About
MIRETAGE (European Pathways to Minority Religious Heritage: Inclusive Heritage in Adult Education) is a three-year Erasmus+ strategic partnership involving 8 organisations in 3 countries: Storytelling Centre (NL), Moslim Archief (NL), La Xixa Teatre (SP), Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (BE), KADOC-KU Leuven (BE) and Future for Religious Heritage (BE) and the University of Groningen (NL), the latter as project coordinator.
Context and Needs
Each year, the number of museums and heritage institutions grows and more countries sign on to the Faro Convention that raised cultural heritage to a key site of European social integration. Yet, many leading cultural institutions have difficulty reaching members of minority communities, who have until recently been largely excluded from national heritage. At the same time, grassroots heritage efforts springing up in minority communities often lack capacity for sustainable work in this sector. MIRETAGE aims to bring these institutions together to develop the methods required to bring inclusive heritage education to a new level.
Goals
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Enable adult learners of minority religious backgrounds to engage in inclusive heritage-making activities
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Develop new methods and guidelines for inclusive heritage education
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Help connect the various institutions involved in adult education around heritage
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Develop educators’ competencies by training them in creative methods in adult education
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Foster civic education through cultural heritage
Methodology
To reach our goals, we will establish a series of Heritage Labs in Belgium, Spain and the Netherlands through which we will develop Heritage Trails.
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Heritage Labs. Heritage Labs will be coordinated by project partners and will bring together representatives of organisations working with heritage (museums, universities, municipalities, cultural centres, etc. ) and diverse local communities - including members of minority religious groups-, to share and discuss personal and collective experiences and decide how they want to carry out the construction of the trails.
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Heritage trails. The heritage trail is a co-creation activity where the various actors involved in the Heritage Labs, together with local religious minorities, create a cultural itinerary that links up the heritage of these minority communities to the wider social and geographic space of their environment. The focus is not on the trail itself but in the process of creating it. This co-creation experience will translate into learning tools and innovative teaching methods (storytelling, games, dialogue tools, movement tools, creation of digital maps, etc.) which will be tested and compiled in handbooks.
