<< Background >>Climate change is one of the major challenges EU member countries confront in the 21st century. It has an increasingly direct impact on everyday life; for instance, we all have first-hand experience with the weather, some phenomena that seem to refute the far-reaching process of climate change. Climate change as a global phenomenon is the subject of intense debate in various public spaces, from the scientific to the rumor level. Even though there is a scientific consensus on human contribution to climate change, there are still many misconceptions about it, and due to its nature, mass media overemphasizes the harmful effects of global processes. The emotion it evokes is often a feeling of boredom, on one hand, anxiety and helplessness on the other. When the mass media keeps saying that humanity is rushing to its loss, it transmits hopelessness. The constant threat is detrimental to our mental health. In this respect, younger people are particularly at risk. We can conclude that a flood of misconceptions and fake news is targeting the audience. In the 21st century, a significant source of information for many people is the social media, a much less reliable source. The ability to think critically is crucial and more important than ever before. A critically thinking citizen can navigate among contradictory information, recognizing partial and biased sources. Critical thinking that relies on information from the media should include the understanding of why and how climate action should be taken forward. We also want to raise attention that critical thinking is embedded throughout the eight key competencies necessary for employability, personal fulfilment and health, active and responsible citizenship, and social inclusion outlined by the EU Council. According to the European Skills Agenda, the rapid shift towards a climate-neutral Europe changes the way we work, learn, and live. Europe can only grasp these opportunities if its people develop transversal skills such as critical thinking.Protection of the climate can only be achieved with educators and students who recognize their role in shaping global processes and can work together for a change. Dialogue between members of the local community is essential for this. The community of inquiry allows group members to learn about each other’s thoughts and attitudes about climate change. They experience that everyone’s opinion matters, which creates the basis for joint action. At the same time, they find no easy answers to complex questions such as climate change. During the sessions, their critical thinking develops as they learn about multiple perspectives, and meanwhile, their perspectives can be challenged by the community to which they belong.<< Objectives >>DEXPO/Developing critical thinking skills for protecting the climate - Educational methods for teaching critical thinking and media literacy on climate change is an innovative project to develop teachers’ and educators’ professional knowledge, capacities and skills to teach about climate change with a focus on critical thinking and its media representation, including misconceptions. The main objective of this project is to develop educators’ professional skills to ensure that critical thinking strategies and issues concerning media manipulation are part of the educational setting when teaching on climate change. Therefore, we create learning resources to teach the concept of media, media literacy, and developing critical thinking through creative methods available to use in online spaces and foster learners’ active and responsible engagement in protecting the climate. The project also wants to reach local communities/youths/students with the long term aim for supporting of becoming better-engaged citizens with the ability to analyse media and information critically, to understand better the content, manipulation practices of media, then to draw opinion critically and act as an active and responsible citizen for the interest of the protection of the climate. We aim to create a strong partnership that will last longer and have plans to keep working on climate change education with a global perspective on it and incorporate interactive and engaging methods. In order to broaden our horizons and networks for climate change education, the partner organizations also need to improve their educational resources. Therefore, we aim to learn and adapt new methods that the partners can use in their educational or any other programmes and activities they implement locally or internationally.Accordingly, the project wants to achieve the following objectives:1. Developing and implement educational resources and materials for teaching on climate change and that are freely available online 2. Providing resources and tools for educators’ professional development 3. Supporting the implementation of local projects/actions on the awareness-raising of climate change 4. Creating a solid and long-lasting partnership5. Improving the educational repertoire, services of the participating organizations in the subject of climate change6. Broadening our networks on the local, regional, national and European level with professional groups and communities developing and providing education on climate change<< Implementation >>Our partnership consists of 3 NGOs from Czech Republic, Hungary, Slovenia and 1 for-profit organisation from Portugal. We have a diverse background in leading international projects on developing and implementing innovation in teaching and learning, supporting community development and initiating local-level projects and actions. This project will expand upon previous projects working with Digital Storytelling (DST), Philosophy for Children/Communities (P4C), the method of Digital Mediation (DM), and two additional Global Education Methods (‘Through other eyes’ and ‘Causes and consequences’). During the 36 months of the project, we will organise two LTTA mobilities to share and learn our already available methods and exchange ideas for developing the productions. We develop and implement 5 Productions. With these productions, we aim to answer the need to support educators for developing future generations’ knowledge, attitude, and capability for thinking and acting on climate change responsibly and fearlessly. We will develop a training scheme (Production 1) intending to improve educators’ professional knowledge, capacities and skills for teaching about climate change with a focus on critical thinking and its media representation, including misconceptions and false news. Within this production development phase, we will organize pilot workshops for educators to further develop the training modules and receive valuable feedback on the applied content and methods of the modules. Next, a long term massive open online course (MOOC) will be developed (Production 2), piloted, and adapted for all partners’ national context during the project. The main goal is to equip teachers and educators with a tool they can use independently and individually, flexible on time. We want to engage local communities in the project and, in this way, offer opportunities for them to contribute to the protection of climate change by working on awareness-raising, initiating local actions with the focus on having dialogue, discussions on climate change. Thus, within the implementation of Production 3, the project partners support creating and implementing small-scale projects on local levels by communities (groups of students, young people or adults). We design and write a digital Educational Toolkit (Production 4) for educators, multipliers. This educational resource provides a detailed description and interpretation of those educational materials presented and learnt by the partners during the international meetings. It also provides educational resources for online teaching. Finally, as an intention to ensure that all the outputs we create during the project will be available free to use after the project lifetime, we want to set up digital space, an online educational platform, to reach educators and other professionals interested in media literacy education in general and to teach this subject online. The primary function of this website is to offer open-source materials to improve media literacy education and education on the subject of climate change using the creative methods partners shared and transformed into Training schemes (P1) and the developed Educational Toolkits (P4). The platform will host the MOOC (P2) in all languages developed during the project; therefore, it will maintain the sustainability of all project materials.<< Results >>As a result, we will have a collection of valuable resources and best practices that we can offer for educators who want to learn and teach on the subject of climate change with a particular focus on its media representation and responsible and critical thinking on it. The outputs of productions' development within this project include a Training scheme in 5 languages, 12 locally implemented projects with video/photo reports and case studies, a freely available MOOC in 5 languages, approx. 35-40 page digital Educational Toolkit designed for educators in 5 languages, and an Online Educational platform in 5 language sections. The educational resources and multiplication events for promoting the completed results will directly reach all together at least 60-70 educators/partners and at least 40-60 students/youths/community/partner through the locally implemented projects. Upon completing the project, we will keep promoting the educational materials through the online educational platforms, partners’ website, newsletter and social community channels to a broader professional community of educators/community leaders, youth workers and trainers. In this way, the partnership expects to reach 3000-4000 persons/partners. Using the educational resources produced in this project, we expect that educators will become proficient in implementing the pedagogical methods in their work and encourage learners to engage with a variety of issues on climate change with a critical analysis. All the final versions of the results will be available for free on the online platform, which will benefit other stakeholders, schools and educational organizations in the long term. An important outcome for the participating partners will be to raise their profile and broaden networking on the local, regional, national and European level with other stakeholders, professional groups and communities of educators in an area of growing interest and concern. They will expand on the resources available to educators interested in climate change and media literacy, global education and critical thinking. They will also learn new methods shared within the project, which they can implement in future projects, therefore benefit them in the long term.

In most of cases artistic subjects are considered to be the less important among subjects taught in primary or middle schools. There is only one or two hours of art class per week. In Poland this subject disappears after the 7th grade, in Italy and in Portugal it is taught only in primary school. As result of such an approach, students lose interest in arts and believe that this subject is completely useless. Consequently, young people who are not interested and don’t understand the art, don’t want to participate in cultural events. Nonetheless, paintings are a testimony of passed time, of the period in which they were created, and they are part of our cultural heritage. We strongly believe that a good introduction of subject – historical and cultural context of the times – helps to understand a piece of art and leads to its appreciation by a young viewer. Artistic heritage is extremely rich in our regions, unfortunately not many people are interested in, and pupils and their families don’t even try to develop their knowledge about this subject. This project is a perfect occasion to discover our local artists and make them known abroad. Our goal is to increase the sensibility of youngsters towards arts, to show them that there is a close correlation between arts and everyday life, and teach them how to be aware art audience.Thanks’ to international cooperation we have a chance to convince our students that artistic tendencies were developed and transferred in Europe even though the Internet and fast ways of communication didn’t exist yet, and they were related to political and social context of these times. We are convinced that teaching of art correlated to other subjects will help pupils to be successful: methods of teaching artistic and non artistic subjects, and of course their contents, are son diverse that putting them together is surprising, and that way more interesting for students, but also it demands their involvement in learning. Through this multidisciplinary approach pupils will receive information that the world is coherent, that different cultural trends are strictly related to everyday life, and that art may be a source of inspiration, of subjects to discuss, and a pretext to meet or contact citizens of other countries as well. The innovation of our project is based on development of an attractive method of teaching satisfying the needs and expectations of young people, using activating methods on class and digital technologies as well, adjusted to educational systems in different countries:- multidisciplinary analyze of paintings: before regarding a painting, students participate in a literature and history class in order to discover what was happening in Europe in this period. This way, they will get a large knowledge about the era – historical events and their impacts, life conditions, musical, literature and artistic trends – thanks’ to which it will be easier to understand the message of the painting- creative use of a painting/ work of art which is an inspiration for pupils: they will create their own products, like lapbooks, films – learning how to write a screenplay + making videos, video reportage – collecting of testimonies, talking to witnesses of history (grandparents, neighbours, etc.), collecting of family historical objects and preparing expositions- team work – working with project method helps to develop soft skills, like discussion, searching of compromise, cooperation, respect to other people and their opinions - preparation of publications – learning of the basis of graphic design, awareness of intellectual property, copyright, protection of image- participation in cultural life of the regions, events and expositions organized by local museums and cultural institutions.On the basis of information received from teachers (related to their needs, experiences, reactions of students) we are going to develop interactive learning kits, a scalable solution to promote the adoption of developed pedagogical results of the project towards other institutions. These kits will be tested during mobility activities (artistic camps), and after the end of the project we will share them on open license. Kits will consist of reading materials – teachers guide, an exercise booklet (with suggested activities mapped to national and school curricula of the partner countries), a set of tools required to developed activities and a collection of resources (physical objects, digital objects) that represents the museological reality under appreciation in the activity, especially interesting for low-mobility groups.Exchanges of animators working in museums and cultural institutions will be a value added of this project, because they will have a chance to exchange experiences and good practices of work with young people and enrich animation offer of their institutions, which can lead to a better cooperation with schools in the future.

<< Objectives >>We aim to create a standardised training curriculum and related training contents in heritage interpretation (HI) that will contribute to the recognition and professionalization of heritage interpreters and raise their employability.Specific objectives are: -To collect, analyse and share good practices examples in HI.-To develop a MOOC in HI at higher education level.-To raise awareness among EU citizenship about the value of cultural and natural heritage and the need for its protection.<< Implementation >>The main activities we are going to implement are:- Analysis of good practices in heritage interpretation and their compilation in a Good practices manual.- Development of a training curriculum for heritage interpretation at higher education level.- Development of training modules and learning units on heritage interpretation.- Development of the TEHIC MOOC on heritage interpretation.<< Results >>The main result will be a MOOC that will allow the professionalisation of heritage interpreters and the recognition of their profession at European level. Our course will be designed to meet the criteria of academic training, but its format and flexibility will allow its use in other educational fields such as CVET and adult education.The other main outcome of the project will be raising awareness and understanding of European natural and cultural heritage.

"The Council Recommendation on key competences for lifelong learning of 2018 emphasizes the need for a better integration between formal, non-formal and informal education, ""reinforcing collaboration between education, training and learning settings at all levels, and in different fields, to improve the continuity of learner competence development and the development of innovative learning approaches"".The DREAM - Digital Reality and Educational Activities in Museums project, proposes an innovative methodology to help teachers of the first grade schools to strengthen the key digital competence and cultural awareness and expression competence of students, collaborating with museums and cultural organizations to set up ""museaters"", aka augmented reality stages that transform the visit into a ""museatrical performance"", a participatory transcultural edutainment event. Speaking with Shakespeare ""All the World is a Stage"", the teachers transform the museum into a theater, engaging students in the production and staging of plays, where the showcased items are the trigger to make their own Storyworld materialize as customized immersive digital scenographies that can be revealed by mobile devices.The DREAM project pursues this goal through three actions:• defining a methodology that codifies in a detailed way how to establish a collaboration practice with a museum, from the signing of the initial agreement to the staging of the performance, going through scriptwriting, making the digital scenography and setting it up in augmented reality;• developing a digital platform to support all the processes described in the methodology. The platform also includes a repository of cultural OERs, created by partner museums and made available to teachers to enrich their digital scenographies;• developing a blended course for teachers, that uses exemplary scenarios to guide them step by step up to the staging of their first museatrical performance.The DREAM project involves 45 teachers from Italy, Croatia and Portugal and 900 students, 30 ofthem with learning difficulties. In each participating nation, at the end of the project, each teacher will have staged his/her own museatrical performance at the partner museum. The best ones will be awarded in the final public opening events of each national museater. In a special international event at the Postimuseo of Tampere in Finland, that will be broadcastend in streaming, all partner museums will stage a co-produced transcultural museatrical performance, using materials developed by the schools during the project. The absolute best museatrical performance will also be awarded on this occasion.At the end of the project, the partners aim to activate regular collaboration programs for the staging of museatrical performances between all the participating schools and the three partner museums in Italy, Croatia and Portugal, accrediting them as alternative development environments of the digital and cultural skills of students. The desired outcome is that the presence of these focal points will encourage the spread of regular non-formal and informal learning programs, with mutual benefit for schools in terms of quality of the educational offer to students and for museums in terms of diversification and retention of the audience.In the long term, partners expect that the presence of a meticulously coded methodology equipped with all the tools necessary for its implementation along with the hoped for success of its application in pilot contexts will lead to the diffusion at an European scale of the museatrical format for the development of digital and cultural skills, with its potential expansion to all school cycles and other sectors such as adult education."

MEMEX promotes social cohesion through collaborative, heritage-related storytelling tools that provide access to tangible and intangible Cultural Heritage (CH) for communities at risk of exclusion. The project implements new actions for social science to: understand the NEEDS of such communities and co-design interfaces to suit their needs; DEVELOP the audience through participation strategies; while increasing the INCLUSION of communities. The fruition of this will be achieved through ground breaking ICT tools that provide a new paradigm for interaction with CH for all end user. MEMEX will create new assisted Augmented Reality (AR) experiences in the form of stories that intertwine the memories (expressed as videos, images or text) of the participating communities with the physical places / objects that surround them. To reach these objectives, MEMEX develop techniques to (semi-)automatically link images to their LOCATION and connect to a new opensource Knowledge Graph (KG). The KG will facilitate assisted storytelling by means of clustering that links consistently user data and CH assets in the KG. Finally, stories will be visualised onto smartphones by AR on top of the real world allowing to TELL an engaging narrative. MEMEX will be deployed and demonstrated on three pilots with unique communities. First, Barcelona’s Migrant Women, which raises the gender question around their inclusion in CH, giving them a voice to valorise their memories. Secondly, MEMEX will give access to the inhabitants of Paris’s XIX district, one of the largest immigrant settlements of Paris, to digital heritage repositories of over 1 million items to develop co-authored new history and memories connected to the artistic history of the district. Finally, first, second and third generation Portuguese migrants living in Lisbon will provide insights on how technology tools can enrich the lives of the participants.