationship. Finally, the possibility of putting the model into practice was assessed. The round table was followed by an initial eight-minute intervention by each of the members and a subsequent twenty-five minute debate around two questions: What do you consider to be the keys to promoting Museum/School collaboration in heritage education? What role do teachers and cultural educators play in heritage education and in the promotion of artistic and social practices?
The event ended with a brief conclusion based on the contributions collected from the participants and the interventions of the audience. It assessed the potential and applicability of the HEROES Model, as well as the need to strengthen institutional relations, especially between people concerned with advancing heritage education close to the interests of students and the public who visit them, in connection with artists and creators.
Images of the sessions are attached below.
