Cities as Classrooms: Integrating Local Heritage into Educational Practices
This 6-day Erasmus course equips educators with tools to integrate Bucharest’s rich local heritage into teaching. Through site visits, storytelling, and interactive learning activities, participants will explore how the city’s history and landmarks can be used to enhance education and promote local identity.
Course Objectives: Explore Bucharest’s local heritage and memory as educational resources.
Learn to integrate city visits and urban exploration into teaching.
Develop activities using local stories and heritage to enhance pedagogy.
Design educational games, walking tours, and treasure hunts.
Promote values like respect, tolerance, and community pride.
Encourage critical thinking through reflection on local heritage.
Learning Outcomes: Integrate Bucharest’s heritage into lessons and activities.
Create interactive learning experiences like treasure hunts and walking tours.
Incorporate storytelling, local folklore, and history into teaching.
Foster students’ social skills, critical thinking, and local identity.
Reflect on how local heritage enhances the learning process.
Learning Methods: Interactive lectures on heritage integration in education.
Site visits and hands-on workshops to develop educational tools.
Group work on creating heritage-based activities.
Critical reflections on using urban landscapes in teaching.
Target Group: Teachers (primary to high school), youth workers, cultural educators, and adult education professionals.
Course Preparation: Pre-course questionnaire to tailor the program.
Pre-reading on heritage in education.
Familiarize with a local historical or cultural institution.
Certification: Participants will receive a Certificate of Completion (Erasmus+), an Europass Mobility Certificate.
Course Program
Day 1: Introduction to the course, the school, and the external week activities, ice-breaking activities. Theoretical session on cities as classrooms and Bucharest’s heritage.
Day 2: Explore the city by foot and discovery and debate about it’s educational potential, with treasure hunts, visits to the Palace of the Parliament.
Day 3: Storytelling and folklore workshop at the National Village Museum.
Day 4: Visit cultural centers and art exhibitions to discuss social values.
Day 5: Group work and presentations, course recap, validation of learning outcomes, course evaluation, and certification ceremony.
Day 6: Cultural activities