Building a Living Curriulum for Cultural Heritage and STEM

 

It is no longer a question of whether intangible cultural heritage should be integrated in university programmes, but rather how

Jyoti Hosagrahar, December 2017, Director of the Division of Creativity at UNESCO.

 

 

As communities across the world become increasingly concerned about safeguarding and protecting their heritage, local educational systems, and the people who teach and learn in them, can adapt their existing curricula and create new experiences to address this challenge. 

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The Hilali Network is a self-organised network which brings people, ideas and projects together across borders and shared interests in intangible cultural heritage, education and digital technology.

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The Hilali Network invited policy makers, educators, students, practitioners and researchers to participate in a unique workshop which working towards building a platform for all those with a vested interest in the future of Cultural Heritage and STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths) education. This was a call to arms to gather together with other thought leaders to co-create engaging lifelong learning experiences which can have a genuine impact on education for sustainable development.

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This workshop introduced participants through practice-based research approaches to the merging of ideas from intangible cultural heritage and STEM and Education to action the building of Living Curricula in these areas. 

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A Living Curriculum repositions “learning as a continuous conversation within a dynamic curriculum that is integrated with, and takes advice from, the world our students live in” (Marshall & Scott, 2012).

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"Intangible Cultural Heritage means the practices, representations, expressions, knowledge, skills – as well as the instruments, objects, artifacts and cultural spaces associated therewith - [...], transmitted from generation to generation, is constantly recreated by communities and groups in response to their environment, their interaction with nature and their history, and provides them with a sense of identity and continuity, thus promoting respect for cultural diversity and human creativity."

(UNESCO, 2003 Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage)

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The workshop was designed with the aim of providing a cross-disciplinary space for the co-creation of tools, ideas and projects in Cultural Heritage and STEM.  The outcomes of the workshop will be integrated into open educational resources in The Hilali Toolkit, which can be used in Higher Education as well as with communities of adult learners in formal and informal learning contexts internationally.

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Throughout the day, there was a series of provocations of the areas of intangible cultural heritage, STEM and Education from key contributors in these fields to keep the creative thinking going.