Europeana published the Crafted Education Manual

The Europeana Crafted project (2021-2023) aims “to support the preservation of European crafts for future generations by aggregating, enriching and promoting tangible crafts heritage and preserving intangible skills and knowledge from craftsmen and artisans”.

The Action delivered a diverse set of crafts related items along with curatorial outputs and activities that addressed the specific material qualities of newly aggregated and already existing objects related to the subject on Europeana and the documentation of their immaterial context - techniques, traditions, knowledge and skills.

This manual, designed for education professionals working in high schools from domains such as crafts, beaux-arts, design and fashion, showcases how crafts heritage could be used in higher education to study the history of crafts, contemporary art, media history, etc.

It presents the various crafts related resources and how they could be used to design lectures and assignments for students.

The project, which had the objectives to enrich and promote traditional and contemporary crafts, produced a rich set of editorial content made available in Europeana and indexed in the Europeana Pro website under the section “Making Culture”: blogs, galleries, videos and digital exhibitions showing how “artisans and crafters shaped and remade culture through the ages, passing down legacies of skill, knowledge and manufacture”. All the material produced as part of the project constitutes an initial set of teaching resources that can be easily used to document and serve as a basis for a variety of educational re-uses, in different languages. “Making Culture” is divided in several sections:

• Crafting fashion: a series of videos, exhibitions, editorials, collections on craft activities pertaining to the fashion heritage realm. The series links ancient traditions and contemporary practices, demonstrating how the preservation of techniques and material and immaterial knowledge is key in fostering recognition and appreciation of craftsmanship.
• Life in Motion: a series of digital exhibitions on different aspects about the history of amateur film.
• Contemporary artists, artisans and their workshops: blogs and videos made in the private workshop of artisans and contemporary artists, telling their stories, the challenges they faced, and showing their skills and knowledge.
• Analogue film and radio: editorials on the distinct craft of analogue photography, the early history of radio, and the birth of videography
• Acoustics: ‘Heritage acoustics’ and the preservation and presentation of historic acoustic environments is a growing field of research within cultural heritage.
• Crafty GIFs: crafty GIFs from the 2022 GIF IT UP competition.

The manual also includes the description of five educational activities, which can be carried out by teachers within their classrooms, stimulating students to use technological tools and innovative methodologies to improve their skills and capacities. The first educational activity is focussed on the “Creation of a gallery about CRAFT on Europeana", with the objective to encourage students to critically reflect on their searching and querying strategies, analyze digitised cultural heritage objects, finding their context, learn how to select and curate items around a single topic, learn more about a topic of their interest.

Read the manual here