Goals

• Facilitate the integration of intangible cultural heritage in formal and non-formal education and policy dialogue, thereby contributing to the mainstreaming of education for sustainable development, global citizenship, cultural diversity, and peace (SDG Target 4.7).
• Strengthen teachers and education practitioners’ use of methods and capacities in this new area through workshops in the selected countries.
• Promote information sharing on the lessons learned from the country projects among policymakers and practitioners at regional and international levels through UNESCO’s networks and publications.

Description

Background

Safeguarding intangible cultural heritage is confronted with significant challenges today, whereby the continued transmission from person to person and from generation to generation of many expressions and practices is under threat. The region of Latin America and the Caribbean is no exception. In this regard, safeguarding intangible cultural heritage in formal and non-formal education is an untapped opportunity to ensure that future generations can continue to benefit from and contribute to their intangible cultural heritage while making learning more relevant and meaningful for them. The region is already particularly active in integrating intangible cultural heritage in education through intercultural education and community-based education.

The Regional Bureau for Education and for Culture in Latin America and the Caribbean (Santiago, Chile, and Havana, Cuba, respectively) have been working together since 2018 to initiate this process of integration. As a first step, a survey was undertaken to understand how intangible cultural heritage is integrated into formal and non-formal education.

Pilot projects in three countries

The project implementation strategy focuses on developing, implementing, and evaluating pilot projects in Ecuador, Guatemala, Peru and Chile to demonstrate how intangible cultural heritage can effectively be integrated in education programs. The implementation process will generate the knowledge, methods, and tools to support the transmission of intangible cultural heritage through formal and non-formal education and thereby improve educational quality and relevance. Concretely, this will involve capacity-building workshops in each country to train educators and the development and testing of resource materials.

Recommendations for policy

Building on the lessons learned through the pilot projects, the project will aim to develop draft recommendations for the development of national and regional policies, through a meeting involving national counterparts and other relevant stakeholders. These recommendations will be disseminated to governments and other relevant stakeholders.

Outputs

• Survey results from the regional survey in Latin America and the Caribbean.
• Resources for teachers on integrating intangible cultural heritage in education.
• Lesson learned through pilot project activities, including their accompanying lesson plans.
• Recommendations for the development of national and regional policies.

The content of the projects and documents referenced in this platform do not imply the expression of any opinion whatsoever on the part of UNESCO, including designations employed concerning the legal status of any country, territory, city or area or of its authorities or concerning the delimitation of its frontiers or boundaries.