34 European case studies
Hundreds of fascinating heritage projects take place on a daily basis throughout Europe, involving thousands of pupils. Unfortunately they cannot all be mentioned here. We limit ourselves therefore to a small selection.
First and foremost, the examples included are meant as tasters and sources of inspiration.
They give a brief and rough outline of the aim and the scope of the projects; details of the initiators and partners are reported. An in-depth analysis of all the projects would not be practical and each teacher must decide how he/she wants to ‘phase’ the projects.
Each educational system works differently, after all: sometimes you work with large class sizes as a teacher and sometimes smaller ones, with pupils who are more, or less, practical than others. You might work alone or with colleagues, have lots of time or not enough. This should not stop the examples from being transferable to other surroundings or environments. The criteria for inclusion were: transferability to other environments, inter-disciplinarity and cross-curricular character, the ways in which they play on connections with the lives of the pupils, cooperation with heritage partners, active input of the pupils, the project approach where attention is given to the process, separated from the end product. It is hoped that this selection will encompass events from the Stone Age right up to the present day.
We rely on the creativity of teachers to extract ingredients from these examples to help them set up their own projects, attuned to the needs of their own educational environment. It need not be said that national borders are irrelevant, which unfortunately does not apply to many a school book. It can be inspiring to ignore age levels and not just read examples relating to the age group(s) you are teaching.