1. Community aspirations and impact areas

1.1 Community aspiration and long-term aims

The Europeana Education Community brings together individuals who believe in the importance of Europe’s digital cultural heritage in education and its ability to equip the future citizens of Europe with critical thinking skills crucial for an open and democratic society.

Our mission is to empower educators, learners, and cultural heritage professionals by building a vibrant community that promotes creative engagement with digital cultural heritage in education.

We aim to drive our members' personal and professional growth while supporting the sustainable development of the education and cultural heritage sectors. By partnering with other communities and organisations at the intersection of digital cultural heritage and education, we strive to build strong networks and partnerships.

Through events, webinars, workshops, and editorial contributions, we provide capacity-building opportunities for the education sector, helping educators and heritage professionals strengthen their digital skills and facilitating knowledge-sharing within our community.

We seek to build sectoral environmental awareness by fostering the reuse of climate change-related learning materials, encouraging collaboration with the Climate Action Community, and prioritising sustainable working practices.

The Education Community’s long-term aim is to support the Europeana Initiative’s aspiration to contribute to Europe’s Triple Transition in its social, digital, and green dimensions and align with Europeana’s Impact Pathways. We foster creativity, innovation, collaboration, and environmental awareness by embedding digital cultural heritage into formal, non-formal, and informal education.

1.2 Delivering your community aspiration - connecting to one or more of the impact pathways

Aligned with the Europeana Initiative’s aspiration to contribute to Europe’s Triple Transition and following Europeana’s Impact Pathways, the Education Community is committed to fostering creativity, innovation, collaboration and environmental awareness through the use of digital cultural heritage in education by:

• Fostering creativity and engagement: we will promote the reuse of Europeana’s resources and tools among educators, learners, and institutions to unlock opportunities for personal and professional development through digital cultural heritage. Specifically, we will highlight case studies of the reuse of digital cultural heritage data in education provided by the community members and show best practices for using the resources available on Europeana Classroom, Teaching with Europeana, and Historiana platforms.

• Building knowledge, digital skills and driving innovation: we will organise and support events, webinars, and workshops that enhance educators' digital skills, facilitate knowledge exchange, and foster innovation. Participating in initiatives like Built with Bits and Low Code Fest exemplifies this commitment by providing transferable digital skills that educators can directly apply in the classroom.

• Encouraging network development and collaboration: we will facilitate cross-sector partnerships, share best practices, and co-organize outreach activities to strengthen networks among education and cultural heritage professionals. By supporting initiatives from collaborators such as EuroClio, ALL DIGITAL, EPALE, NEMO, Una Europa, ESACH, EYP and others, we will promote shared resources and make cultural heritage more accessible and decentralised.

• Building sectoral environmental awareness: we will encourage environmental themes when highlighting digital cultural heritage learning materials and prioritise digital engagement over physical resource consumption. We will also explore potential crossover activities or actions related to education with the Europeana Climate Action community.

2. Education Community membership

ENA members in the community are for a large part digital heritage experts convinced about the importance of education in the broadest sense to create value for cultural heritage and the potential of digital technologies to reach new audiences and make more impact in society. They work for a large community that is a mix of educators working in cultural heritage institutions and teachers at various levels and subjects. These teachers and educators work all around Europe and beyond, though numbers are highest in Mediterranean countries like Greece, the Balkans, Italy, etc. We engage with these educational professionals through personal and professional networks, events and digital communication via Europeana Pro, a mailing list and social media channels. We try to bridge the gap between the offer of an ever-growing amount of digital cultural heritage resources and the demand for good educational materials.

Through the activities of our community, we aim to raise awareness among educational professionals about the availability of digital heritage resources and the opportunities they offer for renewing education. We encourage the active use of digital cultural heritage in innovative educational practices. By engaging with educators and teachers, Europeana reaches a broad audience, particularly young citizens. As a community, we are committed to understanding the needs of educators better, enabling us to continuously improve the resources and support we provide

3. Governance

3.1 SG composition

• Altheo Valentini, Founder & CEO at European Grants International Academy, Italy (Chair)

• Margherita Sani, Project Manager of the LEM Group at NEMO, Italy (Co-chair)

• Dr. Ping Kong, Heritage & Education gGmbH, Germany

• Marco Streefkerk, Information Manager at Anne Frank Museum, Netherlands

• Dr. Tatyana Oleinik, OpenEduHub |H.S. Skovoroda Kharkiv National Pedagogical University, Ukraine

• Raul Gomez Hernandez, Graduate Teaching Assistant at Complutense University of Madrid, Spain

• Georgia Manolopoulou, Museologist,Curator of Public Engagement Ministry of Culture | Archaeological Museum Of Patras, Greece

• Christine Hveding, Business Development Coordinator, Education (Community Manager)

3.2 Chair and responsibilities

• We have a chair and two deputy chairs with no rotation mechanism

• The work is led by the Community manager who constantly liaises with the Chair on ongoing and urgent issues. All other SG members mostly interact and contribute during planned and extraordinary meetings

3.3 Intention to meet

• Regular online meetings with the steering group

• Annual in-person meeting

4. Activity plan

4.1 Outreach and communications

• Monitoring, updating and management of social media channels:

  • LinkedIn group

  • Facebook Group

  • Basecamp group (only for the steering group)

  • Mailing list for community updates and specific calls to action

• Europeana Pro - Education Community landing page:

  • The community page will be updated with the latest news, events, activities, relevant resources and composition of the current steering group

4.2 Peer-to-peer knowledge-sharing activities

• The Digital Creativity Challenge is our new annual event, successor of the Low Code Fest. This initiative is  designed to empower primary and secondary school students and educators across Europe with digital literacy skills to imagine creative digital solutions for the future.
  
  
• Participation in C.R.E.A Cultura. This festival invites schools and institutes, that have completed a project or initiative in the cultural, civic, or social sphere using new digital technologies, and are interested in offering their teachers and students the opportunity to share their results and connect with other national and international communities. Last year this festival offered Europeana a valuable platform to showcase Europeana's resources, foster collaborations, and reinforce its role in the digital transformation of cultural heritage in education. 
  
• Collaboration with the project Watching Videos Like a Historian. The Community will help validate and test the Watching Videos Like a Historian Toolkit. The project will support European educators in teaching media literacy and critical thinking skills through audiovisual resources by creating a toolkit based on digital competencies and new practices in education. The toolkit will include teaching strategies, eLearning activities, and links to audiovisual (AV) galleries.

• Collaboration with Anne Frank House to host and promote the Stories that Move webinar. This webinar provides educators with a free online toolbox for teaching about diversity and discrimination, guided by young people's real stories and experiences.
  

• Webinar related to European Year of Digital Citizenship Education 2025

• Development of a ready-to-use standardised impact evaluation guides for Community-led activities based on existing Europeana Impact assessment practices such as the Europeana standardised question bank and Europeana Impact Playbook. This will provide a valuable resource for community and steering group members to measure the impact of their activities.

4.3 Task force(s) or working groups

Creation of a working group that aims to explore and research the role of the Education Community within the common European data space for cultural heritage. The working group will include 15 to 20 educators who will produce a position paper to establish the Community’s role within the data space. This paper also aims to develop connections with the European Year of Digital Citizenship 2025 emphasising the role of digital cultural education in creating democratic and open societies.

Working group composition and role of the participants:

• The community manager chairs the working group and attends all meetings; she is responsible for the coordination of participants through a dedicated Basecamp, the logistic organisation of meetings on ZOOM and the validation of the sections/chapters curated by steering group members

• The members of the steering group share responsibility for the content curation of different sections and/or chapters of the position paper; they animate the discussion of at least one online meeting with the educators selected for the working group and coordinate the collection of inputs/contributions from them through Basecamp

• 15 to 20 additional participants will be selected with a call for the ENA members. Eligibility criteria are:

  • proven academic and/or professional background on digital cultural heritage education;

  • proficient knowledge of English language;

  • availability to regularly attend the working group meetings and provide timely feedback on the tasks the SG members proposed.

Requirements to be considered for the selection of participants:

• Gender balance: 50% male, 50% female

• Geographical representation: max. 2 participants from the same Country

• Profile heterogeneity: max. 7 educators from primary education, max. 7 educators from secondary education, max. 7 representatives of non-formal and informal education sector

Tentative programme and working phases:

• Phase 1: agreement on the final operational plan and content of the position paper (during the face to face meeting of the SG in January/February 2025)

• Phase 2: open call for application and selection of educators (March 2025)

• Phase 3: online meetings and collection of inputs/contributions (April/June 2025)

• Phase 4: individual content curation by SG members (July/September 2025)

• Phase 5: editorial validation and presentation of the position paper (October/December 2025

4.4 Other activities

Community growth and profiling

• Identify potential community members within ENA and/or outside the
  network (e.g. through members’ local communities);
  

• Identify and better understand the motivations and needs of the community members;
  

• Every year link to at least one major network\

Outreach

• Collect and showcase case studies of reuse of digital cultural heritage data in education provided by the community members. This year we will give special attention to environmental and/or digital citizenship themes;

• Facilitate connections between Europeana and educational players and stakeholders as well as between community members;

• Invite educational and cultural heritage professionals to workshops and/or webinars to encourage the two groups to learn from and about each other;

• Collaborate and follow up with other ENA communities to explore crossover activities or actions regarding education.

Advocacy and awareness-raising

• Advocate for improvement of the cultural heritage data for educational purposes;

• Present community developments and achievements at the Europeana annual conference and other relevant forums;

• Support Task Forces and participation in Working Groups.

Admin & Operational

• Regular online meetings with the steering group

• Moderation of the mailing list and other educational channels

• Bimonthly report to the MB

• Annual report and Working plan (at the end of the year)

5. Monitoring engagement and success

6.1 Budget request

• EUR 4,000 Overall Education Community activities

• Additional EUR 2,000 for working group

6.2 Budget breakdown

Explore and download the Education Community's Work Plans from the previous years.