Pourquoi Intermuse ?

Why INTERMUSE?

The project provides teachers and museum specialists with an innovative methodology for motivating young people to get involved in intercultural learning activities. Its innovative character comes from the combination of the use of ICT, cooperative learning, transnational partnerships, using the museum as resource, relying on the idea of developing a videogame and on making learning an enjoyable experience of personal and collective discovery. Thus, the methodology is enhancing at the in the same time the creativity and cultural expression, together with the critical reflection capacity and the intercultural communication skills of young people. In fact, the approach implies a complex learning process that, while including important acquisition of knowledge, it also supports the development of intellectual, technical and social skills and encourages positive attitudes towards cultural diversity, intercultural dialogue and European cooperation.

The methodology insists on a balanced distribution of responsibility for learning between teachers, responsible for facilitating the learning process and stimulating critical reflection on the learning experience and the pupils. Thus, the approach of the project is also innovative in the sense that the materials produced, that will serve as learning and support materials for other teachers willing to use the methodology, is essentially based on concrete outputs of the young people from the partner schools. This direct involvement of pupils will guarantee that the outputs and the methodology will be understandable, attractive and appropriate for the real needs of this age group and not based only on assumptions of teachers, museum specialists and experts in intercultural education.

Another innovative element is represented by the combination of various levels of cultural diversity in the overall process, including the present-day cultural diversity in each location, the past cultural diversity as reflected by the museums and the transnational and European diversity resulting from the joint involvement in such a project and by the development in the future of other similar learning partnerships.

The innovation consists also in the use for educational purposes of technologies that are just now available to the general public, such as the computers and software able to design in an easy way, without advanced programming knowledge, complex multimedia products, including 3D animation, videoclips, sounds, interactive hypertext, pictures, texts, etc..