The last decades have witnessed a variety of initiatives promoted by a diverse set of actors engaged in the protection of endangered cultural heritage and in stopping illicit trade, initiatives that have tried to bring solutions, remediation, methods and approaches to tackle looting and trafficking. NETCHER seeks to address the complex challenge of harmonising and bringing together these worthy, but often disconnected initiatives by using a participative approach that will result in the establishment of a structured network (defined as a Social Platform) drawing together a broad range of players such as international bodies, umbrella organizations, national governments, researchers, public policy makers, NGOs, as well as public and private foundations. In light of the significance of these uncoordinated efforts, the Platform will take charge of the systematizing and framing of all the emerging best practices in order to enhance and capitalize on the experiences of the partnership members at an international level for building a joint action plan with shared toolkits and a research and innovation roadmap.

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.

According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, in an increasingly complex world children need to develop higher level thinking skills in order to find solutions to social, emotional and economic problems, both personally and in the context of the wider world. In order to respond to the challenges of the 21st century, children need to be creative, innovative, enterprising and adaptable, with the motivation, confidence and skills to use creative and critical thinking purposefully. The Creative School project responds to this need by delivering creative and critical thinking educational approaches into schools through engagement with the cultural sector, specifically museums, galleries, and science centres.The Creative School builds on the outcomes of two previous Erasmus+ funded projects: The Creative Museum (2014-1-FR01-KA202- 008678) and the Making Museum (2017-1-FR01-KA202- 037487), by providing opportunities to generate and evaluate knowledge, clarify concepts and ideas, seek possibilities, consider alternatives and solve problems. The Creative School project aims to use the creative and innovative methods and tools developed throughout the Creative and Making Museum projects and apply them to develop learning modules for children and school teachers. These modules will promote self-directed learning, critical and visual thinking skills by using cultural heritage content made available by the full and associate partner organisations. The project will achieve this in a number of ways: firstly, through an analysis of training and information needs of teachers, educators, children and also parents; secondly, by producing a set of training materials focusing on the development of thinking skills through engagement with cultural heritage and thirdly, through the creation set of guidelines and recommendations aimed at influencing policy makers and curriculum decision makers. The main beneficiaries of the project include primary and secondary school teachers, who, through engaging with the project will become equipped with the skills necessary to facilitate pedagogical strategies for creativity and critical thinking. Children and young people involved as participants in the Creative School project will develop the skills required to respond to the challenges offered by the Creative School curriculum. The project will also explore the possible mobilisation of digital cultural heritage and engagement with maker spaces models, as tools to create unusual and exciting learning opportunities.Here maker spaces are intended as community-operated workspaces, where people with common interests in technology, science, heritage and art, can meet, socialize and collaborate.The project will provide teachers, educators and children the chance to engage with a wide range of subject matter and themes including innovation, STEAM (science, technology, arts and mathematics), sustainable development, urban regeneration, social innovation and entrepreneurship. The project brings together nine project partners from eight countries and six of the partners have worked together on the Making Museum and Creative Museum projects. The project partners all provide considerable expertise and knowledge in the subject area of innovation, creativity and critical thinking and with working with schools and young people. Project results will be disseminated through a range of international and national networks and support by a series of multiplier events, tailored to meet the needs of the local audience.

"<< Background >>The NETCHER project (https://netcher.eu/), started in January 2019 and concluded in March 2021, was aimed at reinforcing the fight against cultural heritage looting and trafficking, by bringing together relevant international actors (security and research communities, public and private institutions, art market specialists, policy makers), to build a sustainable social online platform. With the objective of paving the way to further initiatives, NETCHER issued a set of recommendations, addressing all the different communities of stakeholders. They underline the importance to create reliable, comprehensive and accessible information, on which the efficiency of education and awareness processes relies.The Final Forum of NETCHER, organised on 1-2 March 2021, has also underlined the need to extend its activities to a wider audience, also involving the educational sector and the general public, since the dimension of the challenge requires a wider intervention, involving all the citizens from their early age. In the final round table, representatives of five Directorates-General of the European Commission - also including DG EAC for Education, Youth, Sport and Culture - were requested to comment the recommendations issued by the NETCHER project and highlighted the policy issues from different perspectives. They all agreed that a strong interaction among the educational sector and the key actors involved in looting and trafficking is necessary, with a strong focus on cultural institutions. Archaeological sites and museums are mostly concerned, but any kind of cultural institutions are touched by this severe issue.The present PITCHER project is the first action started to put into practice this strategy, trying to respond to the needs (often not clearly identified yet) of the educational sectors in front of this key problem. Its solution is not involving only a few numbers of police forces, researchers and cultural bodies, but needs the collaboration of all the citizens, starting from the youngsters. It is crucial to make them aware that cultural and archaeological heritage is essential to our understanding of mankind, our history, who we are and where we come from. Taking away the study of these objects from specialists is the same as irreversibly destroying a part of our past.<< Objectives >>The project intends to propose a new model for addressing young people about the problem of fighting the looting and illicit trafficking of cultural goods, focusing on school teachers, in order to raise their awareness and enhance their professional development in this field. This will be done by: - enhancing schools with new models for increasing the knowledge of students, as well as use educational scheme for acquiring the critical thinking necessary to play an effective role in tackling this problem, as a young citizen and as an adult; - creating prototypes of innovative tools based on STEAM Education (i.e. a combination of Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Mathematics) as an access points for guiding student inquiry, dialogue, and critical thinking; - using the educational potential present in the European cultural institutions (archeological sites, museums, libraries, etc.) to support teachers in the development of lessons and workshops aiming at demonstrating the intercultural dimension of the problem. It is a matter of fact that ""creativity"", for born digital youngsters, is strictly associated to the use of IT devices, that are their main tool for communicating and exchanging feelings, emotions and passions. This is why the presence of the ""makers"", the digital artists, can support this action, since they well know the potential of the use of technology and can support the development of educational resources to stimulate creativity. It is important to remember that the word ""poet"" comes from the Greek verb ""poieo - ποιέω"", that means ""to make"". This approach well justify the organization of training events where the partners are working together with creative artists and cultural institutions for jointly designing new educational tools based also on gamification and escape games, enhanced reality, and real-time interaction with the students. In this way, the project will enable all the students to express their culture and ideas, while providing opportunities for the acquisition of necessary skills and know-how to participate in wider cultural developments. The general objective of the proposal consists then of the design and test of a set of open educational resources, to be made available also online, focusing on improving the educators’ capacity in preparing new learning experiences to support the fight against looting and illicit trafficking of cultural goods, thanks to the rich repositories of digital cultural heritage accessible through the web.<< Implementation >>The activities are organised according to the following main phases: Phase 1: COMMON FRAMEWORK AND METHODOLOGY (M1-12) During this phase partners will build a common framework and work methodology by analysing existing good practices and initiatives. This includes the identification of case studies and interviews with stakeholders and key actors. Focus group can be organised in the partner countries with relevant local stakeholders to share and validate the results of this phase. The existing potential available in European digital collections of cultural heritage will be analyzed, to identify and select the most effective materials to be made available to the European schools. Phase 2: DEVELOPMENT & TESTING (M13-M32) During this second phase, partners will develop the Open Educational Resources (OERs). The courses and the related educational materials will be prepared in English in the first version, and they will be translated (if necessary) and tested in the partner countries. Teachers and students, but also citizens, will be involved in the pilot action. Thanks to the feedback received from the participants to the pilot actions, the OERs will be revised and fine-tuned. Evaluation activities will be boosted in this phase to support the testing with the collection and analysis of adequate data. Phase 3: MODELING AND RECOMMENDATION (M29-M36) Based on the results of the test phase, the training materials will be revised and improved and enriched with additional materials. During this phase, partners will work together in order to create a model of intervention and a series of guidelines and recommendations for drafting a document paving the way to a mass use of the training model and resources at local, regional or even national level. Also, the project foresees 6 transnational partners meetings, and 6 multiplier events.<< Results >>PITCHER will develop scenarios that advance the concept of 'open schooling' by building clusters of stakeholders around a creative and critical engagement of youngsters in the fight against looting and trafficking of cultural goods, also involving – as a secondary target group – museum educators, memory institutions and other organisations involved in informal and non-formal educational places, such as community centers, services for youth, young offenders. Through its results: 1: Methods to include a creative and critical thinking approach in education, supporting the fight against illicit trafficking of cultural goods; 2: Design and test of the Open Educational Resources; 3: Guidelines and recommendations for mass use of the training model and resources,PITCHER will create a set of OERs able to help EU teachers in implementing creative ways to involve young generation in this dramatic problem with the help of the educational potential of European cultural institutions. Themes covered in the materials and tools will also include themes of intercultural reflection, values; and identity(ies); dialogue and dialogical relationships; EU values and critical thinking."

The economic downturn of the last years has impacted youth and adult populations throughout Europe. A major concern is the rise in unemployment and prevailing lack of opportunities to develop and improve skills of EU citizens. The EU Strategy acknowledges that education and training can help tackle key challenges, while the cultural sector is becoming more and more one of the key successful elements of new forms of socio-economic development. The CrowdSchool project moves from this situation to underline the importance of human and social capital as articulated in the aims of Erasmus+. The project intends to propose a new model for:- enhancing schools with new interactive methods for increasing the creative thinking skills of students, taking benefit of the potential present in the digital repositories of cultural institutions;- creating an innovative tool for applying STEAM Education (i.e. a combination of Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Mathematics) as an access points for guiding student inquiry, dialogue, and critical thinking.The background context from which the project originates, comes from the mass digitisation process in the field of cultural heritage, that made available the huge amount of contents in European galleries, libraries, archives and museums. Despite its enormous potential (about 60 million items are included in Europeana), browsing the records interesting for the students to perform learning tasks is strongly limited by shortage of metadata describing the cultural objects themselves. E.g., if you look for paintings depicting a renaissance landscape, and the descriptors of Mona Lisa are only “Mona Lisa, Leonardo da Vinci, Louvre”, this record will be never displayed, thus frustrating the student experience.To overcome this problem, the CrowdHeritage project created an online tool using the power of crowdsourcing (i.e. the joint effort of students who collectively annotate a picture with its key characteristics) to improve quality of metadata and increase the fruition. Some schools have been already involved in 2019 in the piloting phase, however it is time now to start using the platform in a more structured way.The training model proposed by the CrowdSchool project consists of different steps: 1) teachers select some themes of their interest, according to the mission of their school; 2) cultural professionals identify digital collections interesting for preparing lessons, researches, workshops focusing on those themes; 3) jointly the teams work together for defining the terminology to be used for describing the collections for that specific theme. The terminology is translated in different languages, in order to retrieve an item also if it has been annotated in a language different from the one of the users performing the inquiry; 4) the students start the annotation campaign, enriching in a creative way the educational content of the collections, and making them available also to all the students who in future will perform a similar query; 5) annotations done by the students of each school will be also revised by another class of a different country, encouraging in this way the development of critical thinking capacity in the revisers’ group, who will be requested to justify the reason for the non-acceptance of the proposed annotations. All the process will be organised according to a gamification scheme, in order to provide higher scores to the pupils who are more creative in the annotation process and whose tags were less subject to the critical revision of their peers; 6) finally, in order to guarantee the sustainability of the system and pave the way to further annotation campaigns, the students more effective in the first pilot action will become the mentors of their younger colleagues of the following school year, supporting them in the annotation and validation process on a different educational theme.The key results expected by the CrowdSchool project are:- training teachers to use the CrowdHeritage tools;- customizing training materials to the purposes of targeted educational communities, using digital culture heritage to respond to their specific training objective;- acquiring Key Competences, through a creative and critical thinking approach;- promoting co-creation and collaboration of teachers/children with cultural heritage organisations;- increasing awareness of the European teachers community on the relevance of creative and critical thinking capacity, using an interdisciplinary approach combining science and humanities.The project brings together ten partners from six countries and four of them have worked together in CrowdHeritage. The partners all provide considerable expertise and knowledge in the subject area of innovation, creativity and critical thinking. Project results will be disseminated through a range of international and national networks and support by a series of multiplier events, tailored to meet the needs of the local audience.