The Cours

Programme EFTLV Comenius Grundtvig

Europe between mythology, modernity and multiculturalism

“Above all, distrust your imagination and your memory. Imagination misrepresents, both it embellishes and qualifies you. Ungrateful memory doesn’t remember anything, unfaithful memory mutilates everything. We forget everything unwritten and we run in vain after what is written with negligence.”             Denis Diderot

Preparation

Organizers will provide a very detailed program and every useful information about the preparation of the course, his development, his documentation and report.

Objectives 

This course is addressed to all those teachers, educators, trainers who want to bring their professionalism up to date, acquiring an effective method of education, by a week of study and experimentation, known as research-action-formation, added to the tradition of the myths of Europe, to let this continent be proposed as advantaged place for cultural exchanges.

Lots of figures, artists, lettered, left in every part of Europe traces of their genius, their sensibility and their spirit, to describe the myth of Europe, feminine figure from which the West lands took their name and reminds us that people have always transmigrate and those migrations took important cultural and social innovations. The physical journey will become the occasion for the intellectual one, in art and history, to tell with images and scripts an extraordinary “transversal” experience in important places for the European culture. The very importance is the soul of the place, the genius loci, and the very ancient link between humanity, place of origin and shelter, between time and history, traditions and memory, categories that the virtual reality is slowly crumbling. The aim is to re-link the communication between subject and his context of space and time in all the relations this two points have, to revitalize the relations between territories and their people (residents, tourists, occasional visitants, immigrants).

Participants, trough the didactic program and interpersonal contacts, might deepen this following aspects:

-       European cultural roots;

-       Richness of the cultural and natural heritage;

-       Difference of the European cultural traditions 

This route will have concrete tools for the formation able to link themes and different knowledgs in an interdisciplinary and transversal project compared to the cultural and environmental European heritage and it will lead to a new ways of didactic experimentation to bring to schools and structures concerning the permanent education. It will also promote the ability to know how to structure an interdisciplinary project on culture and landscape of your own country, with the aim to finally have a European network of places in history and memory to keep lively all those meanings to have a creative and deep relationship with the contemporary world.

Methodology 

The myth of Europe, feminine figure from which the West lands took their name, reminds us that people have always transmigrate and that those migrations took important cultural and social innovations.

The course will have theoretical meetings, visits, seminaries and practical activities concerning the theme of the “European cultural identity ”, a long tradition concept, that invites and facilitates the “discover” of the beauty through the intercultural, spatial and chronological differences. Activities will go around the history of art, to the history of the traditions and mythology. This method will lead to a realization of a formative path overall thanks to the participants that will finally appreciate the didactic value of a new learning method, deeply transversal in his approach, that mainly leads to a new point of view, focusing on the cultural interaction, and also trains to the documentary production and artistic sensibility, to promote the creation of strong links between people, cultures and territory.

This brings to teachers a fundamental learning tool, and sensitize the knowledge about the cultural-environmental heritage, stimulating the development of the partnership projects to protect the European cultures and his histories.

Follow-up

Interns after the course may spread their now new method, contributing, so, to this network project to popularize and protect the great European cultural heritage (mythological, iconographic, artistic, literary, historical, scientific), to, then, supplement to the daily educational activities.
The success of the common willing is the one, step by step, face the artistic and cultural topics, counting on the plurality of the voices, and long perspectives to finally have the perfect frame of the new reality in which we live and  try to understand with his deep roots, or the evolution, connection, or differences that depend on our life quality in relationships.

The course follow-up will offer:

- Use and create innovative training instruments (e-book, multimedia products, videos)
- Interact with the represented institutions, through a specific web portal.
- Exchange opinions, good work practices and sharing the project results, everything possible with the creation of a special section in the website www.laboratoriodelcittadino.org that will collect every work realized during and after the course, accompanied with educational boards, technical texts and tutorials.
- Meet in a virtual place with the aim to develop new European projects as: Comenius, Grundtvig, Leonardo and Study Visit.

Some reflections to work together 

Our journey to discovering the European myths is not just about a “mythical” journey, but talking about people, populations, countries, languages and the own country. We have to create, all together, a new approach to knowledge in a process that goes from the simple to the complex, from known to unknown, in a way to focus on the complexity of the world in all his forms. A new point of view is fundamental. Travelling is like a filter, and this is his pedagogical capacity.

The ethic of the vagrant that knows how to look to the landscape offers us a precious model of learning, because teaches to be open and to avoid the monotony of the repetition. The years we are living gave us the view of the lost of the domaine in a territory and accentuated the migratory process that will confuse our conceptual borders. Customs will contaminate promoting an ethic without barriers; the vagrant one, the one with the experience, looking for what Kant called “the starry sky”. The ethic of the vagrant doesn’t know any map, he just faces the path he is in, and the difficulties he has step by step. This is the limit we have to think with wisdom. This landscape we see is already our unstable, provisory and unconscious shelter.