The Project

Young ArcHers is an Erasmus Plus project which targets primary school teachers and their students (9-12 yo), including children with disabilities and those originating from socio-culturally diverse backgrounds.

Drawing inspiration from heritage buildings and monuments constructed between 1850 and 1960 in Athens, Barcelona, Nicosia and Paris, the Young ArcHers project proposes efficient training materials and accessible interdisciplinary tools, designed to support teachers in motivating their students to discover the European dimension of their local built heritage and develop participatory skills.

Moreover, the project emphasizes the role of digital technology as a catalyst for the consolidation of new knowledge, and promotes the protection of heritage buildings through local and international awareness campaigns.

 

Objectives

“Young ArcHers” aims to:

  • Provide primary school teachers with valuable knowledge and materials to support their students in acquiring knowledge and skills regarding urban architectural heritage while increasing their awareness of European identity and values;
  • Further promote social integration and inclusion, by ensuring accessibility of materials destined to users with disabilities;
  • Offer teachers an opportunity to expand their scientific interests and resources by familiarising with a new thematic area (built heritage), which can in turn feed into already existing curricula;
  • Acquaint teachers with innovative, interdisciplinary tools and methods to upgrade their educational practices;
  • Enhance and sharpen all participants’ digital skills through inspiring hands-on activities with a valuable social footprint and the use of accessible up-to-date creative digital tools and applications;
  • Motivate primary school students with diverse sociocultural backgrounds and competencies to engage into collective action for the promotion and preservation of urban built heritage;
  • Help students develop valuable cognitive and social skills, necessary for real-life challenges, including critical thinking, synthetic ability, communication skills and creative expression;
  • Help young participants develop expectations related to future goals which can be attained in methodical ways;
  • Encourage cross-cultural interaction and trigger interest with respect to built heritage among the larger communities;
  • Promote collective action at local (and potentially national) level;
  • Upgrade the educational approach of School partners, directly empower their teaching staff and students, as well as offer them multiple opportunities for networking and exchange with schools and education-related organisations and stakeholders, at local, national and international level;
  • Enrich and upgrade the expertise of Non-school partners, by further enlarging the scope of their research, as well as by multiplying their working tools with an emphasis on digitisation and accessibility.

 

Project results

Young ArcHers will create:

1. An educational toolkit, containing accessible materials (scientific resources, creative tools and lesson plans) that will support them in acquainting their students with core concepts of the project and in guiding them throughout the implementation phase
2. A set of accessible audio guides to support educational walks around selected architectural paths in partner cities (Athens, Barcelona, Nicosia and Paris).
3. An accessible manifold digital game to be used by teachers inside and outside of the classrooms, expected to facilitate assimilation of all new knowledge and trigger creativity among student participants
4. Local and international awareness campaigns to offer student participants an opportunity to develop valuable soft skills and engage with the purpose of promoting the preservation of built heritage in their urban contexts.