The Role of Cultural Heritage in Education. The Case Study of the European Project PASTILLE

Collections, museums, science parks, and archaeological sites represent an important educational tool for the entire citizenry, help develop an awareness of cultural heritage, tangible and intangible, and stimulate curiosity, interest, and motivation to understand and learn throughout life. They are increasingly ideal spaces for not only formal but also non-formal and informal learning. Therefore, building familiarity with heritage-related experiences helps develop a lasting relationship with the local area. The project “European Arts and Traditions in Italian Language Learning – PASTILLE”, funded by the Erasmus Plus Strategic Partnership program, is part of this framework and aims to create an educational model to benefit a target that is often overlooked because it is not included in traditional educational institutions, that is, to help foreigners who want to learn the language and deepen their knowledge of Italian culture. The partnership set out to build 60 didactic units for learning the Italian language (increasing difficulty level, from A1 to C2), entirely inspired by the national cultural heritage and available open source in an ad hoc digital platform. Literature, art, music, and expressive forms peculiar to contemporary times (cinema, video, digital media) by well-known and lesser-known authors are interwoven in a multi-voiced discourse made up of memories and reflections to stimulate the learning of the Italian language and culture in a way closer to today’s culture. The paper presents the methodology of creating a model teaching unit and references the teaching unit built around a scientific collection of anthropological heritage, the Museum of Ethnomedicine of the University of Genoa (Italy). The project addresses the need for a new educational perspective that can support self-directed learning, inter-and trans-disciplinarity, and linking formal, non-formal and informal education.