Cultural heritage, education and youth: UNESCO and the European Union launch a new project

ALMATY. KAZINFORM Marking the European Year of Cultural Heritage 2018, UNESCO and the European Union teamed up to develop a new project to start in 2019 that strengthens the connections between cultural heritage, youth and education. The project has two main components: one seeks to empower a new generation of heritage professionals and another aims to bring intangible cultural heritage into the classroom.

UNESCO will organize the Young Heritage Experts Forum to be hosted in Zadar, Croatia in the first half of 2019, which will bring together 28 young experts from across the European Union. They will engage in a series of activities related to the safeguarding and protection of their cultural heritage. Through workshops, group discussions, hands-on experiences and site visits, participants will learn from each other, create synergies and reinforce their aptitudes and skills. As a result, the Forum will empower them to become better advocates of cultural heritage and enable them to implement sustainable projects on heritage protection and safeguarding in their home countries, UNESCO Almaty Office's official website reads.

UNESCO will also work with the UNESCO Associated Schools Network and teachers across Europe to foster learning about and through intangible cultural heritage in schools. Existing and innovative approaches of integrating such living heritage in school-based learning will be mapped, and new guidance materials developed for teachers and schools. A special focus of the project will be the integration of intangible cultural heritage in the lesson plans of core curriculum subjects, such as mathematics, physics or chemistry.