Transnational Meetings

GREECE LTT AND TPM

The Third Short-Term Joint Staff Training Transnational Project Meeting

Creative Thinking Through Culture

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Culture has the potential to play a distinct and unique role in bringing the ideals of quality education into practice; stimulating cognitive development, encouraging innovative thinking and creativity, engender understanding of the importance of cultural diversity and reinforce behavior patterns underlying social tolerance and understanding.
 
But has culture, indeed, become a practical tool in teachers’ hands for promoting the creativity of their students?
 
In general, educational activities typically focus on the importance of gaining skills that are useful in the workforce, and neglect the need to develop the ability to form creative, resilient and conscious behaviors. Under this scope and given the advantages of bringing culture into educational systems, reform is required.
 
For this reason a 3-day physical training event under the title “Creative Thinking Through Culture” was organized by CulturePolis, in Corfu, Greece on 31 May – 3 June 2022, including the transnational project meeting of the SPACES’s partners. The event addressed partners representatives – many of them were teachers of secondary education –  utilizing culture and local cultural stories and examples as a significant tool for transmitting creativity attributes and creative thinking to students. It included theoretical and practical activities in order to motivate teachers and in extent students to stimulate their creative thinking in problem solving through their school education; a fact that will enable them to perceive this ability also into their adult life.
 
The event started with the Transnational Meeting of the partners (31 May 2022) where all project activities were discussed in detail, as well as the progress made on each of the current deliverables. Particular emphasis was placed on the the third intellectual output (IO3), which had just started. With regards to that IO, an interactive workshop in the form of a brainstorming exercise successfully took place and was led by the project coordinator, SPATIA.


 
The following days visits in cultural and educational organizations of the island, outdoors activities and city tours, workshops, speeches and presentations from distinguished executives of institutions, academics and experts took place. The places which hosted the training event were not selected by chance; all of them serve a different form of culture (a library, theatre and gallery). Indicatively, partners:
● visited the Central Public Historic Library of Corfu where they attend the workshop “Making Reading Books’ A Creative Learning Process”,
● participated in a guided tour in the Old Fortress given by the Ephorate of Antiquities of Corfu aiming to stimulate their creative teaching effectiveness.
● were hosted in the Municipal and Regional Theatre of Corfu (DI.PE.THE.), where they got informed about the educational theatrical programs the theatre organizes for children and teenagers.
● met local students, talked with them and learned about the Greek secondary educational system.


● attended an illustrating presentation and workshop on “Storytelling and Creative Writing in Museums” which was successfully given by the Curator of the National Gallery – Corfu Annex.
 
All in all, the training event in Corfu was conducted with great success and triggered the interest of not only the project partners but also the local actors – representatives of museums, galleries, libraries, teachers, students – who got involved and were more than willing to interact with people from other countries by exchanging ideas and thoughts on how to improve the educational system of Europe towards a more creative and innovative direction.