CREATING BRIDGES - NETWORKING

CREATING BRIDGES is a project to exchange successful practices among entities from Spain, Portugal, Germany, Belgium and Italy that are linked by their work around our common European heritage. A close work between schools and museums in 8 European municipalities will help CREATING BRIDGES to promote social inclusion and improve the acquisition of key skills and competences in minors.Schools with high percentages of students at risk of social exclusion (mainly minors of immigrant and gypsy origin) - and their families - will be active participants in CREATING BRIDGES. The profile of our beneficiaries is very little linked to a European sentiment and has almost no access to culture.Museums, NGOs, universities, public educational and cultural entities, and schools will work together during 30 months. The project combines guided visits to museums with more than 1,500 children at risk of social exclusion (and their families). We will implement artistic workshops during school hours before the guided visits to ease the guided tours and implement artistic workshops after the guided visits to internalize the concepts and promote awareness of a Common European heritage. Minors get involved, improve their analytical, critical and interpretive skills, reducing learning problems and demotivation levels. The work is developed from a gender, intercultural, equity and citizenship perspective. Parents associations will also be trained to achieve the future sustainability of the project in schools.The outputs of the artistic work will be translated into shows, exhibitions and murals (to empower our beneficiaries) which will be shown in all participating countries. The project also involves the production of a documentary that summarizes the European experience of CREATING BRIDGES in museums and classrooms.CREANDO PUENTES wants to identify successful educational activities implemented between European schools and museums. More than 300 education professionals actively participate and exchange their experiences. It reaches more than 1,500 children and their families. +100 artists, volunteers and students in higher education practices associated with the world of education (psychology, pedagogy, social education, sociology ...) will collaborate and receive specific training. The project will improve national methodologies of socio-educational intervention in museums, which will encourage exchange and good practices.CREANDO PUENTES will be disseminated among educational administrations related to each participating partners, among non-partner collaborating entities, and will be spread in the environments of participating schools. We want to disseminate the project at the headquarters of the European Parliament in Madrid and/or Brussels, in order to give visibility to our achievements in the presence of all interested partners, journalists, and delegates from Embassies and European institutions. The ideal place would be the Yehudi Menuhin Hall at the European Parliament.Activities:01. Intervention with minors in participating schools and participating museums/universities during the three school years.02. Work with families. We also want to involve families in the project, and we want them to carry out a parallel work to the one implemented by their children (specific work with families or joined work with children and families).03. Work with teachers. We will train teachers of participating schools in the contents of the project, since we need their active participation in our activities with families and minors, a key element if we want our project to be successful.04. Entities with experience in non-formal education will disseminate the project's activities and methodology in their local, regional, national and/or international training meetings.05. Each school carries out each school year a CREATING BRIDGES day of open doors, a show, an exhibition or a collective mural of dissemination of the contents of the project (through theater, dance and plastic and visual arts).06. Preparation and editing of documentaries in which the experiences lived in museums and schools are collected and disseminated in social networks.07. The project includes an evaluation report. We do not want our project to simply entertain, we want it to transform.08. We will elaborate a didactic document (didactic units complemented with images of the theoretical and practical workshops) that includes all key and successful educational actions.The project also includes the creation of an open access web page in order to disseminate all actions. At the end of the project we will create a networking methodology between schools and museums, which we will initially export to other municipalities of all 5 participating countries and later on to municipalities in other European countries.